WHAT’S IN A NAME

What I Love And What I Hate About The MLS Is Back Tournament
Seth Herrold
@HerroldTimes
Next week, Major League Soccer will return with its MLS is Back Tournament in Orlando. While several sports such as the PGA Tour, NASCAR and Professional Bull Riding – yes, the PBR is back, folks – have already returned to weekly competition, the MLS’s return will mark the first major North American sport to get back on the field, uh I mean the pitch.
There is a lot to love about the MLS model for a return to play and some things that maybe weren’t thought out the best. For this week’s column I present: The MLS is Back Tournament, what I love and what I hate.
Let’s start with the easy ones here. I love the tournament because it is live sports coming to my TV. Not just that, but with Sporting Kansas City in the mix, it is a live sporting event with a team I can get behind and root for. That’s going to take my level of investment into this tournament substantially higher than most of the other sports that have already made returns.
I’m a big Jordan Spieth fan, so I could buy into golf tournaments, especially recently with Spieth playing the best golf he’s played in a while. I don’t have a NASCAR driver I follow since Jeff Gordon retired and I tried to be a “Team Yeti” fan in the PBR’s new team format, but none of those three sports have given me a local team to root for. So this tournament marks a more official, more invested “sports are back” moment for me personally.
The easiest thing to hate about the MLS is Back Tournament is the name. Obviously there wasn’t much thought put into the name. The MLS is back, so why not call it the MLS is Back Tournament, right? As Sporting Kansas City captain Matt Besler said in his weekly radio spot on 810 Sport Radio, “We already get made fun of enough because we are soccer players and this name doesn’t help any.”
The name aside, I love the format of the tournament. The event kicks off on July 8 and places all 26 MLS teams into a World Cup-style tournament with a group stage to be followed by knockout rounds leading to the championship. The World Cup format is something new. MLS follows a more traditional format for their playoffs, so this gives the event a different look from the norm. The top two teams in each of the six groups will advance to the knockout round of 16 along with the four best third-place finishers. From there, it’s traditional playoffs with the round of 16 to be followed by the quarterfinals, semifinals and championship.
Another thing I love about this format is the MLS is counting group-stage games toward the regular season standings. That gives every team an incentive to go out and win those matches. Sometimes in group play teams will clinch a trip to the knockout rounds prior to their final group game. That final game usually gets watered down with backups playing and teams just trying to get a tie. With real regular season points on the line, however, that should eliminate any of those occurences.
One of the more questionable aspects of the tournament is how the groups were determined. MLS announced it as a random draw to get the three Western Conference and Eastern Conference groups set. Amazingly, the random draw placed Sporting in a group with its biggest rival, Real Salt Lake. Regional rivals Minnesota United and the Colorado Rapids round out the group. It feels anything but random. The two Los Angeles clubs – which have become big rivals in the plast year or two -also found themselves sharing a group as did the clubs from Columbus and Cincinnati, Toronto and Montreal, Vancouver and Seattle, Orlando and Miami, and so on. It’s insane to think all those rivalries somehow came out of a random draw. Everyone is fine with it – they like rivalries – so it would have been pretty acceptable for MLS to come out and say they were placing rival teams in groups together and people would have applauded them. Instead, we got fed the random draw line that is just in no way believeable.
Another thing I am looking forward to with this tournament is getting to know the game of soccer better. I have been a mild Sporting KC fan for a while and I always watch the World Cup tournaments, but have never took the plunge into full-on soccer fandom. Having the MLS is Back Tournament start ahead of other sports like the NBA, NHL and MLB gives the league a chance to reach a lot of potential new fans, like myself, who are waiting on their favorite team’s league to begin again. They can go after new fans, as the only major team sport playing.
I am going to give the sport a prolonged chance, even as other sports pick up, and I would recommend you doing the same. Who knows, you might become a fan as well.
Speaking of recommendations, this week’s picks are…
Read: Golf’s Holy War: The Battle For The Soul Of A Game In An Age Of Science by Brett Cyrgalis.
Watch: Um, did you read the column or did you just skip to the recommendations? Watch some MLS and give it a real chance. The tournament starts on July 8 at 7 p.m. with Orlando City facing Inter Miami. All games will be broadcast on ESPN. Sporting KC’s first match is on Sunday, July 12 at 7 p.m. They play the Minnesota United.
Eat: This week’s eating recommendation is actually a drink – the vanilla sweet cream cold brew coffee from Green House Rolls here in Trenton. It’s the closest thing I have found to the Starbucks version anywhere and is definitely worth trying.