USA TODAY International Edition
Loss of bigger stars really a good thing for MLS
MLS lost several of its most talented players this winter.
In the last week of January, Atlanta United star attacker Miguel Almiron was sold to the Premier League’s Newcastle United for a reported $27 million, a Major League Soccer record. Former league MVP and Golden Boot winner Sebastian Giovinco departed to Saudi club Al-Hilal for reportedly between $3 million and $4 million — with just six months remaining on his contract, Giovinco’s club Toronto FC was happy to get anything, as he would have been able to leave the club for free this summer.
MLS is losing some of its brightest stars, both up-and-coming sensations and established league leaders.
This is a wonderful thing for the league.
It seems a bit counterintuitive, I realize. A league should want to retain its most talented players in order to put out the most entertaining product. If MLS wants to gain viewers, the obvious thinking goes, it should want good players in the league, not being sold away from the league.
This thinking is wrong.
MLS embracing its status as a selling league
Trying to retain every good player in a league like MLS is a short-term philosophy. It is one that MLS has had for far too long. It was major news last year when MLS Commissioner Don Garber finally accepted that his league needed to become a “selling league,” i.e. a league where young, talented players could come hone their craft and then move on to major European clubs.
For a long time, MLS had no interest in being a selling league. Teams instead favored bringing in aging European stars for one last go-round. David Beckham did it successfully. Steven Gerrard did it not so successfully. MLS clubs will still take chances on aging European stars — Wayne Rooney was a revelation for DC United this past year — but they’ve started embracing a new philosophy, signing young South American talent, watching that talent develop into stars, and then selling that talent on to bigger European leagues.
While some teams have been doing this for a while, this philosophy was most notably embraced by expansion side Atlanta United. The club gave former Tottenham exec Darren Eales the freedom to pursue an aggressive strategy of signing ascendant, young players with the understood goal that the players would probably be sold to bigger clubs in a year or two.
Instead of 35-year-old stars, they’d sign 18-year-old unknowns … who would one day become stars.
Could Atlanta United fill the seats, though?
The fear in this “sign young up-andcomers” strategy was always about attendance and attention. The thinking went in MLS that fans wouldn’t pay money to watch young unknowns, that it was safer to bring in recognizable names to try and get people out to games.
Well, it turns out if the young unknowns are really freaking good, as Almiron was, people will turn out. Atlanta United led the league in attendance for its first two seasons, averaging 50,000 people in home matches in its first two seasons, with big rivalry games and playoff games regularly selling out 70,000-seat Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
Almiron was the prize of the first batch of Atlanta signings, and the plan seemed to work exactly as the franchise would have liked. Almiron came in for $8 million, helped make Atlanta United fantastic, brought 70,000 people to a lot of games, won an MLS Cup and was sold for $27 million.
Some of that money will go to MLS, and Atlanta United spent plenty on wages, so it’s not like it made a clean $19 million profit. But the team did make money, and for what Almiron brought to the club, I’m sure Atlanta United owner Arthur Blank would happily have lost money on the Almiron signing.
Atlanta United followed up that signing with bringing in 18-year-old Argentine Ezequiel Barco. He didn’t feature much in his first year for the club, but it will build around him moving forward. The cycle will repeat itself.
A narrative to sell to the future Miguel Almirons
Perhaps most important, the sale of Almiron will send a strong message to young, talented players in South and Central America: You can come play in MLS and one day move on to a major European club.
This should be more encouraging to MLS than any money Atlanta United or Toronto FC brings in with the departures. They are becoming more comfortable embracing their role as a steppingstone, and it’s only going to make the quality of the league better.
Teams are realizing that they can invest in their youth setup, or sign young players, and reap the rewards. Tyler Adams, a product of the New York Red Bulls academy, signed for Red Bull Leipzig of the Bundesliga this year and already looks like he could be a key cog for the team, at 19. (This is insane.)
Alphonso Davies, who came up in the Vancouver Whitecaps organization, joined Bayern Munich this year and has already been working with the first team at 18.
For a long time, MLS was a league filled with aging European names and underpaid American role players. Clubs such as Portland Timbers and FC Dallas started doing things differently, investing in youth and scouting heavily in South and Central America, and immediately reaped the rewards. (DC United also had a major run of success early in the history of the organization following a blueprint of scouting the Americas.)
Now this could become the norm in the league. It will be welcome. Teams will be younger, more exciting. The soccer will get better. When players leave, new, younger players will replace them. American fans, it turns out, don’t just want to see names they know. They want to see good soccer.