I’m no soccer fan but I know enough to understand that stateside MLS teams are thoroughly outclassed by their Premiere League counterparts. But just how much so? For example, if the Seattle Sounders beat the New York Red Bulls 2-1, would Barcelona beat them 3-1? 4-1? 50-1? I’m fully aware this is completely subjective and could fluctuate significantly from one game to another. But, averaging final scores over several games, how bad would it be for the Red Bulls?
I’ll ask for a move to The Game Room
USA Women’s Team has been doing pretty well, AFAIK. 1st in 1991 and 1999 (the top removal one). 2nd in 2001. 3rd in 1995 2003 2007. If I’m reading right, the highest all-time performance of any country? There have only been 6 of these so far if that matters.
Men’s? Not as well.
It’s hard to tell, since soccer’s not one of those games where the talent differential shows prominently on the scoreboard. It’s like baseball in that regard.
I saw a 2nd Division team play a Premiership team in a friendly about 10 years ago, and while the premiership guys were obviously better, the score was only 2-0.
Soccer teams will show their dominance over a longer period than say… US football teams.
Moved from General Questions to the Game Room.
Division by zero is undefined.
Premiership clubs play MLS teams in friendly matches all the time and every once in a great while the MLS team actually wins. A few years back Kansas City actually beat Manchester United, for example. The big club probably doesn’t play it’s A team, but they’ll put all the big stars in for at least part of the game so the foreign fans can watch them play. During the last MLS/Premiership friendly I watched, the announcer pointed out that the MLS’s salary cap for the entire team* is less than the salary of even a single second-line player at a big international club.
Some MLS teams have also done well at the CONCACAF champion’s league, including a couple of teams that have actually won it all, despite playing against Mexican clubs with much higher bankrolls that should completely outclass them. It seems like there is a bit of a “anything can happen” effect in soccer where even though a smaller club wouldn’t fare well in a league with the huge clubs, they still have a fighting chance in individual matches and tournaments.
*Except for the “Beckham rule” that allows each team one higher priced player.
I suppose with some legwork using the Google one could determine the average margin of victory for Premiere teams over MLS opponents, but that wouldn’t take into account your point about the Premiere teams not exactly giving these games their all.
It really depends what team they are playing too. The top European teams would have 70% ball control and the games would look similar to Germany vs Greece or Spain vs Ireland. Scores don’t really matter that much but the control over the game and dominating space would be the difference.
Goals are hard to score. It’s better to judge on a binary scale (win or lose) and over multiple games.
So rather than asking whether a team would win 5-0, the better question would be whether they’d win four games out if five (or eight out of ten).
Any given game could go either way (with a statistical advantage to the stronger team) because ine lucky goal or one bad mistake can turn a game around, but a season of games will show the stronger teams clearly.
So over a series of games, I’d expect a Premiership team to win the majority of games against any US team by a small goal difference, as is typical in that game. In a single exhibition game, I’d expect the Premiership team to win but wouldn’t be flabbergasted by the opposite. I would be flabbergasted if the US team could do that consistently over a series of games.
The difference is, of course, budget. Premiership teams recruit the best players from all over the world at insane salaries. US teams can’t - at present - attract that level of talent. That may well change in the future, but that’s how it is right now.
As a side note - national teams tend to play to a lower standard than Premiership teams for two reasons:
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A Premiership team is free to recruit talent from anywhere in the world; a national team is limited to one country. Thus Manchester United is a stronger team than England.
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A Premiership team trains and plays together all the time, creating strong teamwork. A national team does so only briefly at international tournaments, and even then the team and manager are likely totally different each time.
So, then to modify the OP, let’s say Barcelona plays New York over 20 games. How many does Barcelona take?
Well, you’ve picked the best European team in the last decade or so - I’d be surprised if New York could beat them more than once in 20 games.
Other European teams are more beatable.
To me, it doesn’t really matter. I watched three soccer games today on television, England-Italy, Seattle Sounders-Portland Timbers, and New York Red Bulls-DC United. The two MLS games were far more entertaining than the Euro Cup game.
But no, MLS teams are not as good as the best teams in the top leagues. That said, the best MLS teams would probably do well enough playing the lesser teams in any of these leagues. Against the big teams, they would do about as well as the other teams in the Premiereship would do. They would win occasionally but mostly they would lose.
I still like MLS just fine.
(BTW, you should all thank me. I just deleted three paragraphs explaining exactly why MLS teams are the way they are. Take that, obsessive fannish behavior!)
It is weird, I am a German living in the USA, I have not gotten in the MLS yet since their level of play seems rather poor in comparison to European leagues. The Champions league especially the semi matches were great to me. But I do prefer college football over the NFL, maybe because they have more hail marys and often sloppy defense.
I assume with the increase in Latino population, the MLS will eventually get more money to buy better players and up their game. Big problem is that soccer for now seems not popular and is considered unmanly by some in the US.
The standard answer is that MLS is roughly equivalent to the second division in England, perhaps on the lower end of the second division.
Some MLS teams are capable of playing excellent soccer but none of the teams are consistently good. They can’t be because there is a large drop-off in quality on the field between the good players and the not-so-good players. The journeyman players who should be playing in the league aren’t because of the salary cap. Those players take their game to Central America, Scandinavia or other places where they can make from three to 10 times as much they can make in MLS. Then all it takes is an injury, a national call-up or just a spell of bad form to one or more of the good players and the team is awful for a while.
It hasn’t happened yet and may never happen. Chivas USA in Los Angeles was an attempt to attract the latin (more specifically, the Mexican and Mexican-American) audience and it pretty much failed. That being said, the fan base for the league seems to have expanded a great deal. The sort of crowds seen in Seattle, New York and Kansas City would have been unheard of a few years ago. Television viewership isn’t all that good, but it is significantly higher than it used to be. As more teams begin to make a profit, I expect more money will be spent on players.
The way I hear it, Spanish soccer fans view those teams as somewhere between the Spanish 2nd and 3rd; not as bad as the regional teams, but bad enough that any team that’s traditionally been a Primera, or even wavered between Primera and Segunda should be able to beat any of them.
Direct quote from a soccer fan:
Him: “bah, nothing on TV”
Me: “I thought I’d seen soccer?”
Him: “yankis :rolleyes:. Might as well go watch Tudelano, at least that would be outside and I’d get some fresh air… or rather, bloody hot air…” (Tudelano is the local team - plays in the regionals)
You can take out that seems, there really is such an effect. It’s one of the interesting things about Copa del Rey: a team that’s in Segunda, or struggling to stay in Primera, can have a good day and kick a big one out of the field… and then anybody who’s not a fan of that particulat big one has a field day, or week, or month… rubbing that in the face of those big-one fans who spend most Mondays asking “so, how did [insert small team who lost] do yesterday, hmmmm?”
My first year in college, I had three assholes (with body attached) who sat behind me in class and who would go through that routine every Monday. I didn’t need to watch TV to know what had Osasuna done, the assholes would tell me. Boy, did I love being able to ask “so, how did Osasuna do yesterday” after Osasuna reamed their beloved Barcelona out of Copa…
I think a few of the bigger MLS markets could support world-class soccer teams right now, but the country at large probably couldn’t do a whole league of them. There’s quite a wide gap in attendance between the high and low end. The salary cap is probably close to what a team with consistent low 10,000’s attendance like Columbus or New England could realistically spend anyways, but not so with the west coast and Canadian teams that are getting crowds in the 20 and 30,000’s.
I always thought it would be cool if the Mexican league system would let some American and Canadian teams join (sans salary cap), since I would say that LA at least and maybe a few other bigger markets would be capable of fielding a Primera Division-level team. They could be like our version of the Toronto Bluejays!
To try to put some vague numbers on the OP’s question, we could compare teams like Barcelona to the worst teams that they play regularly in serious games, i.e. the teams at the bottom of their own leagues. If you compare Barca, Real Madrid, Manchester City (current EPL champions), and Manchester United against the bottom five teams in their respective leagues last season, the record is
Played 40
Won 35
Drew 3
Lost 2
Average scoreline 2.8 - 0.5 .
I think most people would agree that MLS teams are below the standard of any Primera División or EPL team, so Barca vs MLS over the long term would probably do better than that.
I am not so sure about that. There is a huge relative dropoff in talent in a number of European leagues. There are basically two really great Primera teams, a number of middling ones, and a few shitty teams. I am confident some of the top MLS teams could compete in the middle to lower portion of that league.
Similarly in the EPL, we already see players sold or loaned to EPL teams who make an immediate impact. Given that many individuals can complete on some of the better EPL clubs, I think it’s reasonable to assume their MLS teams would be fairly competitive with the lower 1st division teams. Especially given that guys like Keane play in the MLS even though they have interest from lower EPL teams.
Okay, taking everyone’s testimony into account, I’m left with the following:
MLS teams are nowhere near the top Premiere teams (Barcelona, Man U, etc.), but could be fairly competitive against at least the lower and possibly middling Premiere teams. Some are saying they’d have to drop a rung below even that, but nothing more. To hear Europeans discuss American teams (at least in the limited degree of discussion of which I’m aware), you’d think the Premiere League as a whole versus the MLS is like comparing Major League baseball teams to their significantly inferior Single A affiliates. Is this just a whole lot of European soccer, er, football snobbery?