Major League Soccer

Major League Soccer
PAGENAME
Sport	Soccer (Football)
Continental FIFA Confederation	CONCACAF
National Confederation	U.S. Soccer ; Canadian Soccer Association
League Founded	1993
Inaugural season	1996
No. of clubs	13
Countries	USA; Canada
Current Champions	Houston Dynamo
Official website	mlsnet.com

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Major League Soccer (MLS) is a professional soccer league with teams in the United States and Canada. It is sanctioned by the professional divisions of both the United States Soccer Federation (USSF or U.S. Soccer) and the Canadian Soccer Association (CSA), which are both members of FIFA. MLS represents the first tier in the American Soccer Pyramid.

History

MLS was formed on December 17, 1993, in fulfillment of Alan Rothenberg and the US Soccer Federation's promise to FIFA to establish a "Division One" professional football (soccer) league in exchange for the staging of the FIFA World Cup USA 1994 in the United States. The league began play in 1996 with ten clubs and enjoyed promising attendance numbers in its first season. Numbers declined slightly after the first year, but have increased in subsequent years. The original 10 clubs were divided into two conferences: the Eastern Conference (Columbus Crew, D.C. United, New England Revolution, NY/NJ MetroStars, and Tampa Bay Mutiny), and Western Conference (Colorado Rapids, Dallas Burn, Kansas City Wiz, Los Angeles Galaxy and San Jose Clash).

Expansion, contraction and relocation

The league expanded to 12 clubs in 1998, adding the Chicago Fire and Miami Fusion. However, following the 2001 season, Miami and Tampa Bay were disbanded and the league contracted back to ten clubs.

Following the 2004 season, the league expanded again, adding Real Salt Lake, located in Salt Lake City, Utah and Chivas USA, which shares The Home Depot Center with the Los Angeles Galaxy. The two new clubs were placed in the Western Conference, with Kansas City moving to the East.

Following the conclusion of the 2005 season, the San Jose Earthquakes were relocated to Houston and renamed Houston Dynamo. However, the Earthquakes' name and history were not transferred, with the possibility of an expansion club returning to San Jose as early as 2008; Houston is considered an expansion club.

MLS added Toronto FC for the 2007 season with the plan to have three more expansion clubs by 2010. Other current possibilities include a return to San Jose,^[1]^[2] or expansion to Cleveland,^[3]^[4]^[5] St. Louis,^[6] Milwaukee,^[7] or Philadelphia.^[8]

Club names

For more information on MLS club names, see individual club entries.

Originally in the style of other US sports, the clubs were given nicknames at their creation such as the Chicago Fire. DC United and Miami Fusion FC were the two exceptions that adopted more traditional names. However, new teams, such as CD Chivas USA and Real Salt Lake, have been adopting traditional soccer names. In addition, other established clubs like Dallas and New York have changed their club names to reflect traditional soccer names.

Stadiums

When the league was started, most clubs played in stadiums built specifically for NFL or NCAA (college) American football. This was based on the record attendances achieved at the 1994 FIFA World Cup. However this turned out to be a considerable expense to the league because of modest attendance and poor lease deals. To provide better facilities as well as to control revenue for the stadium, a major goal of MLS management is to build its own stadiums, which are often called soccer-specific stadiums.

Since 1999, the league has seen the construction and completion of six venues specifically tailored for soccer. Lamar Hunt broke new ground in this endeavor by financing the construction of Columbus Crew Stadium. The Los Angeles Galaxy followed four years later with the opening of The Home Depot Center in 2003. The new venue played host to two consecutive MLS Cups, until FC Dallas' Pizza Hut Park opened in 2005 and hosted the next two championships. Chicago Fire began playing their home games in Toyota Park in 2006, a venue that witnessed the MLS All-Stars defeating Chelsea F.C. in the All-Star Game, and a US Open Cup championship for the Fire in their first season in the stadium. 2007 will see the opening of Dick's Sporting Goods Park for the Colorado Rapids, and BMO Field for the expansion Toronto FC.

File:PHP 2005.jpg

Pizza Hut Park, home of F.C. Dallas.

Future plans include new venues for Red Bull New York and Real Salt Lake by 2008, while DC United and the Kansas City Wizards are actively searching for ways to finance and build their respective stadiums.

The move to soccer-specific stadiumsa has been seen by many as essential to building up attendance and fan support for MLS. So far, every club that has built its own stadium has not only seen its game attendance rise, but also has helped MLS to come closer to the ultimate goal of profitability. Thanks to their new stadium, the Los Angeles Galaxy became the first club to make a profit, and are projected to be followed in 2006 by FC Dallas. With the league's new TV rights for the 2007 season, several more clubs are projected to be profitable.

Other MLS teams will, in the foreseeable future, continue to play in larger stadiums designed for football. The New England Revolution play in Gillette Stadium, whose primary tenant is the NFL's New England Patriots, and Houston Dynamo play in Robertson Stadium on the campus of the University of Houston. Both teams have expressed interest in securing their own soccer-specific stadiums.

Profitability

Major League Soccer has lost more than $350 million since its founding, according to a report by BusinessWeek in 2004.^[9] but some signs are positive. As soccer-specific stadiums are built, ownership expands and television coverage increases, MLS has managed to see their revenues increase while costs are kept to a minimum. The 2003 season saw the Los Angeles Galaxy make a profit in their first season at the Home Depot Center, while FC Dallas turned a profit in a similar fashion after moving into Pizza Hut Park in 2005.

Television coverage has consistently expanded throughout the league's history, with MLS brokering a deal with ESPN in 2006 for rights fees and greater presence across its networks. 2007 will also see a return of MLS to Univision and its Spanish-language networks. They will join Fox Soccer Channel and HDNet as MLS' national outlets, while the league has mandated that every league game receive television coverage, if not nationally, then by at least locally in one of the two teams' cities.

In another new commercial development, MLS has announced it will start selling ad space on the front of jerseys next year to go along with the league-wide sponsorship partners who are already advertising on the back of club jerseys currently [1]. The league has established a floor of $500,000 per shirt sponsorship, with the league receiving a flat fee of $200,000 per deal. Real Salt Lake will be among the first teams to feature a sponsor on their team jerseys.

Recently MLS Commissioner Don Garber said^[10] that he expects the league's clubs to be profitable by 2010 overall, saying that FC Dallas and LA Galaxy clubs are already profitable, with several other clubs nearing profitability according to earlier remarks: the Chicago Fire and New England Revolution.

Ownership

MLS operates under a single-entity structure in which teams are centrally controlled by the league. In order to keep costs under control, revenues are shared amongst the league, and player contracts are negotiated by the league.

Some critics have regularly alleged that the league showed preferential treatment to big-market or profitable clubs with regards to player allocation and the salary cap. The league also fought a bitter legal battle with its players over its economic system, but this was eventually resolved with the players gaining some improved benefits in return for accepting the single entity structure. A court had also ruled that even absent their collective bargaining agreement, players could opt to play in other leagues if they were unsatisfied.

The league's controlled costs have attracted new ownership that can put more money into the league and improve it by focusing their money and attention on fewer clubs. Examples include the Anschutz Entertainment Group's sale of the MetroStars to Red Bull, "in excess of $100 million," according to the New York Times. MLS Commissioner Garber said to the Los Angeles Times that "the sale was part of a plan to have AEG decrease its holdings in MLS. We're pushing Hunt Sports to do the same thing."

It appears that Commissioner Garber and MLS management has said it is pushing these changes as part of a new ownership strategy, one in which each owner has a single club, and is better able to focus their resources upon that club, as with the owners of the New York Red Bulls and Real Salt Lake. Commissioner Garber has stated that having multiple clubs owned by a single owner was a necessity in the first 10 years of MLS, but now that the league appears to be on the brink of overall profitability and has significant expansion plans, he wants each club to have its own owner.

In order to help bring this about, the league is now giving more incentive to be an individual club owner, with all owners now having the rights to any player they develop through their club's academy system, sharing the profits of Soccer United Marketing, MLS' media and marketing arm, and now for the first time, allowing owners to have individual club jersey sponsors, with the approval of the league office.

AEG, at one time, owned six teams in MLS, and have since sold the Colorado Rapids, MetroStars and DC United to new owners. AEG's remaining teams are the Los Angeles Galaxy, the Chicago Fire, and the Houston Dynamo. The other major owner-investor in MLS is the Hunt Sports, which owns the Columbus Crew and FC Dallas, having sold the Kansas City Wizards in 2006 to a local ownership group.

With the sale of DC United in 2007, the league now has 10 owners for their 13 clubs.

Rule changes

MLS experimented with rule changes in its early years. The clock, which counts up in international soccer, would instead count down and would stop on dead ball situations at referee's discretion. Once the clock hit 0:00, the game would be over. The other major change was the inception of "shootouts" to resolve tie games. If the game ended in a draw, a situation similar to a penalty shootout would ensue. A shootout attempt consisted of a player getting the ball 35 yards from the goal with five seconds to put it past the goalkeeper. Just like with penalty kicks, it was a best-of-five competition; if the score was still tied, the tiebreaker would head to an extra frame. The club that won the shootout would get one standings point (as opposed to three for the regulation win), the losing club zero.

MLS did feature a fourth "goalkeeper only" substitute until the end of the 2003 season when MetroStars coach Bob Bradley used a loophole in the rule to insert Eddie Gaven as an extra fourth field player substitute.

The rule changes, especially the shootout, failed to bring in a wider American audience and alienated some traditional fans. The shootout was eliminated after the 1999 season and the upward-counting clock came into use in 2000. MLS experimented in settling tie games with golden goal overtime periods from 2000 to 2003 similar to those in college soccer (in MLS, the tie would stand if no club scored after ten minutes and each club would get one point). Overtime was phased out for the 2004 season, due to new FIFA regulation.

From 1996 to 2004, MLS playoff games did feature golden goals if a tie needed to be broken. Golden goals were scored in the 1996, 2001 and 2002 MLS Cups by D.C. United, San Jose Earthquakes and Los Angeles Galaxy, respectively.

Organization

In contrast to most other established professional sports leagues in the United States and abroad, but like most recently founded leagues, MLS is organized as a "single-entity" organization, in which the league (rather than individual clubs) contracts directly with the players, in an effort to control spending and labor costs, share revenue, promote parity and maximize exposure. This also differs from most other soccer leagues around the world. Still, clubs may do their own scouting, and if they identify a potential signing, and MLS can negotiate a salary with the player, the discovering club will typically get that player. Each club has an owner/investor and the league allows an owner to have more than one club, although this may be more because of the lack of willing investors than the single-entity structure itself.

The league assigns a home region to each of its 13 clubs for player development purposes. The clubs have the right to develop a limited number of players they select in their home region and retain the rights to these players. Further, the league also requires each club to operate youth academies and to field youth academy teams in 2007. Players developed by the club in their home region may be signed by the club and placed on the club's first team directly without that player being entered into the annual player draft. Consequently, not all high school and college players will go through the MLS SuperDraft. Instead, each clubs' youth development program will retain the rights to players, ensuring clubs a steady stream of talented teenagers beyond those cultivated by colleges and U.S. Soccer's residency program in Bradenton, Florida (run in conjunction with IMG). Thus, as Deputy Commissioner Ivan Gazidis told media, MLS today consists of clubs, not merely teams. With vertical player development in 2007 based closer on the European model, MLS organization is different from other American sports.

The full roster for each MLS club's first team is limited to a maximum of 18 senior players, plus a maximum of ten roster-protected players to stock each club's reserve team. Of the 18 senior players, MLS clubs are allowed a maximum of four senior (over the age of 25) international players on their active roster, as well as three youth international players (under the age of 25). In MLS, a player is not considered an international (regardless of eligibility to play for the U.S. National Team) if he is a U.S. citizen, is a resident alien (green card), or is under asylum protection. International players are so defined by the United States Soccer Federation, the sport's overall governing body in America, to accord with U.S. Immigration and Naturalization laws, which prohibit an employer from limiting the number of permanent or temporary residents, refugees, and asylees.

As a result of these restrictions, most of the players in the league are from the United States, but some are renowned international players, with Latin America and the Caribbean being the home region for the largest number of international players.

Toronto FC, the new MLS club for 2007, operates under a different set of league rules regarding internationals. Due to Canadian immigration laws, there can be no restrictions on the number of Canadians playing for a Canadian club — and International players will be considered non-Canadians. However, due to their inclusion in the US-based MLS, TFC are allowed a maximum of four senior (over the age of 25) international players, but also 3 additional US international players, on their active roster, as well as five youth international players (under the age of 25) to begin with.

Unlike most other nations, there is currently no system of promotion and relegation in American soccer; although repeated suggestions for such a system have been made from a limited audience, such an organization does not exist in any sport in America, and the disparity in both attendance and revenue between divisions makes such a vertical integration impractical. It is highly unlikely that any professional sport in the United States will have any such system in the foreseeable future due to lack of popular minor league clubs on par with major league clubs, certain opposition from club owner/operators in top-level professional leagues (including MLS) and even geographical considerations (America's huge landmass is often cited as a reason promotion and relegation never took hold there in the first place); the major football leagues of Europe cover land areas comparable to those of one or two U.S. states. For example, England is only slightly larger than Mississippi, Italy is about the size of New Mexico, and Spain is about twice the size of Oregon. This can be somewhat discounted, however, by such examples as Brazil and Russia, which are both larger than the continental U.S. and both feature promotion and relegation, though both of those populations are distributed considerably and relevantly different than the US. Likewise, the concept of fans traveling to away games (common in other countries) is generally limited to a few regional rivalries, such as DC United-New York, Dallas-Houston, Chicago-Columbus, and of course LA-Chivas USA.

MLS and foreign stars

From its inception in 1996, MLS has been a magnet for some of the top talents in the CONCACAF region and beyond who were willing to sign contracts with MLS without hefty transfer fees paid to their former clubs. These great-yet-affordable regional international talents were frequently distinguished in the domestic league and national team of their native countries before they came to MLS to impress in the US. Fans have adored these top regional international talents who brought their flare and passion for the game to MLS. The long list of great foreign players includes CONCACAF internationals Carlos Ruiz, Stern John, Amado Guevara, Dwayne De Rosario, Damani Ralph, Mauricio Cienfuegos, and Raul Diaz Arce; CONMEBOL internationals Jaime Moreno, Carlos Valderrama, Leonel Alvarez, and Marco Etcheverry, and UEFA internationals Peter Nowak, Preki, and Hristo Stoitchkov. Where-ever these great regional players and MLS historical icons came from, each one of them has been so important to the early years of MLS that it could be joked that they could each be inducted into the Hall of Fame twice, as both players and founders. These internationals have been immortalized in the history of MLS by setting league records for assists (Valderrama, 114), goals (Moreno, still active in second place with 105), league MVP (Preki, twice in 1997 and 2003), goal-of-the-year (Etchevarry and De Rosario each awarded twice), Golden Boot (Carlos Ruiz and Stern John, both twice), by popular nomination to MLS All-Star and Best XI teams, and, most importantly of all, by leading their teams to win national championships in MLS (4x: Moreno, the most with one club; others of note include 3x: Etchevarry, De Rosario; 2x: Arce; 1x: Ruiz, Cienfuegos, Nowak, Preki).

Top regional international players like these continue to be some of the very best players MLS has to offer (some of the other top players in MLS have always been domestic American players). But, MLS has never been able to attract, even less afford, the world's top elite players. The kind of players with salaries in the seven figure range. Eight figures. Staggering amounts of money. Pre-Beckam, the highest paid and best known foreign international player was probably Youri Djorkaeff, a key member of the World Cup champion French team in 1998, who also played for Inter Milan. After two successful seasons with the MetroStars, he retired in 2006. Another international star was Italian goalkeeper Walter Zenga, who was well known for his 12-year career with Inter Milan, as well as his performances in the 1990 FIFA World Cup in his home country. Zenga played two successful seasons with the New England Revolution. In those pre-Beckham years, the world's premiere players often viewed MLS as a 'retirement league' on par with the old NASL, where stars who were past their prime could finish their careers. Although this attitude toward the league may have existed in the early years of the league, the situation has been changing. Increases in profitability, investment, ownership, marketing, stadium construction, and tv coverage have improved the league's ability to afford the world's top talent. The bar has been raised for a new generation of elite, world-class foreign internationals to take the excitement and popularity of the American league to new heights. Who knows which elite world-class athlete will be next? A number of other high-profile players, such as Ronaldo,^[11] have made statements about playing in MLS towards the end of their career. Former Juventus star Edgar Davids is reportedly in talks with FC Dallas. Such speculation is one of the hot topics of soccer fans all over the world. Unfortunately for the MLS, both Davids and Ronaldo spurned MLS offers, Davids returning to Ajax Amsterdam and Ronaldo heading to AC Milan. There were also rumors that the Chicago Fire approached former soccer stars Zinedine Zidane and Henrik Larsson. Zidane had an excellent club career with Juventus and Real Madrid, in addition to leading France to two World Cup finals in 1998 and 2006. Larsson also had a memorable club career, starring for Celtic F.C. and F.C. Barcelona among others, and he was also a key member of the Sweden national football team, leading them to two successful World Cup campaigns in 2002 and 2006. Unfortunately, neither player gave strong consideration to the deals.

League commissioner Don Garber assures fans and investors that one thing is for sure: the league will continue to make slow, controlled growth, and make the smart financial decisions that are good for the league now and long into the future.

Not all foreign internationals were a big success in MLS. Some of the most noteworthy international busts in the history of the league include: Lothar Matthäus, who spent a forgettable year with the MetroStars; Mexican star Luis Hernández, who was a big bust in LA; and Korean star Hong Myung-Bo, who failed to even earn a position in the Galaxy's starting lineup.

Competition format

File:Mls cup.gif

The Alan I. Rothenberg Trophy

The format for the 2007 season is as follows:

Season runs from April 2007 to a championship match played November 18, 2007.
13 clubs split into two conferences: the Western Conference will have six clubs, while the Eastern Conference will have seven, with Toronto FC as the newest addition. Each club plays 30 games, evenly divided among home and away matches. Each club will play every other club twice, home and away, for a total of 24 games. The remaining 6 games will all be intra-conference, with each club playing its fellow conference members an additional game. In the Western Conference, an additional game will be added to the above, highlighting a local rivalry (Los Angeles vs. Chivas USA, Houston vs. FC Dallas, Salt Lake vs. Colorado).
At season's end, the top two clubs of each conference will make the playoffs; in addition, the next four highest point totals, regardless of conference, will also be in the playoffs. In the first round of this knockout tournament, aggregate goals over two matches determine the winners; the Conference Championships are one match each, with the winner of each conference advancing to MLS Cup. In all rounds, draws will be broken with 2 15-minute periods of extra time, followed by penalty kicks if necessary. The away goals rule is not used.
The MLS Champion (winner of MLS Cup) qualifies for the next CONCACAF Champions' Cup. Furthermore, the club with the best record in the 30 game regular season wins the MLS Supporters' Shield and also qualifies for the CONCACAF Champions' Cup. If the Supporters' Shield winner wins the MLS Cup, the runner-up to the Supporters Shield is the second qualifier.
The two MLS clubs that qualify for the CONCACAF Champions' Cup have the ability to qualify for Copa Sudamericana if they make the final, and the FIFA Club World Cup if they win the championship. If an MLS club were to win Copa Sudamericana they would also play in Recopa Sudamericana.
During the season, all MLS clubs may also compete in the U.S. Open Cup (except Toronto), select international tournaments, and various exhibitions.
SuperLiga, a new MLS-Primera División de México club competition, will also make up the 2007 season schedule, with most matches occurring midweek in July and August. FC Dallas, Los Angeles Galaxy, DC United and Houston Dynamo are expected to play at least three matches each.