In the thinking of the people who put them on, mega-events can never just be their own thing. They must leave a legacy, or, if possible, a Legacy. Remake the landscape; alter the course of history; change the whole world, if that isn’t too much to ask.
Most World Cups don’t really leave much of one, once the dust has settled. Or if they do, it’s a legacy of white elephant stadiums that burden the host nation for many years. The last World Cup in the United States, played in 1994, really did leave something tangible and positive behind: Major League Soccer, the creation of which was a condition for hosting the tournament.
Where the upcoming World Cup will leave MLS, however, is a question begging for an answer.
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Since kicking off in 1996, MLS has grown to 30 teams with committed fanbases and pleasant stadiums designed with soccer in mind. Those clubs have built productive youth academies and found their place in the global transfer market. But the league has also bumped into something of a ceiling, stretching budgets that remain some way short of the world’s leading leagues. A sense of stagnation is setting in. If soccer is forever the sport of the future in the United States, MLS seems stuck in its role as the league of tomorrow.
For years, the prospect of the 2026 World Cup has been invoked as an inflection point for the league. How, exactly, it may benefit from a self-contained tournament with none of the proceeds earmarked to invest in MLS – unlike in 1994 – was never clear. It has always seemed a bit like South Park’s gnome meme, with the question mark as the penultimate step before the final stage labeled “Profit”.
What is clear: MLS has to provoke some kind of bump from this World Cup. A big one.
It’s hard to measure these things, but it doesn’t feel like MLS is part of the conversation in the same way it was in previous World Cup summers. Maybe that’s to do with how small the league’s footprint will be on the USMNT – largely as a justifiable policy choice, mind you. Or perhaps this is all downstream from the league gradually gutting its own internal media apparatus, which did yeoman’s work covering every team’s minutia and built community among fans – and now does so independently.
Whatever the case, if MLS can’t turn this World Cup into an accelerant, it’s hard to see where the next leap forward will come from. If that happens, or doesn’t, the 1994 World Cup will be remembered as the one that launched MLS and cemented soccer in American culture; and the 2026 one as a World Cup that, well, also happened here.
It is well established that soccer has long since entered the American mainstream. Bars teem on Premier League mornings. Soccer jerseys are everywhere. Participation in youth soccer is among the highest in any sport stateside and has been for decades. We’ve even had a hit TV show, Ted Lasso, centered around soccer. This trend has not necessarily translated to the domestic soccer league. It’s hard to get a read on MLS’s TV ratings, as most of the games are stuck behind the Apple TV paywall and the league isn’t forthcoming about them. But, plainly, a gap exists between the visibility of Europe’s legacy leagues and Mexico’s Liga MX, and MLS.
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The fact of the Vancouver Whitecaps’ seeming inability to make it work feels instructive for the league’s failure to ascend to the next tier. The club is Canadian but its struggles are similar to those faced by some of its counterparts in the south. The team plays in one of North America’s most historic soccer cities and holds a heritage of more than a half century. Its market is attractive and abundant with the sorts of demographics leagues like to sell their wares to. Not even a bad stadium situation – which it nevertheless entered into willingly – ought to be able to stand in the way of such a team. Especially one who also happen to have one of the best on-field products in the league and employ a marquee name in Germany hero Thomas Müller and a budding USMNT regular in Sebastian Berhalter.
The Whitecaps are by no means typical of the league, but if MLS was truly on the brink of hitting the bigtime, dragging the rest of the domestic sport along in its wake, it would surely have outgrown these teething problems.
The cleanest way to benefit from the World Cup seems to be to create more tethers between MLS and the big tournament. Because there are hardly any.
Recently, the league has imported veteran stars Son Heung-min (Los Angeles FC), James Rodriguez (Minnesota United) and Marco Reus (LA Galaxy), in addition to Müller. Antoine Griezmann’s move to Orlando City has already been agreed. And lately, MLS has been linked with a slew of other big names ageing out of Europe’s elite clubs – Robert Lewandowski, Casemiro, Mohamed Salah, Bernardo Silva. (The desiccated husk of Neymar, too, for what that’s worth.)
It seems a good idea, right about now, to go after all of them – even if they won’t all play or star for their country this summer – to create a sense of continuity between the end of the World Cup and the resumption of the MLS season in 13 of the markets where both events will be contested.
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Ah, but the dreaded “retirement league” smear. Well, whatever. This handwringing was always a bit of a misdirection. Most leagues will happily take in ageing superstars, or players who didn’t quite make the grade at a higher level. Serie A is full of Premier League castoffs and nobody in Italy gets worked up about it.
Relevance is the only thing that really matters in the attention economy that has sucked soccer in the same way it has everything else. An injection of star power is just the thing, no matter what people say. It’s better to be talked about. MLS will hope some of the attention from this summer’s World Cup sticks around to help promote the league.
