So Don Garber, commissioner of MLS in the US has said he thinks the league can be a top 10 world league by 2023. I was trying to think of leagues that it would have to surpass to get there and realized I didnt really know. The current top 10 leagues (full leagues, not just a couple of teams like Portugal or Scotland) to my knowledge are
Top 4 in some order
England
Spain
Germany
Italy
Next 6 in some order
Netherlands
France
Russia
Mexico
Argentina
Brazil
But then I didnt know where to go from there. I don’t believe any Asian or African leagues are at the level of MLS (maybe the J League?). So that leaves Europe and SA. What leagues in those areas would come next on this list? Or did I miss a league elsewhere?
Not that I want to complain about that guy’s methodology, but MLS has got to be better than the Peruvian Primera Division (no. 20). I think the OP’s top ten are defensible, but MLS would definitely be in that next tier, which would include some of the bigger South American and Eastern European leagues, and leagues of the Belgium/Switzerland/Norway class. You could argue the J and A leagues should also be in this tier, though at the bottom of it, perhaps.
I think Garber’s goal is laudable, and maybe even achievable – but at the end of the day, they’re going to have to pay the players more. I don’t think you can have a top-ten league where certain players are earning $33,750 a year.
Alternatively, maybe wage caps will be introduced in the other leagues, to equalise things the other way. It’s what a lot of fans would like to see, but will probably not be implemented by FIFA (and it would have to be FIFA, to avoid talent-drain - it’s not something that could be imposed unilaterally, or even by UEFA acting alone) until we have a few more high-profile clubs going bankrupt. The OP mentions 2 big teams in Scotland - unfortunately they no longer compete against each other as Rangers have been dropped to the third (or is it fourth?) tier after going into administration with huge debts, thanks to chronic financial mismanagement. This leave Celtic with an easy run to the title but even they would have to admit that it’s not good news for Scottish football at all. Those in charge, however, simply believe that the more money in the game, the better - a view that will soon prove to be too short-term, and unsustainable, I fear.
Sorry, that was a bit of a hijack - in response to the OP, it is of course very hard to compare across leagues where there is very little contact between them, and very little movement of players. I guess Peru is somewhat comparable to the US in that I can only think of one Peruvian player who really “made it” at the top level of English football (Nolberto Solano - wonder what has happened to him?), whereas I can immediately think of the 3 or 4 US players who have made an impact (Kasey Keller, Tim Howard, Brad Friedel, Landon Donovan - interesting that 3 of them are goalkeepers). But the sample size is too small to be meaningful, I think.
I wonder if the Egyptian and South African leagues would get a look-in as being on a par with MLS?
Here is a list created by the International Federation of Football History that puts MLS at #37. Now, I’m sorry, but there is just no way that MLS is lower in quality than the Sudanese or Cypriot first divisions. There seems to be some ridiculous anti-American prejudice at work here.
Do we count the second tier English division (can’t be bothered to confirm the name. Champions League or something) as a separate league? Because its average team is probably better than the average MLS team. I don’t think any other second division is at nearly the same level, but feel free to correct me on that.
And based on the SuperLiga matches, aren’t MLS and the Mexican league pretty close to equal in ability? (there seemed to be about a 50/50 split in general).
SuperLiga is a fake tournament. I wouldn’t take those matches to mean anything. The CONCACAF Champions League is the real regional club tournament. However, since MLS has more parity than most of the Central American leagues, I wouldn’t take that as a top to bottom representation of quality either, but it’s a good overview of the talents of the top of each league.
The Mexican league is pretty significantly better than MLS. MLS is probably the second best league in the region, but I’m not positive.
UEFA’s horribly flawed coefficient system ranks European countries thusly:
Spain
England
Germany
Italy
France
Portugal
Ukraine
Netherlands
Russia
Belgium
That’s the top ten. Not making that list are Turkey, Scotland, Greece, Switzerland, all of which probably have a good claim to being better than the USA. Obviously the J-League, K-League, the Australian league, and several African leagues probably come on a par or above the USA too, and the USA is nowhere near the level of football in Argentina or Brazil.
Looking at the Club World Cup, which has only been going for a few years and is far from a perfect way to compare, some Mexican teams have made the last four, and only one other North American or CONCACAF team, from Costa Rica. Ecuador and the DRC have had finalists, Mexico, Saudi, Costa Rica, Egypt, Tunisia, Japan, South Korea and Qatar have had teams in the final four. None from the USA, though. So several of the African and Asian leagues seem to be on a par with Mexico, if not better, and therefore better than the MLS.
These rankings are apparently based off of a modification of the Elo rating for individual clubs, as opposed to national sides. These ratings include a factor for league difficulty. There are six tiers
[ol]
[li]England, Italy, Germany, Spain[/li][li]France, Argentina, Brazil[/li][li]Netherlands, Portugal[/li][li]Belgium, Czech Republic, Greece, Russia, Scotland, Turkey, Ukraine, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay[/li][li]35 others, including the US[/li][li]Everything else[/li][/ol]
These rankings are only for the top league in a country. Note however that there are 23 leagues in the top four tiers. 19 of the top 20 in the list linked above are from these 23. This isn’t surprising, because the ranking formula used assumes the conclusions. (And if I understand the rankings correctly, the formula is also biased in favor of larger leagues.)
How do these league tables account for leagues with 1-3 super-dominant teams and a bunch of schlub teams, like Scotland (Rangers, Celtic) and Netherlands (Ajax, Feyenoord, Eindhoven)?
Also, these rankings seem to have a pretty anti-American slant; someone’s really going to stand there and say that the MLS is worse overall than the Moldovan, Sudanese or Peruvian leagues (hot latinas notwithstanding)?
I admit that generally the US leagues don’t attract the top athletes in the US, but even being 4th fiddle in a country as large and sports-enthusiastic as the US ought to produce a decent level of play.
The MLS is a funny league because it has a smattering really good talent; a lot of slightly past their sell by date imports, but also some good domestic players like Donovan (and a few younger players); most of whom could feasibly making their living in top leagues like the Premiership. A hell of a lot of mid-level players, who would probably struggle in the English Championship a bit, but could make a good go of League 1, backed up by no-name squad players who are probably nearer English non-league in quality.
In other words the MLS has more of a spread of quality than your average league, this is due to the system of spending a lot of money bringing in older big-to-fairly-big names, trying to hold onto many of it’s best prospects whilst many other leagues accept that these players will move on, whilst at the same time neglecting those domestic players who don’t usually trouble the first XI of their teams. Overall I’d say the quality is somewhat similar to the English Championship (2nd tier), but lacking the insanely competitive nature of that league.
The two big hurdles the MLS faces to becoming a top 10 league is that it that there isn’t enough domestic talent to make it a top 10 league and that won’t change enough in 10 years (it could change enough in say 20 or 30 years) and the fact that it plays in a weak confederation with a weak Champions League. This is of course assuming that money was no object.
There seems to be some weird American chip on the shoulder going on in this thread. Do people really believe that the MLS isn’t ranked higher by various random list generators because of some anti-American bias? Anti-American prejudice, really?
Face it you guys, the world isn’t out to get you, we just don’t think all that much of your league. Perhaps if it stopped being a retirement home for the occasional ex-premier league player and introduced proper promotion/relegation structures that might change in the future.
The MLS ranks poorly because inter-confederation rankings are notoriously difficult as only a very small number of meaningful games are played every year and MLS teams have not fared well in the CONCACAF Champions League.
And that’s pretty obviously step #2 (step 1 being, IMO, paying players other than a handful of “names” real money) - beating teams from another league in sanctioned competition.
Until the MLS wins more CONCACAF CL matches the ranking will stay low (and probably should, because otherwise it’s just eyeballing guesswork).
I’ll complain about the methodology for you. here’s a quote from that site:
Rather than using a straight average, they’ve chosen an arbitrary divisor (15). Which inflates larger league’s ‘average’ as the bottom 5 or so teams add points but don’t count when finding the average!
Also note the bit in italics. This is a list of the 20 leagues they bothered to work out, nothing more.
In fact going back to the source for the stats the MLS teams ELO ratings can be [found here](World Football / Soccer Clubs Ranking - FootballDatabase States). Which has a mean of 1362.518 or 1453.352 if the weird bleacher report methodology were used. That’s a touch below the Ukrainian Premier league figure on their list, which would put the MLS at #14.
By comparison the J-League average is 1360.28; The Peruivan league average is 1379.255 and the A-League average is 1312.006.
You make a lot of good points in your post. But I question this assertion about domestic talent. By that metric, the EPL would also not be a top-ten league. Arsenal, for example, as only five Englishmen on its first team. Fulham only has four, two of whom are from Northern Ireland. It’s the ability to pay top dollar to bring in talent from elsewhere that really matters.
Your second paragraph kind of explains the first. People in the outside world really do have this misperception of MLS as a retirement home, as you call it, for the EPL. That was once sort of true, but not really anymore. And promotion/relegation does not really have a ton to do with the top-to-bottom quality in the league. It seems to me that with a relegation system, you have a couple of dominant clubs at the top that contend for trophies, while everybody else contends just to avoid relegation. MLS is more parity-driven, so you tend not to have the perpetual bottom-feeders some leagues have. Except for Toronto.