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Major League Soccer kicks off its 23rd season this weekend, raising the curtain on a nine-month marathon that ends with one team hosting the MLS Cup trophy come December.
There’s plenty to look forward to across MLS.
The arrival of much-ballyhooed expansion side Los Angeles FC and the Southern California competition it will ramp up versus the incumbent L.A. Galaxy.
The all-conquering quality and simmering ambition of Toronto FC, and Atlanta United’s spare-no-expenses devotion to hunting them down.
The three promising soccer-specific stadiums being built in Los Angeles, the Twin Cities and Washington, D.C.
Relocation drama in Columbus, the evergreen excellence of NYFCFC’s David Villa, youth movements in Utah, Pennsylvania and North Jersey — and the list goes on.
Here are some big-picture themes that could determine the course of the season ahead.
Heightened spending, rising quality
MLS executives have long been known as a penny-pinching bunch, at least when it comes to expenditure on player salaries. Yet the cautious experiment that began three years ago with “Targeted Allocation Money” — the attempt to goose the league’s quality with collective, judicious and highly specific spending — has gone well.
So well, in fact, that resources available to acquire higher-end talent continue to increase every year, and 2018 brings a new feature: “discretionary TAM,” which gives teams the option to spend up to $2.8 million per year of their own money to sign or retain blue-chip performers.
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While still modest by the standards of the world’s richest leagues, the uptick in spending that TAM has fuelled is having a marked effect on MLS’ level of play. Clubs have been able to recruit better players from abroad, keep hold of rising standouts within the league and build more depth and competition into their squads.
But as a wise man once said, “More money, more problems.”
To some – including interim U.S. men’s national team coach Dave Sarachan – the influx of overseas talent threatens to crowd out the opportunities for domestic products to carve out careers and grow the player pools in Canada and the United States.
Thinking big
Although not every MLS team is seizing these opportunities to spend more, the league’s pace-setters generally are, and the less ambitious risk being left behind.
Toronto FC are an instructive example.
Even as defending MLS Cup champions and “treble” winners, the Reds managed to upgrade their roster over the winter with showcase signings Gregory van der Wiel, Auro and Ager Aketxe, as they aim not just to hold their ground but carve out new achievements. Meanwhile more established contenders like Seattle, Portland, New York City FC and the LA Galaxy are targeting the reigning champs.
Second-year club Atlanta United also aspire to reach Toronto’s level and showed it by being the most aggressive movers this offseason, signing Argentine attacker Ezequiel Barco from Independiente for an MLS-record $15 million transfer fee and sending an unprecedented amount of allocation money to Portland in a trade for U.S. midfielder Darlington Nagbe.
The Georgia club enjoyed striking success on the field, in the stands and across their community during their 2017 expansion debut and will be keenly watched in its second season of play. Though circumstances are different in SoCal, LAFC hope to follow that example.
MLS remains a parity-oriented league, but the tendency towards groupthink and collectivism is slowly eroding as growth brings more varied ownership groups with a wider spectrum of perspectives.
Under pressure
It’s probably not a coincidence that as investment in the on-field product has increased, turnover in the coaching ranks has, too. Six MLS teams will kick off the new season under new head coaches, and 15 of the league’s head coaches arrived in their current post since 2016 or later.
Retired U.S. national team great Brad Friedel has taken over the New England Revolution, adding his name to the list of those who’ve both played and coached in MLS.
To the north, respected French tactician Remi Garde was selected to lead the Montreal Impact’s homegrown-oriented rejuvenation process.
Swedish tactician Mikael Stahre becomes San Jose’s fifth coach in less than five years as he leads San Jose into 2018.
Englishman Anthony Hudson is installing a pressing 3-5-2 system with the Colorado Rapids after arriving from New Zealand’s national team over the winter.
More than a decade after leaving Chivas USA to take over the USMNT, and a whopping two decades from his MLS Cup triumph in charge of the Chicago Fire, Bob Bradley has returned to the league where he made his name — this time steering LAFC into its first season of existence.
Longtime New York Cosmos coach Giovanni Savarese has finally, and deservedly, moved up from the NASL club to the top flight as the Portland Timbers’ new boss.
All will be given the opportunity to stamp their influence on their new teams. But all will be conscious that the margin for error is shrinking as the pressure to deliver results grows.
World Cup shadow (like it or not)
Neither Canada nor the United States could score tickets to 2018’s biggest soccer party: this summer’s World Cup in Russia. That sobering reality will probably cast a shadow over the league for a while in June.
Most readers are probably all too familiar with the soul-searching and teeth-gnashing brought on by the United States’ first failure to qualify for the event since 1986. That process will rumble on in 2018 as a new national-team head coach is selected and the first steps towards Qatar 2022 are taken, and MLS’ influence on the program will remain close to the center of those discussions.
The U.S. and Canada aside, about 20-30 MLS players from other nations are in the mix for places on their respective World Cup rosters, and their efforts to show their quality figure to provide a compelling subplot in the season’s early months.
Continued focus on rivalries (like it or not)
MLS as an organization is already obsessed – some say to a fault – with rivalries, which are seen as a key ingredient in stoking interest and inspiring more devotion from fans.
The relative success of the cross-New York competition between the Red Bulls and NYCFC helped power the decision to bring a second team back to the SoCal market, so observers can expect to hear an awful lot about the faceoff between LAFC and the Galaxy.
The three-way Cascadia Cup rivalry between Portland, Seattle and Vancouver remains a showpiece for the league, while MLS has tapped into something similar in Canada as its teams in Montreal and Toronto have picked up the centuries-old cultural antagonism between those two cities.
The “Texas Derby” of FC Dallas and the Houston Dynamo, the brewing Southern showdown between Atlanta and Orlando, the “Cali Clasico” featuring the Galaxy and San Jose Earthquakes and more general regional clashes in the upper Midwest and Northeast Corridor will all continue to be talking points for a league eager to forge deeper and more emotional bonds with fans.