'An absolute joke': How MLS's preseason 'coverage' hurts the league's momentum
If you're a casual fan of Major League Soccer, you've undoubtedly read headlines about the league's 2024 preseason. There's just one problem: Most headlines feature Lionel Messi-led Inter Miami and no one else.
The Florida club's global preseason has received wall-to-wall coverage from MLS, with live streams available for free on the league website and high-quality broadcasts on AppleTV via MLS Season Pass. From El Salvador to Tokyo, from Hong Kong to Riyadh, seemingly every Inter Miami move has been filmed, shared and scrutinized.
Compare that to the preseason story of the Columbus Crew, the reigning MLS champion. It has played several matches too, but none have been broadcast and media coverage is scant.
Inter Miami is the outlier — every other MLS club's preseason has been virtually invisible. Games are so inaccessible that even MLS insiders like The Athletic's Tom Bogert have resorted to calling club media teams to learn what happened in them. Warning, there is profanity in the below embedded post.
This all-or-nothing approach is awful for MLS in the long term. One team is covered so breathlessly that even hardcore fans feel the attention is patronizing, while the other 28 are cast in such a shadow that insider journalists must call around to figure out what they're doing. This is not the way a professional soccer league should behave.
Having all of the attention on its shoulders is bad for Miami, which buckled and bent under the pressure of its highly publicized tour. (Final results: one win, two draws and three losses, including an embarrassing 6-0 hammering at the hands of Saudi Arabia's Al-Nassr.)
It's bad for MLS' other clubs, who lack the resources to drum up preseason tours of their own. And it's bad for American soccer as a whole. Sending a shaky Miami team on an exhausting journey made international fans think American soccer was weak. Failing to show a single other MLS team as a complement only served to validate that assumption.
Interest in the league has never been higher, but prospective fans entered the preseason with a terrible choice: Watch an unfit Miami team get the stuffing kicked out of it around the globe or watch no MLS at all. There's a middle ground here, one championed by other leagues like the MLB, but MLS doesn't seem interested in finding it.
If the league wants American sports fans to take it seriously, it must start taking itself seriously, too.
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