Atlanta (AFP) – Major League Soccer clubs must attract fans overseas to capitalize on the explosion of US football, officials said Wednesday, as the country prepares to co-host the World Cup. The MLS was set up in the mid-1990s as a pre-condition of the US hosting the 1994 World Cup, when global football bosses were desperate to finally introduce top-tier domestic soccer to the world’s largest consumer market. Soccer has since seen dramatic growth in the US, even surpassing traditional American sports like baseball in popularity by some metrics. Major League Soccer drew 12 million fans to games last year, second only to England’s Premier League.
Big names including Lionel Messi, Son Heung-min, and — this week — Antoine Griezmann have recently joined the league, as MLS clubs have built their own state-of-the-art, soccer-specific stadiums. But while domestic fanbases have soared, officials now want to challenge the popularity of the top European clubs by cultivating followings around the world. “I want Atlanta United fans in London, in Germany,” said Victor Montagliani, head of CONCACAF, football’s regional confederation for North and Central America and the Caribbean. MLS commissioner Don Garber told AFP that the league’s future “is going to be to grow our fan base and our business outside the United States and Canada.” “We are playing the global game, and we have been primarily a domestic league,” he said, on the sidelines of the Business of Soccer conference in Atlanta.
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Emulating the likes of Real Madrid and Manchester United is an almost impossibly daunting task. Those clubs have decades of tradition, with fandom passed down from generation to generation, and spread around the world. European leagues also have no salary caps, allowing them to entice the world’s top talents. The MLS does allow each club to bypass those limits with certain “designated” star players, but most squad members are on restricted wages. The league itself has on occasion gone a step further to bring in global superstars like David Beckham and seven-time Ballon d’Or winner Messi. Back in 2007, Beckham was offered the chance to buy an MLS team for a heavily discounted sum, while in 2023 Messi was promised exceptional revenue-sharing agreements with league partners such as Apple.
But Garber this week indicated those days are over, dismissing a suggestion that Mo Salah — who recently announced he will leave Liverpool — could be extended similarly extravagant terms. “I’m not sure the league needs to get involved in those kinds of deals going forward,” said Garber, who added that he would still “love to see” the Egyptian forward playing in the MLS. “There was a time we had to convince players to come, and now it really isn’t about that,” he told reporters. Instead, the league has focused on other ways to make itself more attractive to international stars, like changing to a summer-through-spring schedule from next year. This will allow US clubs to acquire global talent during the summer break and avoid future clashes with international fixtures. “It’s one piece of the puzzle,” said Garber. “If we want to be a major player on the global stage, we’ve got to play the same game the rest of the world is playing, even if it’s a little harder for us,” he told reporters.
Another piece of that puzzle is the World Cup, which will be hosted in the United States, Canada, and Mexico this summer. The MLS is planning a major marketing campaign so fans attending World Cup games will be tempted to keep following the sport’s domestic league once it concludes. Officials also expressed confidence that visiting World Cup players will be impressed by the gleaming new facilities that many MLS teams now boast. “We’ve had top 10 national teams come and use our training center before, and we’ve had players on those national teams say ‘this is better than the training center that I train at with my club every day,'” said Brian Bilello, president of New England Revolution. “I think it’s actually showcasing the soccer infrastructure that we already have in this country.”
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