With return tournament, Curtin sees light at end of tunnel
MLS is coming back, and befitting the lunacy that has been 2020, it’s going to look different from anything that has come before it.
The league made official Wednesday what has been rumored for weeks: A bubble league to start in July in Orlando to mark its return from the coronavirus pandemic. But the new wrinkle in the creatively named “MLS Is Back Tournament,” a World Cup-style field that will count in both the regular-season standings and toward bringing home the $1.1 million prize pool.
Teams will be drawn into six groups for roundrobin play, with the results used to seed a knockout tournament. Teams will be drawn into groups Thursday.
“We’re excited,” Union manager Jim Curtin said on a video conference. “Tomorrow’s a big day because every coach and every player has been sitting around, and we tend to work backwards. So when we get that initial game date, then the plan starts to come into place. It’s been a long couple of months of trying to keep everyone going, thinking in your brain, every sleepless night, did we do enough? Are we preparing enough?”
The tournament will start July 8 at ESPN’s Wide
World of Sports in Orlando, the league taking over Disney’s Swan and Dolphin Hotel. All 26 teams will participate. Clubs are required to arrive in Florida in late June to go through COVID-19 testing and isolation while training. Each team is guaranteed three groupstage games, which will add to the two games played in March before the COVID-19 suspension for the regularseason standings.
Sixteen teams will advance to a knockout tournament, crowning a winner by the second week of August. All of the games will be televised in the United States and abroad. The tournament includes extra wrinkles like additional subs to accommodate for the workload on players after such a long layoff. There’s also the possibility of morning broadcast windows, which could allow for teams to avoid Orlando’s notoriously sticky weather by kicking off at 9 a.m.
As for what comes after the tournament, the league will reassess that as the dates come closer and the general picture of COVID-19 across the nations comes into view.
“I’m very optimistic,” commissioner Don Garber said in a call with media, setting a goal of having that info within the next four to five weeks. “I expect that we will be back in our stadiums. We just don’t know the exact date. Obviously this is all unfolding in real time, and literally, more and more markets are opening, and what I find interesting is they are the markets you expect to open up later and on a curve or a timetable. I do believe we’ll get back to our markets. I think all of our fans should expect that to happen. When that will happen is still uncertain, and whether or not we’ll have any markets with fans is also uncertain, but we are also hearing about different guidelines that have been established state-by-state where there’s even a possibility that some fans might be able to attend games.”
Curtin is hopeful that the buy-in of Disney and ESPN will lead to a product that will play well online. With baseball still squabbling over a return and a soccer void looming once European leagues finish and with international tournaments canceled, it presents an opportunity to develop new fans.
The league will operate under a rigorous testing protocol, to ensure that everyone remains free of the virus. Curtin said that included the Union getting their first of two sets of tests in as many days Wednesday.
On the local side, the Union are cleared to resume full-team training. They got the go-ahead for individual workouts less than a month ago, two weeks after MLS had cleared the return thanks to conditions in the greater Philadelphia area. They had two weeks of individual workouts and barely a full week of smallgroup training – thanks in part to the negotiation between the MLS Players Association and the league, with owners bluffing for a lockout that the players promptly outmaneuvered last week to get a deal in place.
The first team session will be Friday, still in Delaware at the 76ers Fieldhouse due to a “holding pattern” as they wait for approval to return to Chester. They may well be on their way to Orlando, which can happen as soon as June 24, before they see the Power Training Complex again.
Details remain to be worked out, including what happens if players with health or individual concerns don’t want to take part. But regardless of what comes after it, Curtin is excited for the opportunity to get back to work.
“It’s getting real now,” Curtin said. “The individual fitness workouts were great. I thought the guys handled that well. The individual training was, we’ll just say, a unique experience for everybody. I think we got the most out of it, small groups have been good in our pressing cues and sprinting and being away from each other but also moving off of each other in relation to the ball and how we want to press. And now the ultimate will be Friday in being able to compete. At the end of the day, these guys haven’t had physical contact, and that’s what they’re incredibly used to as players.”