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The Major League Soccer is the top division of soccer in the United States and Canada. Teams like Colorado Rapids, Atlanta United FC, Chicago Fire, FC Dallas, LA Galaxy, New York City FC, Montreal Impact and a lot more participate in this league. For betting odds updates, please refer to the provided ones below.
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Major League Soccer (MLS) is the main league in the United States and Canada’s soccer league system. It is supervised by the United States Soccer Federation (U.S. Soccer), which is a member of FIFA.
It is made up of 24 teams in two conferences, the Eastern Conference and the Western Conference. The season starts in March and ends in December. Each team plays 34 games during the regular season. The regular season champion receives the MLS Supporters’ Shield. The top 12 teams in the regular season qualify for the MLS Cup Playoffs, a direct elimination tournament that ends with the final match of the MLS Cup.
It ranks 4th as the strongest league of the last decade of the 21st century in North and Central America.
Major League Soccer is the 52nd best league in the world according to the official ranking of the International Federation of Football History and Statistics (IFFHS).
History
Major League Soccer was created on 17 December 1993, in fulfillment of Alan Rothenberg’s and the United States Soccer Federation’s (USSF) promise to FIFA to establish a “top-level” professional soccer league in exchange for the 1994 World Cup award to the United States. Previously, only one professional league, the NASL, which was played between 1968 and 1984, had a significant media and amateur following. Major League Soccer’s goal was to become one of the world’s major soccer leagues and one of the major sports leagues in the United States. The league began its first season in 1996 with ten teams and enjoyed promising attendance figures. Numbers declined slightly after the first year, but have increased in subsequent years. They divided the 10 original teams into two conferences: the Eastern Conference (Columbus Crew, D.C.) and the Eastern Conference (Columbus Crew, D.C.). United, New England Revolution, NY/NJ MetroStars, Tampa Bay Mutiny), and the Western Conference (Colorado Rapids, Dallas Burn, Kansas City Wiz, Los Angeles Galaxy and San Jose Clash).
Expansion, Contraction, and Transfer
The league expanded to 12 teams in 1998, adding Chicago Fire to the Western Conference and Miami Fusion to the Eastern Conference. In 2000, the league was reorganized into the East, Central and West Conferences; Chicago Fire, Tampa Bay Mutiny, Dallas Burn and Columbus Crew were moved to the new Central Division. However, the league’s financial problems led to the departure of Commissioner Doug Logan after the end of the 1998 season. Don Garber, a former NFL chief, was hired in his place and his leadership became a tool to shore up the league’s future. The construction of soccer stadiums for league teams, funded in large part by financiers such as Lamar Hunt and Phil Anschutz, became a point of emphasis for achieving fiscal health and ensuring the league’s survival. The 22,000-strong Mapfre Stadium, built in 1999 as the first football-specific stadium in the United States, is often cited as a model league. It was followed by Chicago’s Toyota Park with 20,000 spectators, Los Angeles’ StubHub Center with 27,000, Dallas’ Toyota Stadium with 22,000, Salt Lake City’s Rio Tinto Stadium with 20,000, Toronto’s BMO Field with 20,000, 18,000 Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Denver, 25,000 Red Bull Arena in New York, 18,000 Talen Energy Stadium in Philadelphia, 18,000 Children’s Mercy Park in Kansas City and 18,000 Avaya Stadium in San Jose.
Despite this move, to stop the economic bleeding by contracting the Florida franchises in the 2001 season, the two Florida teams (Miami Fusion and Tampa Bay Mutiny) disappeared and the league returned to ten teams. The league returned to just two conferences, as it was originally, with Chicago Fire in the Eastern Conference.
The 2002 World Cup, in which the United States unexpectedly reached the quarterfinals winning against Portugal and Mexico, triggered a resurgence of U.S. football and MLS. The 2002 MLS Cup final, which took place four months after that year’s World Cup final, set an attendance record at Gillette Stadium that saw the Los Angeles Galaxy win its first title.
In the 2004 season, the league expanded again, added Real Salt Lake, which plays in the new 20,000 spectator Rio Tinto Stadium and C.D. Chivas USA, which shares the StubHub Center with the Galaxy. The two new teams were placed in the Western Conference, moving Kansas City to the Eastern Conference. The name Real Salt Lake is due to the fact that its owner is a fan of Real Madrid and established several agreements with the Spanish club. Chivas USA was founded by the owner of Guadalajara in Mexico.
In the 2006 season MetroStars was renamed New York Red Bulls after the purchase of the equipment by energy beverage giant Red Bull. The team will be the brother of Austria’s Red Bull Salzburg.
San Jose Earthquakes disappeared as a franchise, but their players and coaching staff moved to Houston 1836, which a few weeks later changed its name to Houston Dynamo. However, the name of the Earthquakes and their history were not transferred, reappearing San Jose Earthquakes in 2008 thanks to a new group of owners, thus the Houston Dynamo became an expansion team.
Weeks before the start of the 2007 season the league closed an agreement with the German Bundesliga for cooperation, exchanging knowledge of building football stadiums and financing.
(2007-2009)
The MLS was expanded with a new team in the 2007 season, Toronto FC, being the first Canadian team in MLS history, and whose local management built a football stadium. In its first year, it ran out of season tickets due to its great reception. Since 2007, Major League Soccer’s leadership has taken steps to further internationalize the league in an effort to raise the level of play. Among the first steps in this direction has been the franchise player rule, which helped bring international stars into the League, despite relatively low salaries, and the creation of the North American Super League, which pits the top of the MLS teams against the top teams of Mexico’s First Division in an effort to exert more meaningful competition for both leagues. The MLS changed the rules regarding foreign players in the league to allow a total of 8.
Thus the 2007 season witnessed the MLS debut of David Beckham, whose signature had been seen as a blow to American football. Beckham’s contract with the Los Angeles Galaxy was made possible by the new franchise player rule. Players such as Cuauhtémoc Blanco of Club America, signed with Chicago Fire, and Juan Pablo Angel, from Aston Villa to the New York Red Bulls, are some of the first designated players to have made significant contributions to their clubs. The departures of Clint Dempsey, Jozy Altidore and Landon Donovan’s loan to the Premier League, along with Claudio Reyna’s return to the New York Red Bulls and Brian McBride to the Chicago Fire, respectively, highlight the exchange of the best prospects to Europe for experienced league players. Several other well-known foreign players have followed David Beckham and Cuauhtemoc Blanco to MLS, including Guillermo Barros Schelotto to Columbus Crew, Fredrik Ljungberg to Seattle Sounders FC, Wayne Rooney to DC United, Kaka to Orlando City SC, Juninho, Steven Gerrard and Zlatan Ibrahimović to Los Angeles Galaxy as well as Thierry Henry and Rafael Marquez to New York Red Bulls and David Villa and Lampard to New York City FC.
In addition, MLS puts a lot of effort into the youth academy and the training of new players, all MLS clubs have their own football academy. The Red Bull Academy in New York, which trains youngsters at risk of social exclusion living in troubled neighborhoods, and the David Beckham Academy in Los Angeles, are noteworthy for their prestige.
During the 2008 season, San Jose Earthquakes reappeared in the league, bringing the league from 12 to 14 teams. In the 2009 season, the Seattle Sounders FC expansion team was created and plays its home games in the new, modern CenturyLink Field, where the NFL team Seattle Seahawks also plays. With a crowd of 35 523 at Qwest Field. In their first year, they broke all attendance records in a Major League Soccer stadium with the most spectators in each game.
(2010-present)
In the 2010 season, the league expanded with a new team in Philadelphia, bringing the league to 16 teams. Philadelphia Union based in Chester, Pennsylvania, in a new 20,000-seat, dedicated soccer stadium built west of Commodore Barry Bridge. Also in 2010, New York’s new football-specific stadium, the modern Red Bull Arena, was inaugurated with 25,000 seats covered with a translucent structure.
In 2011 the MLS was expanded to 18 teams due to the expansion of two new teams in the Western Conference in the cities of Portland and Vancouver, perhaps these teams will resume the Cascadia Cup alongside the Seattle Sounders. It will be the Portland Timbers and the Vancouver Whitecaps.
In 2012 a new team joined the Eastern Conference, the Montreal Impact, which will play at Saputo Stadium. The goal of MLS at the time was to close the league with 20 teams, 17 from the United States and 3 from Canada (Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver).
The 20th franchise finally sees the light in May 2013, when MLS grants Manchester City of England and the New York Yankees a place for a new team called New York City FC.5 In November of the same year Orlando City was also announced as a new franchise.6 Both clubs entered the competition in 2015. A second franchise is currently being negotiated in Florida (in Miami specifically) with David Beckham as one of the owners.7 In April 2014 a new franchise was announced in Atlanta, which will make its debut in 2017.
Two new franchises, Minnesota United FC and Atlanta United FC, began playing in 2017. In 2018 a new Los Angeles franchise enters the league replacing Chivas USA, Los Angeles FC. The MLS announced that in 2020 the league will have 24 teams, 12 for each conference. As part of a series of global changes in the institution to be implemented for the 20th season of the league, Major League Soccer introduced a new logo that is customizable for each franchise and came into use from 2015. In 2017 MLS announced its future expansion to 28 teams.
On December 20, 2017, a new expansion franchise is announced in the city of Nashville, Tennessee, which will be the 24th to enter the League.10 A new franchise, the 25th MLS between the cities of Cincinnati, Detroit and Sacramento, is expected to be announced in early 2018.11 In early 2018, the 25th franchise to be held in Miami, Florida was confirmed and will be owned by David Beckham for a possible entry into the 2020 season. On May 29, 2018, the City of Cincinnati officially launched its MLS franchise under the name FC Cincinnati and to debut in the 2019 season, became franchise number 26°.
Championship system
The Major League Soccer championship is divided into two parts: the regular season, where the 24 teams play divided into 2 conferences: Eastern Conference and Western Conference, and the playoffs, whose final game, the MLS Cup, decides the league champion.
Although the format has varied over the years, the current format states that during the regular season all teams play a total of 34 games each. Of those 34, 10 are against the teams of the opposite conference, and the other 24 are divided among the 9 rivals of the own conference, being able to face the latter in two or three opportunities. At the end of the regular phase, the team with the most points among all the participants of both conferences obtains the MLS Supporters’ Shield and the second place in the CONCACAF Champions League, being accompanied to said competition by the team that has achieved the most points in the opposite conference. Likewise, the best 6 of each conference enter the playoffs, classifying the first 2 to the conference semifinals, and the following 4 to the first round.
In the first round, the 3rd place faces the 6th, and the 4th to the 5th. The crosses are to a single party, acting as local 3rd and 4th. The winners go on to the conference semifinals. The semi-finals and conference finals are played with round-trip matches. In the first instance, the 1st plays against the winner of the first round who has been in the worst position in the regular season, and the 2nd faces the other classified.
The two conference winners will participate in the MLS Cup, which is played one match away from the home of the two with the most points during the regular season. Whoever wins will be crowned league champion.
Qualification for the CONCACAF Champions League
The MLS awards three of the four spots the United States has for the competition:
- The first is the MLS Cup winner;
- The second is for the MLS Supporters’ Shield winner (the team with the most points during the regular season);
- The third, to the first-placed conference opponent to the MLS Supporters’ Shield winner.
Canadian clubs that participate in MLS are excluded from these qualification tracks as they enter continental competition from the Canadian Football Championship.
Salary cap
Unlike the rest of the world’s professional leagues, player contracts and transfers are not handled by the clubs but by the league. So all the clubs in the league are given a salary equivalent to dividing between the contracts of several players. This is called a “salary cap” and the average cap was $2.55 million in 2010.
Since 2007, there is an exception rule called the Franchise Player Act, also known as the Beckham Act. This rule allows each club to have up to three “franchise players” on their payroll to release an amount of $335,000 per eligible player on their total payroll. This mode of operation of the MLS means that the average players in this league are paid less than the average players in the professional leagues of Europe. The franchise player rule allows you to sign some of the big international stars.
The rule changes
In the early years, MLS experienced rule changes trying to make the sport more American.
The clock, which counts to 90 minutes in international football, in MLS would count backwards and stop in situations of game stoppage. When the clock reached 0:00, the time would end. After the 1999 season, this rule was abandoned in favour of a normal football watch.
The other change was the definition by Shoot-Out, to resolve tied games. If the game ended with a tie, a sudden death would be played:
- A player would receive the ball 35 meters from the goal with five seconds to score. As in a penalty shootout, each team had five attempts. If the result was still a draw, there would be another series of Shoot-Out. The team that won received one point (as opposed to three points for a victory), the team that lost received zero.
- However, the rule changes, especially the Shoot-Out rule, did not improve the audience levels in the American public and, on the other hand, meant the antipathy of some traditional fans. The Shoot-Out was abolished after the 1999 season.
- The MLS made use of the golden goal from 2000 to 2003, but in 2004 abandoned this rule, applying the traditional model of match definition.