MLS All-Star Game

A preseason Italian Serie A team, in AS Roma, versus a collection of the supposed best players in Major League Soccer in midseason form played each other in the “MLS All-Star Game” last night at Sporting Park home of Sporting Kansas City in front of 21,175 people. The game finished AS Roma 3 – MLS All-Stars 1.

MLS props this game up as a way of furthering the leagues international exposure and allows their players to compete against the best teams in the world.  I see it as portraying our league, MLS, as an inferior product compared to soccer in Europe.  We would never see the English Premier League, La Liga, Serie A or any other major professional soccer league take a break in the middle of their season to have a foreign club come play their best players, albeit a club that is using it as a preseason game.

Don Garber, Commissioner of MLS, said that the “stated” goal of MLS is to be one of the best leagues in the world by 2022, if this is to be accomplished the MLS All-Star game, as it is now, needs to be scraped.  No one in the world of soccer will take the MLS seriously if it continues.  MLS needs to be able to grow by itself if will ever truly be one of the top leagues in the world.

If the All-Star game needs to continue the only way I can support it is to see the elimination of foreign clubs involvement and switching back to an East vs. West format, similar to other North American professional sports leagues.  The All-Star game could then be used to determine which Conference champion has home field advantage in the MLS Cup, similar to how the MLB uses its All-Star Game. This change would, in my opinion, bring actual relevance to the All-Star instead of being an overhyped friendly.

Oh yah, speaking of overhyped friendlies AS Roma’s next game is August 7^th vs. Toronto, if you can’t tell already I’m really excited.