How can MLS become an elite league?
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How did the hosts frame MLS’s opportunity after the World Cup?
Hi there and welcome to the Athletic FC podcast with me, Adam Leventhal. So, as the World Cup packs up and leaves town, what's the legacy? MLS have declared they'll take it from here, so after a six-week festival of football on their doorstep, will they capitalise? Well, for the final time here at ACAR Studios in New York, the World Cup has now left town. But what comes next for the domestic game in the US? The Athletics senior writer and author of The Messy Effect, Paul Tenorio, is here. Yes, it's all over. How do you feel? Oh, I feel sad.
I'm not ready to go back to the real world. You know, it's like the same way I felt after the group stage when we were done with four games a day. Yeah. And you have to kind of come to terms with the fact that you won't have those marathons anymore. And now we just don't get the World Cup for another few years, a couple of years for the women's and then four for the men's. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm going to need a week or so to come down from it. And then I'm going to need another few weeks to recover from the fact that it's not back.
Yeah.
Absolutely. Yeah, it is going to feel like a big void. I do agree. We're going to be hearing from some very influential people in MLS, soccer in the US, global football as well, including Arsene Wenger. But before we get to those people, MLS was obviously launched off the back of the 1994 World Cup in the US. Do you feel 30 years on that they're ready to take the next step now?
Well, I know that they're ready to. I know that the infrastructure has been built up. The investment has been there to be ready for this moment. The question is whether they'll seize the moment. And that, I think, is still more up in the air than anyone, I think, around the league would like to admit. You know, they they believe that they're ready for more, but how they get there, what that more looks like is literally still up for debate in the boardrooms amongst the owners of Major League Soccer. So we've seen some changes already voted on. We know the biggest changes are yet to come. But I do think it's fair to say there's a question mark around what MLS is going to do to capitalize on this moment.
And I can say, you know, clearly that they weren't ready to do it now, which they should have been, right? They had an eight-year runway for this moment. The changes that they voted aren't going to come until next year. So... Everything in the league, the foundation is there. It's now acting upon it. And that's actually the hard part is getting 30 owners on board about this is the way forward.
Yeah. You want to strike when the iron is hot, especially in the US. So the tagline from MLS is thanks world. We'll take it from here. Here is the MLS commissioner Don Garber on the master plan.
It's called MLS 3.0 for a reason, because it is a transformation of the way we're going to think about going about our business. But it is not a flipping of the switch. It's about changing. acting on the step we took back over the last couple of years to figure out what we're going to look like in the years to come. I wholeheartedly believe that without Major League Soccer, building the commercial market, creating a supporter culture, building the foundation for the sport, being at it every single day through rain and shine and thick and thin and making tough decisions and having some fun and getting a bit lucky, that the World Cup would be what it is today. And to your point, and now we got to take it from here.
when you see how big this was, is there any regret that some of these sporting changes that are coming weren't ready for 2026?
Absolutely not. And it's no different than some of the other views of various pundits that don't really understand that timing is everything. And when you're running a a league, you got to think about the world in macro terms because you get too focused on the micro. You, you, you, you risk making a quick decision that could be wrong as opposed to making the right decision that could take a little time. You've, you've, and you will never agree with that.
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