MLS expansion to 28 teams seems reasonable – and inevitable

Maybe for you, Major League Soccer rests in a good place at 20 teams, the same size as the Premier League and some of the other heralded associations with which American soccer remains endlessly smitten. Or maybe you wanted MLS to fill more dots in this great big land of ours, stretching from sea to shining sea with 24 or 28 or even 32 teams. Or, why stop there? What about a bigger footprint still? Picture Oprah sitting at conference of mayors: “You get a team! And you get a team!” After all, the country’s king daddy of sporting behemoths, the NFL, is a high functioning 32-team operation.

But what we probably all agree on, the MLS supporters who prefer “small” and those who covet more grand designs, is that further league expansion had a certainly inevitability, didn’t it? Expansion in MLS has generated its own, hard-to-contain momentum lately.

So when MLS commissioner Don Garber announced last week that league owners want to pursue expansion to 28 teams, the surprise factor rated “very low.” Somewhere near “Donald Trump says something outrageous!”

When it comes to MLS expansion, it’s not exactly a full-fledged feeding frenzy to add member clubs as quickly as possible, but it’s sure not to far from one either. Manifest destiny is built into the American DNA, after all.

MLS had 12 teams just 10 years ago. It was a 16-team league just five years ago; the 2010 season came and went with two conferences of eight clubs, which looks a little cute and quaint now.

Pretty soon that became an 18-team operation, which bloomed quickly into the 20-team league that just completed another MLS season. Actually, even as Columbus and Portland were playing in a helter-skelter championship match Sunday, it wasn’t really even a 20-team league anymore; with Atlanta, Minnesota and LAFC all sorted out and set to join no later than 2018, a 23-team league is already a hardened reality.

(In fact, this all becomes a 24-team set the moment David Beckham pulls enough political and financial levers in South Florida to get that slow-starting engine off the starting line. He says it’s done, but we’ve heard that before, and we should never, ever forget the golden rule of MLS stadium development: “Artist renderings and ‘done deal announcements’ are nice and all, but only a fool believes any of it until someone actually puts a shovel into the ground.”)

SEE MORE: Access to public transportation makes Beckham’s Miami site a winner.

With expansion fees hovering near $100 million and suitors practically lining up like Black Sunday shoppers, who can blame MLS for going a little expansion bonkers? Besides, is it really a bad thing? That seems highly doubtful. Honestly, what is the downside to a 28-team MLS?

Dilution of talent and alarmist notions of diminishing quality is the primary argument against MLS getting the way most of us do around the holidays – a bit overstuffed. With all due respect to a few smart guys in the game who have voiced concerns, former New England manager Steve Nicol among them, those worries are misplaced.

I’ve heard these same concerns since MLS was a 12-team operation. Again, that wasn’t so very far back. But if you watched MLS in 2005 and then again in 2015, you saw two very, very different products on the field. If MLS in 2005 was “standard definition TV,” MLS has improved to HD 1080p. Quality improves through a variety of areas, but mostly via two elements: the number of competently skillful players and the number of difference makers. Both quantities have improved dramatically in MLS.

If you look back at the players who competed for MLS Cup in 2005 (L.A. Galaxy defeated New England), there were some really good performers on the field that sunny day outside Dallas, augmented by a few men of international level talent (Clint Dempsey, Landon Donovan, Cobi Jones, Herculez Gomez and Michael Parkhurst most notably). Those were two pretty well-stocked rosters, which is why those clubs were large and in charge on an MLS Cup final Sunday. Well, today most MLS teams have a roster that looks like that. As in, all 20 of them.

There is literally a world of soccer players, and the spending money that MLS clubs have to attract them keeps ticking up incrementally. Meanwhile, the academies that are producing across MLS – and producing prolifically in places like Dallas, Vancouver and elsewhere – weren’t much more than a rumor back in 2005.

So, no, expansion will not be a drag on quality, not so long as salary caps that allow for clubs to spend on good, mid-level European and South American talent keeps gradually rising. (When thinking of “good, mid-level talent” that doesn’t break the bank; think of players like Justin Meram, Tony Tchani, Will Trapp, Diego Chara, Rodney Wallace and Jorge Villafana, none of whom made more than $170,000 as a base in 2015 as they held vital roles in helping usher Columbus or Portland into the MLS Cup final.)

Why else would anyone fear a larger MLS? The ghosts of the old North American Soccer League have been long vanquished. Yes, the old NASL expanded too quickly, relying too heavily on wobbly ownership that eventually went leaky and sank the ship. Well, this ain’t the 1970s, and the landscape looks remarkable different for soccer. Besides, MLS commissioner Don Garber and his crew have been careful in vetting financial heft of would-be owners. If merely being rich and passionate were sufficient as a requirement of MLS ownership – as opposed to being ridiculously rich – AC St. Louis would already be part of MLS.

On the other hand, there are lots of reasons to champion further expansion. Most of them start with establishing a larger US footprint, a goal long pursued by MLS, but one where plenty of ground remains untaken.

Awareness of MLS within the league’s 19 markets ranges from “OK” to “outstanding,” which puts the league in a pretty good place in 2015. Not an outstanding place, though; merely “pretty good.” See, it’s a big country. And if you drive an hour in any direction from most of those markets, “MLS” is just a bunch of letters. They wouldn’t know Benny Feilhaber from Benny and the Jets. Most people would guess that Red Bull Arena was for rodeos rather than restarts.

According to this list, 13 of the country’s top 30 TV markets will remain unserved by MLS even when the league hits 24 teams. (Yes, there is professional soccer in many of these untapped markets, and blessedly so. But none of the other leagues have national TV contracts.) As we might declare about a slow-footed holding midfielder, “He isn’t covering enough ground!”

A more substantial footprint adds more awareness, which adds to TV contracts, which adds money to buy players, which adds interests across all markets, where they can sell more seats and gin up the sponsorship contracts, etc. All of that adds awareness, which further drives TV contracts, player salaries, gate receipts … and so it goes in a circular pattern.

SEE MORE: MLS Cup draws 874K viewers across platforms.

The early TV ratings are out for an MLS Cup final that was short of beautiful soccer but high on entertainment. Those ratings in a word: disappointing. Yes, two smaller market clubs helped create ratings on the skinny side. But so did this: the ongoing lack of a larger national footprint mentioned above.

MLS is 20 years old is doing fine, making slow and steady progress. The best chance to keep the party going, to ensure the train of progress moves down the track? It’s still about growth – for now at least.