mls Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Your 2022 World Cup safe bets
While every World Cup is unique in its own way, and this one especially, there are certain happenings you can count on. They come about every tournament. The pressure, the coverage, the overall oeuvre of the whole thing just drives people into the same patterns. Over the next month, you can look for...
If you’re gonna have playoffs, make them as drunk as possible
Soccer doesn’t really lend itself to playoffs. It’s why league seasons and cup competitions are generally separate, and the latter are understood to just be goofy, random collections of games where just about anything can happen. As soccer games are still decided on maybe one or two moments, one or ...
Who let Philadelphia be the sports capital?
In one light, there probably is no better place than Philadelphia, the epicenter of North American sports right now. There might not be a place where the teams matter more to the fans and residents, which of course leads them to some very curious words and deeds at times. You have to be truly dizzy ...
The rumored MLS Playoff changes are almost there
Apparently, taking a good hard look at the fairness of your playoff format is contagious these days. ...
A look at the 10 richest owners in sports and how their teams are doing
There’s rich, and then there’s wealthy. And then there’s “team owner money.”...
It’s Hollywood FC now
The idea of MLS as a retirement home has been a misnomer for a while. While the league might not pull in the biggest players in the world in their prime, it certainly isn’t waiting around until they can’t move anymore, for the most part (those watching Douglas Costa for the Galaxy might disagree). T...
MLS becomes the first to go full streaming
Well, someone was going to do it. ...
Messi to MLS could be a reality
For most of his career, it was impossible to picture Lionel Messi in any other jersey than the blue and maroon of Barcelona. Nine months into his stay with Paris Saint-Germain, transfer talk for one of the best to ever lace up a pair of boots is surfacing once more, with a report coming out on Tuesd...
That was MLS’s biggest night
Perhaps there have been too many markers as “MLS’s biggest night” that the words have lost all meaning. So many stadium openings (which is good! Except for those that might have been opened on the public dime), or MLS Cup finals, or TV deals, or expansion teams joining the fray (and definitely not a...
So what will MLS do about its TV ratings?
When setting up for the current MLS season, which started the last weekend of February, one of the major themes was the league locking in its new TV deal sometime in March. MLS’s TV deal has been paltry when compared to the other sports leagues ($90m a year), and there was a feeling that while the n...
Oh, damn, MLS started this weekend
Part of it was due to still being on vacation, and the other part was my general obliviousness. But I only realized at the last minute that MLS started its season this weekend, about 12 minutes after the last one ended with NYCFC’s manager in his undies in the rain in Portland, thanks to having to w...
Soccer, much like football, didn’t come home either
I wanted to resist the urge to give into the Timbers Army’s desire to claim Portland as “Soccer City USA.” It’s quite a label to bestow on yourself, and having grown up in direct opposition to Detroit’s “Hockeytown” self-flagellation, my alarms don’t need much prodding to go off. ...
The Philadelphia Union got screwed, but there was probably little MLS could do
We don’t think any of the current seasons taking place now as “COVID seasons” like we did of the previous ones played in empty stadiums/arenas or in weird, neutral venues altogether. But it still very much is, which the Philadelphia Union learned the all-too hard way yesterday....
Let’s fix the MLS Playoffs, shall we?
I know, I know. There’s nothing MLS fans hate more than someone who doesn’t watch as regularly as they do telling them what’s wrong with their league. Even with my expanded efforts to watch, understand, and develop an attachment to our domestic league, I’m still a long way off from being a tried and...
The New England Revs are going to set the league points record, and they’re not going to play any defense to do it
While MLS still has its fair share of issues, the one thing you have to give it credit for is that during the regular season, the league rewards teams that just say, “Fuck it, it’s free cake.” They don’t generally live on in history, because wonky defensive teams get found out by the extremely callo...
New Liga MX-MLS Cup is way cool, and might set up more cool stuff (I said ‘might’… this <i>is</i> MLS after all)
If I were the cynical sort (perish the thought!), I might suggest that MLS realizes its main stream of income, expansion, might be drying up in the coming years. That’s if you go by the “MLS is a Ponzi scheme” theory, which one has to admit has some legs. Charlotte and St. Louis join the league in t...
Patrick Mahomes cements status as Kansas City royalty
Apparently, Patrick Mahomes’ ambitions include not only figuratively taking over Kansas City, but pulling out his wallet to literally make it a reality....
Gabriel Heinze is just as big of a penis as you remember
The lesson for MLS coaches the past couple of weeks is that trying to show your authority by freezing out a star player only ends with your head in the guillotine’s receptacle. Gabriel Heinze was the latest to learn that yesterday....
MLS is back, and I’m really going to try this time
MLS returns this weekend, and unlike most of the big soccer leagues in the world, it can do so in front of some fans. We won’t hear the sheer wall of noise we would usually get in Seattle, Portland, Atlanta, and Orlando, or in more and more places these days, just yet. But it will be a relief to hea...
MLS is all grown up, on the verge of its very own work stoppage
Can you be a legitimate league in North America and not have a work stoppage? Apparently MLS doesn’t think so, as it is on the verge of careening into their first one in their 25 years of existence....