I don’t think it’s entirely snobbery. I mean, take salaries - while they may not be the be-all-and-end-all measure of how strong a league is, they must give some indication. MLS average salaries are far below those of the English second tier, the Championship, and absolute chicken feed compared to the EPL and other big leagues. You have to wonder why, if the players are close to that standard, they put up with those salaries?
Well, the UK (and probably others) has work permit issues. Some (Landon Donovan) prefer to stay where they are for family or personal reasons, some aren’t good enough, and quite a lot do leave after their first contract is up. The Scandanavian leagues are especially popular for MLS players.
European soccer is pretty broad. You have the top leagues in Italy, England, Spain and Germany and then you have close runner-up leagues in France, Russia, the Netherlands and Portugal. But you also have countries with middling teams at best where MLS teams could probably compete in the top tier of those countries. A top MLS team would be competitive in top-tier Sweden or Greece I would think. Not great but competitive.
And the Scottish league is so awful I’d pick the MLS team to win it most years.
I wouldn’t. While most of the league is awful, Celtic and Rangers are both respectable clubs. Do Maurice Edu and Carlos Bocanegra stand out for Rangers? Both were very good players in MLS, Bocanegra was the best defender in the league when he was here.
They were both notable Rangers players, as was Claudio Reyna in years past. But it’s far from clear that Rangers will even be around in the SPL next season.
Celtic lost to Philadelphia in preseason a few years back, but I guess friendlies don’t really tell you much. So perhaps our MLS team might finish second. I just can’t see them having too much trouble with St Mirren or Kilmarnock.
I was surprised recently to see that the Columbus Crew (MLS) has a 17-10-7 lifetime record against international competition, including 2-2-2 against English Premier League teams (the latter may not have been the best teams in their league at the time, but still…).
Columbus has had some of the better MLS squads over that time period, which also includes mediocre seasons.
Bear in mind that an ELP team in that situation - typically - does not play it’s A team. It tries out upcoming players.
A few more data points.
No US club has qualified for the FIFA World Club Championships, held annually since 2005, so we can’t get any results against European clubs out of there,
US clubs haven’t done particularly well in the CONCACAF Champions League (formerly Champions Cup) either - with only two champions back in 1998 and 2000.
Another issue is that many MLS starters could probably get paid 2-3 times more to go to a European club, but they’d sit on a bench 90% of the time. It may be a better career move in the long run to stay where they’re actually getting play-time.
Plus, the EPL season is twice as long as the MLS season. And, you can theoretically do both via a short term loan (as some MLS players do).
This question isn’t specific enough. A European team could be from Spain or Luxembourg.
Anyway, I’ll give a few examples. Kansas City beat Manchester United in 2010 by the score 2-1 (preseason). Kansas City played most of the game with only 10 players. Berbatov, Giggs and Scholes and others played. Also, in 2010, Juventus (with roughly 73% of its starters) lost 3-1 to NY Red Bulls who used mainly a reserve team. In the same week, the worst team in the MLS at the time, DC United, ended 6 games without even scoring a goal by beating AC Milan 3-2. Both of these games were postseason rather than preseason. NY Red Bulls won the Emirates Cup in 2011.
Whenever a non-European club or international team beat a European team in a friendly the Eurosnobs always say the European team didn’t take it seriously (as if the non-Euro teams always take friendlies seriously). If the Euro team wins they boast about how strong European teams are and the weakness non-Euro team (many times without even contemplating if the non-Euro took it seriously or without even knowing how many bench/reserve players were used). An example is China’s win over France before the 2010 World Cup. China used an experimental team but most people assumed France didn’t take the friendly seriously.
It is nothing but Euro snobbery to say an MLS team is comparable to a League 1 or League 2 team in England.
Oh, gosh, not at all, it’s just to be expected. A better comparison would be, say, comparing the NHL (if it ever runs again) to the Swedish Elite League. The Swedish league’s pretty good hockey, and every now and then one of those clubs could beat the L.A. Kings, but not every often. It’s just that MLS is a minor league, despite its name. Top-of-the-line players are not going to toil in Kansas City for a fraction of what they can make the EPL, just as a true Swedish star is not going to play in Sweden for small change if he’s looking at a zillion dollar contract in New York.
I suspect a good Premier League team, if they went all out, would win the MLS championship with ease. They wouldn’t win any games 12-1 or anything crazy like that, but they’d be the best team in the league by a mile. The quality of play in MLS is good but is very, very obviously inferior to the top European tiers.
The thing is most European leagues have weird quotas or work permit rules. For example, in Spain you can only use 3 non-EU players during a season. Which means that players from other countries outside of Europe (such as Brazil, Japan etc) are good enough to play in Spain to but cannot get the chance. Many players from Argentina try to get Italian citizenship so that they can play in Europe without restrictions.
In England, they normally require you to play 75% of your national team’s games over the last two years to get a work permit. Aston Villa wanted Omar Cummings but he didn’t meet that criteria. Omar Cummings isn’t even a designated player in MLS yet a Premier League deemed him good enough to play in the league.
“It’s just that MLS is a minor league, despite its name.”
Um, it’s called Major League Soccer because it is the top league in its country. Similar to how the word Premier is used to show that English Premier League or Irish Premier League or South African Premier Soccer League are the top leagues in their countries without even comparing the quality.
That’s all well and fine but I think my meaning was clear; MLS is not really the world’s top league and is not comparable to the really top level leagues. That’s the issue under discussion.
Damn, I remember reading this but can’t remember the cite. May have been Soccernomics, may have been something else (though Soccernomics was a fun read nonetheless.)
The basic thesis compared hours spent training in youth and adolescence. Europe according to this thesis had better training programs and youth-to-professional tracks while the US was still behind. It was something like a 2x or 3x difference in hours trained by age 18 or something like that, Europe ahead of the US.
I’ll try to find it, it was an interesting read.
I think his meaning was pretty clear too. Nobody assumes a league is the best in the world based on the name.
Well unfortunately the teams don’t play each other competitively, due to apparently no US team ever qualifying for the FIFA World Club Championship. Surely the fact that no MLS team has ever qualified for that is something to think about? Especially considering that a European team has won it the last five times.
Another thing that may affect the situation is that although some US “stars” are rightly considered to be excellent players, others are less so. I’m a Coventry City fan, for example, and after the 1994 World Cup we signed a player from the US team. He was woeful and lasted only a season. His name was Cobi Jones and he went on to be the most capped player in the US national team’s history. Things like that tend to affect your views.
Top European teams are not generally better than top (South) American teams.
And as you well know, “American” as an adjective is most commonly used to describe something from the United States of America. “South American” and “North American” are used to describe things from the two continents but “American” to describe something from the combined landmass of North and South America is generally only used by pedants such as yourself.