Dear Major League Soccer:
No more expansion. Thirty teams is plenty.
Also: no one should play three road games in eight days.
That’s the fallout from Saturday’s 0-0 match in Mission Valley between San Diego FC and Sporting Kansas City. This was not a soccer display that made local MLS fans exclaim, “See, this is why we begged to get an MLS team in San Diego.”
San Diego FC wasn’t at fault. It held up its end of the entertainment standard.
Led by its polished European League alums in the midfield and up top, SDFC maintained its ball-control dominance and also an over-the-top threat. The tactics of coach Mikey Varas gave more weight to scoring than to defending. That’s how SDFC rolls.
Sporting Kansas City, on the other hand, was gung-ho to create a nil-nil final score.
Here’s the kicker: That was the right approach by coach Kerry Zavagnin.
One, K.C.’s offense, at this stage, lacks great refinement.
Two, the club was playing its third road match in eight days. Attempting to play a full-field, full-gusto 90 minutes would’ve been overly bold. Only three nights earlier, K.C. went full tilt in St. Louis, playing its rival to a 2-2 draw.
Zavagnin decided returning home with one point would be a big victory.
If Kansas City’s performance impelled no one in the announced crowd of 25,233 to buy the MLS package on Apple TV+ afterward, it was a disciplined, well-coached effort.
Who knows? Come October, the single point may enable K.C., which came in 13th in the 15-team Western Conference, to land one of the 18 playoff spots.
Zavagnin called it a “a complete performance in of attitude, intention and determination.”
“And when I say complete performance,” he added, acknowledging this wasn’t beautiful soccer, “I of course mean on the defensive side of the ball. On the attacking side, we’re still working to be the best version of us.”
San Diego FC had its own stamina challenges to manage. The game was also its third in eight days.
This year, I’ve belabored my belief that the 34-game MLS schedule and numerous international events is too strenuous for any team to sustain high quality. Travel is a big part of the challenge. The United States is a big country — much bigger than England, home to the standard-setting Premier League.
Having teams play three matches in eight days dilutes the soccer quality.
Sporting Kansas City’s three-in-eight test sent the team to Portland, Ore., back to the Midwest for the St. Louis match and then on to San Diego.
Egads.
“When you go on the road for three games during the week,” said Zavagnin, a former MSL midfielder who mentioned the three-in-eight fact twice in his postgame comments, “you have to defend extremely well.”
Zavagnin could enlist his defensive expertise. A defensive midfielder, he won a MLS Cup in 2000 while with the then-Kansas City Wizards. K.C. was outshot 22-6 but won 1-0 thanks to 10 saves from star goalkeeper Tony Meola. Zavagnin was in the starting lineup.
To appreciate the tedium of K.C. offense Saturday, we turn to soccer’s expected goal statistic. It’s an estimate of the likelihood a shot will result in a goal.
Kansas City’s expected goals on Saturday, as published via different data sources used by ESPN and The Athletic, were 0.00 and 0.05.
Coping well with its own fatigue, SDFC outpossessed K.C. by 30 percentage points. The advantage in corner kicks was 8-1. Defensive midfielder Jeppe Tverskov completed 100 es. Striker Anders Dreyer got off two threatening shots, and Tverskov put a header on goal.
No one could crack the safe.
“The positive is we pushed the game, but we were able to maintain a clean sheet,” Varas said.
My plea for no more MLS expansion is pretty cheeky. My logic isn’t perfect, but here it is: the soccer will be better throughout the league if more players aren’t needed, and because expansion almost always results in two teams being added, that would require about 50 more players, many of whom would be drafted off current MLS rosters.
MLS has engaged in hyper-expansion for years. Around 2017, the league’s business model was described as something of a ponzi scheme by Stanford economist Roger Noll, who discerned a thirst for expansion fees.
In the past 10 years, MLS has grown from 19 to 30 franchises. The expansion fees have soared, with San Diego FC’s leadership ponying up a record $500 million.
MLS commissioner Don Garber understands how the financial sausage is made. As you’d expect, he hasn’t ruled out further expansion.
Here’s hoping the expansion talk is just rhetoric, and that MLS also calms down on the heavy travel and the scheduling quirks. With world-class soccer a press of remote button away for fans in all U.S. markets via streaming and telecasts, it’s important to keep an eye on the (checkered) ball.
Soccer quality is crucial to long-term success.
