By J Hutcherson – WASHINGTON, DC (Feb 11, 2015) US Soccer Players – Preseason means different things in North American pro sports. Baseball’s spring training has the organization and the facilities. Football has the history of going to see an NFL team train at a small college in the middle of nowhere. The NBA and the NHL have the exhibition games that can be in their arenas or neutral sites. Even the USMNT has January and an annual domestic friendly in a warm part of the country. MLS has… uhm.
There was a time when MLS tried to establish its own version of spring training. Following baseball’s lead, they got teams together in Florida to play a preseason schedule with the general public invited to watch. In season 20, we know it didn’t work. MLS teams settled on taking invitations to train wherever they could get them. The overseas preseason training trip became common. So did playing in smaller tournaments in places like Charleston, South Carolina and Arizona.
Where this leaves MLS fans is interesting. There’s normally no travelling to see your MLS team somewhere else. With a few exceptions, these trips are pragmatic. The team needs to train, there’s an invitation or available facility, and off they go. There’s the occasional match report when a training game rises to the occasion. Otherwise, it’s brief accounts of scrimmages and practices, the prep work for a new season.
MLS teams aren’t on the same overseas touring schedule as the European clubs. For one thing, there are few places for MLS teams to go. Whether or not an MLS team on tour would draw is a question only in theory. There’s not much of a tradition of European teams disrupting their seasons to play friendlies in their main stadiums. Certainly not in February when MLS teams are available.
There’s also the resumption of the CONCACAF Champions League for MLS teams to consider. In theory, the best MLS teams have important games on their schedule prior to the start of the regular season. The knockout round of the CONCACAF Champions League should loom. These are games that really count, moving MLS teams toward the confederation title.
CONCACAF shoulders most of the blame for the sorry state of the Champions League. Several of the teams normally involved have tried. The Montreal Impact are pushing their Champions League game as a special soccer occasion. It can work. Montreal shocked North American soccer – and likely CONCACAF – when they drew a massive crowd by any standard to a Champions League game a few seasons ago. Repeating that isn’t easy, with Montreal promoting the game while also realistically looking at their position in their market.
Where Montreal gamely promotes the Champions League, other MLS teams do the soccer equivalent of putting out a sign that reads “game today”. Again, that’s as much a CONCACAF problem, with the Confederation relying as much on inertia as anything else in turning the Champions League into a draw. It isn’t working. The tournament isn’t even a good schedule filler for its participants, dropping games at points on the calendar when they’re as much a disruption as anything else.
MLS does do something that is unique in North American pro sports. Many clubs start their preseasons locally. Like a lot of things with MLS, the reason for that is somewhat pragmatic. The facilities are there, even the ones covered in snow. It’s an opportunity to try to engage the locals, both fans and media. It creates a jumping off point for whatever an MLS team might be doing in late January and through February before the start of the season.
DC United held its version of a fan fest, something normally associated with Major League Baseball. There’s no model for that. In DC’s wider market, the Washington Nationals held theirs at the end of 2014. The Baltimore Orioles waited until January. The format isn’t all that inventive. At a convention center, a baseball team makes current and former players available for autographs and Q&A’s while offering the same kind of concessions and souvenirs you’d find at their ballparks.
What it does is reconnect a fan base, if just for an afternoon. Baseball has the most organized preseason of any American sport, especially from a tourist perspective. Yet, there’s still that need to put some of the focus on their cities before heading out to their preseason locales.
There are worse models in pro sports for MLS to adapt. Putting players and the focus on their cities now makes it easier to return that focus when they need it in early March. Without doing anything locally with the team until shortly before the start of the season, MLS might be asking for too much. The difference between the fan bases willing to watch a live stream of a training game from somewhere where shorts are appropriate in February is different from the fan base MLS needs week-by-week in their stadiums.
It’s not exactly a progression for how MLS figures this out. They started with more organization than we have now. Two decades of preseasons have only really pushed teams toward pragmatism. There’s no point in taking risks with preseason training. For most clubs, there’s also not much of a point to revisiting what didn’t work before. Without the built-in European model of letting some other country where your league is popular pay you to see you and lacking anything resembling the baseball tourist model, there’s only so much MLS can do.
Still, the MLS teams that are trying to build toward their regular season both on and off the field deserve credit for trying. This is tough for any pro sport to get right, because it’s only really successful in retrospect. It’s proof of concept territory, and one that has to be replicable across the league for it to stick. That’s difficult for any professional sport in North America, especially when it’s relying on clubs to get it right first.
J Hutcherson started covering soccer in 1999 and has worked as the general manager of the US National Soccer Team Players Association since 2002. Contact him at jhutcherson@usnstpa.com.
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