So it took a while but I finally read Paul Tenorio and Pablo Maurer’s look at a 2015 consulting document shared around Major League Soccer, put together by Boston Consulting Group. It’s a revealing read for reasons I’ll get into in a second.
The timing was somewhat fortuitous; after taking essentially the entire season off MLS this year, I watched Toronto FC lose 3-1 to the Seattle Sounders in the MLS Cup final, and was…shocked—I guess that’s not too strong a word here—shocked at how awful the play was in general.
I don’t know if it was worse than in previous years, or if it was unconscious bias, or just a bad day in the office for both teams. But the marked difference from that game and (to make an entirely unfair and ludicrous but nevertheless instructive comparison) the Liverpool Man City bout from earlier in the weekend was enormous.
Toronto FC enjoyed much of the possession, but the passes were square, pedestrian, directly at their intended receiver as opposed to in front of them. Players would receive the ball and remain stationary. Sometimes they would make decent movements off the ball, but by the time they were in a good position to receive a pass the player with the ball would only just then be finishing taking his four touches to settle it. Meanwhile, Seattle might have otherwise not even been there until they scored from an insane deflection in the second half. And the whole thing was slow. Punishingly slow (and I mean no offence here to my friends who work in the league—I’m sure you know a little of what I’m talking about here).
The really odd thing, however, was to hear the familiar and welcome voice of veteran football announcer Jon Champion try his best to give the proceedings a sense of excitement and depth; at times it was funny to hear the Englishman intone in eloquent terms Toronto’s slapdash attack, making it appear more coherent than it even remotely was. The whole thing felt almost comically artificial, and made me think of Richard Attenborough’s soliloquy on the fleas in Jurassic Park. “I can see the fleas mummy, can’t you see the fleas!”
Jon Champion, incidentally, was recruited by ESPN in a broadcasting coup this past December to cover the 2019 season. I will confess I found the move both exciting and annoying. Champion to me surpasses even Martin Tyler as one of the more enjoyable and competent announcers in football. To lose him and have to be subjected to more Peter Drury for the Premier League was a loss. But it also felt like having Champion commentating on MLS was like putting premium gasoline in a rusty 1993 Corolla.
Reading the Athletic’s analysis of BCG’s study, Champion’s move to ESPN to cover MLS reflected (perhaps coincidentally) recommendations on how best to improve ‘the product’:
The study points out in no uncertain terms that consumers in 2015 perceived the quality of the league’s broadcasts to be very low. “Relative to other sports leagues,” it reads, “consumers have negative perceptions of MLS commentary, pre/post-game analysis and production.”
[…]
In the short-term, the study recommends setting best practices for the league’s broadcasts, for example, mimicking the angles and number of cameras used on English Premier League productions. It directed the league to create a robust broadcast manual to establish a uniform look and feel for its broadcasts and also a mechanism to monitor and enforce deviations from that standard.
A dog and pony show
Reading through BCG’s recommendations, it’s not hard to feel like you’re looking at an internal document shared within the Communist Party politburo on how best to raise the production of wheat.
In a non-single entity system, the way it works is teams spend money on players to try to win, everyone gets a piece of the TV broadcasting pie (though winners get more), and they all try not to lose too much money (but some inevitably do). Hopefully, the result is a league that’s exciting with teams that are fun to watch, though the point really is that it’s a sporting competition, I guess.
In MLS, and this is really hammered home in the BCG study, it’s a dog and pony show; generating interest is a matter of making sure the lighting is right, there are enough camera angles and the stadium seats are comfy. The way and manner teams spend on players is tightly and centrally controlled, but can be ‘enhanced’ slightly to ensure greater ‘quality of play’ allegedly, just like turning a knob or a slider.
I’m not saying these things don’t matter at all in football—they do, which we know from how badly the dearth of modernized stadia in Italy has weighed on Serie A. But it’s hard not to smell the astroturf when you read recommendations like this:
With regard to perceived quality, the study suggests that MLS would be better off de-emphasizing a high-profile player’s footprint and focusing more on the quality of their play. They recommend coaching the league’s broadcast partners to “reinforce quality in broadcasts,” even suggesting that the league might launch a national “play quality” campaign to change its perception.
Or this:
The study suggests that the atmosphere at MLS matches could be improved by positioning supporters in highly-visible areas of the stadium (like end zones, where the large majority of supporters’ groups are already located). They suggest providing infrastructure for tifo, such as pulleys, and that supporters be featured on television and in-stadium; both Fox and ESPN now regularly feature the unveiling of large-scale tifo on their national broadcasts.
There is a little of this in every successful soccer league, including England. It’s important. But it’s clear that single-entity was never meant as a safeguard MLS from instability in an unfriendly market, but a means to enact a permanent monopolistic command economy that will somehow, someday manifest as market growth, sort of the theoretical Marxist utopia everyone was waiting for after Lenin.
And in this command economy, MLS can control everything but the thing that matters most—being worth watching, an issue that still plagues the league today despite the so-called promise of young people perking up and taking interest (MLS’ television ratings continue to be utterly stagnant).
This isn’t going to work though. None of this is going to generate competitive TV numbers. The bottom line is at some point, the clubs will need greater autonomy. The ‘potential’ for growth we’re constantly told about can’t just refer to the league’s insatiable desire for more mid-range cities to pay exorbitant franchise fees in a league that may one day feature forty fucking teams. They can rearrange the deck chairs all they want, but you can’t astroturf a truly, organically compelling competition. At some point, you have to raise the stakes. At 25 years old, it’s more than time for MLS to figure out how beyond tinkering with TAM, adding more stadium wifi or making sure the colours on the team-sanctioned tifo really pop on the broadcast feed.