MLS starts 25th season by looking back, and forward
As Major League Soccer embarks on its 25th season with two new expansion teams, it seems worth not- ing how far the league has come in that quarter-century.
And what better way to look at that evolution than to ask its first employee.
MLS President and Deputy Commissioner Mark Abbott has been around since long before legends like Landon Donovan, Carlos Valderrama and David Beckham graced the league.
Abbott has seen the expansion of MLS from 10 teams in 1996 to 26 teams this season. Four more are on the way.
He joined MLS three years before its first season and wrote the league’s business plan. He rode out the dark days of contraction in 2002 before the re-emergence of the league under current Commissioner Don Garber.
He’s seen soccer go from the “next big thing” to a legitimate major league sport.
“If you think about the modern era of professional soccer, beginning with the World Cup in the United States in 1994, if you think about how people were 6 or 7 or 8 years old at the time, and maybe that was the first time they were watching a sport or sporting event. Now they’re in their late 20s or early 30s. So you have an entire generation of peo- ple who grew up with soccer as a mainstream sport in this country, which was different than the way I grew up. And so I think it has been a process of the market developing, and the league making investments to help develop that market.” Abbott said. “Clearly in the last few years, when you see what’s happening in some of these markets where you get 70,000 people in Atlanta, or what happened with our MLS Cup in Seattle, or what’s happening with our El Trafico game in Los Angeles, you realize this league means a lot to a lot of people.”
Atlanta midfielder Jeff Larentowicz, a 15-season MLS veteran, echoed Abbott’s thoughts.
“The children that are now in their 30s, the biggest sport to them growing up was soccer. And that’s kind of where we’re at,” Larentowicz said. “So the iron is hot, it’s time to strike. I think the league is doing that, expanding and trying to reallypush that. That generation is here.”
The stats back him up. A Nielsen survey showed interest in MLS grew 27% between 2012 and 2018. And a Gallup poll from two years ago showed soccer was tied with basketball in popularity behind American football among fans ages 18-34.
The 25th season will be the first for teams in Nashville and Miami. Charlotte, Austin, Sacramento and St. Louis will get clubs in the next two seasons, bringing MLS to 30 teams.
For now, the plan is to sit tight at 30, Abbott said. As the 1994 World Cup on home soil led to the start of the league, the 2026 World Cup, a joint effort between the United States, Mexico and Canada, is on the horizon.