In many ways, Saturday’s MLS Cup was about as good an advertisement as MLS could have asked for its league.
The game had young and in-prime stars, such as Joseph Paintsil, Gabriel Pec and Dejan Joveljic, that have been a focus of league spending in recent years; it had recognizable names with extensive European resumes in Marco Reus and Emil Forsberg; and it even had five players born in New York or New Jersey in the starting lineup for their hometown team as John Tolkin, Daniel Edelman, Peter Stroud and brothers Sean and Dylan Nealis took the field. The game also had two major media markets and two of the more recognizable brands in MLS: the LA Galaxy and the New York Red Bulls.
Played in front of a sold-out crowd at one of the first soccer-specific stadiums in the country, the match-up was entertaining, too, even without Galaxy star Riqui Puig on the field. In the end, the Galaxy lifted their record sixth trophy, resurrecting what was long the league’s most iconic brand.
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The showcase game left a distinct feeling of the league’s potential.
Next season will mark the 30th in MLS history. How far the league has come is remarkable. MLS has one of the most impressive and wealthy ownership groups across professional sports. Over the last three decades, their investment has built world-class stadiums and training facilities across the country.
The infrastructure is there. The league feels primed for its next steps.
The question now is: where do MLS owners want to take it?
LA Galaxy general manager Will Kuntz had less than half an hour to catch his breath and grab a quick shower to rinse off the Champagne and Michelob Ultra from the locker room celebrations before heading to the team party.
Four hours prior, the final whistle sounded on the Galaxy’s MLS Cup win. It was a remarkable turnaround from when the 40-year-old took over the front office last December.
Riqui Puig and Los Angeles Galaxy celebrates following their MLS Cup Final win. (Shaun Clark / Getty Images)
The Galaxy finished near the bottom of the MLS table in 2023, just another down year in a decade-long slump. The club was perpetually chasing the success of a dynasty built on the back of David Beckham, Landon Donovan and Robbie Keane. Too often, the pieces didn’t fit together. The Galaxy floundered. They missed the playoffs in five of the previous seven seasons.
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When Kuntz thought back to his first days in charge, the reset button started with a simple idea. The Galaxy had latched on too much to the celebrity aspect of their winning history and not enough on that other part.
“It was just trying to say, ‘Hey guys, let’s just win,’” Kuntz said over the phone from his hotel room Saturday night, his voice a touch raspy from the celebrations. “Let’s trust our fans that they don’t need to know who anybody is when they show up. If we have guys who are sexy, dynamic, competitive and win games, everything else will take care of itself. Let’s free ourselves of that burdensome yoke of trying to repeat what is not repeatable. Let’s just go out and find some good young ballers and trust that if we get the right guys, the city will love them and our fans will love them.”
Owner of Los Angeles Galaxy Philip Anschutz and MLS Commissioner Don Garber prior the 2024 MLS Cup Final. (Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images)
The vision to remake the Galaxy required real investment. Galaxy owner Philip Anschutz, the MLS Cup’s namesake who was on hand Saturday to make a speech after the Galaxy’s win, put down serious cash, as he has done time and time again across three decades of MLS. The Galaxy spent around $20million (£15.7m) in transfer fees to buy Paintsil and Pec. They spent millions more on a new contract for Puig, the star midfielder who left Barcelona at 22 years old to sign for the Galaxy.
That ambition earned a sixth MLS Cup trophy.
The lesson from the club’s turnaround is not just that they spent big money. At a time when the success of Lionel Messi and Inter Miami has some wondering if more big-name stars are an answer for MLS’ growth, the Galaxy’s vision was to push aside concerns about celebrity and just find the best players they could with the budget Anschutz supplied.
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MLS commissioner Don Garber was asked Friday at his State of the League address, and in both the MLS Cup pregame show on Apple TV and halftime show on Fox, what big plans the league might have in store to grow its on-field product.
The questions were hardly surprising. North American soccer is in the middle of an unprecedented era, with Messi signing in Miami and the Copa America, Club World Cup and World Cup all being played on the continent. For the past 18 months, MLS stakeholders have talked about how the league is studying changes it might make to capitalize on the moment. Yet, asked specifically about changes to spending, Garber said Friday he didn’t “expect anything significant happening in the next couple of years.”
For three decades, MLS has dictated spending via various roster mechanisms. The idea has been to control costs and enforce certain league-wide initiatives to ensure competitive balance. Today, the rules are structured in such a way that teams rarely make decisions based on who is the best player. Instead, it’s who are the players that fit these narrow constructs.
If clubs could build rosters with the same ambition and freedom with which they’ve constructed facilities — take a budget and build it as best you can and try to one-up your competitor along the way — the story of MLS might start to change.
MLS Cup left a distinct feeling of the league’s potential partly because it hinted at how far teams might be able to go. The game showcased teams with “two distinct styles and two really distinct ways of building a roster, both of which, I think, are the blueprint for MLS,” Kuntz said.
LA Galaxy beat the New York Red Bulls 2-1 in the MLS Cup Final. (Shaun Clark / Getty Images)
“The Red Bulls had what, four or five homegrown New York-New Jersey kids, and those guys gave us the fight of their life and took out Columbus and took out NYCFC,” Kuntz said. “I mean, those guys have zero fear. They are relentless. They are confident. They are cocky. They’re a bunch of f***ing Jersey kids, right? You want to talk about development and commitment to it and that’s from (Red Bulls president and general manager) Marc de Grandpré all the way down. That’s how you do it.”
The MLS rules undoubtedly helped the league get to this point. Over time, teams have forged identities in terms of how they want to build and where they want to invest. The job now is to trust those teams to do it to a higher degree.
But MLS must also convince a wider audience in the U.S. that it’s grown up, according to Garber.
“I do spend a lot of my time trying to explain domestically what Major League Soccer has done,” Garber said. “And that probably will change in time, maybe when there’s a different commissioner standing at the podium.”
The league’s reputation in the domestic sports landscape lags behind the reality of the progress it has made on almost every front. MLS has to find a way to close that perception gap.
To do so, the league should follow the Galaxy’s example. The idea should be to find the best possible players for the investment owners are making. Right now, MLS rules tell people more about how teams can’t spend. MLS Cup showed Saturday there are compelling stories right now about how teams are spending. Plenty of owners have indicated they’d be willing to do even more.
Altering the rules is as much about altering the narrative around the league as anything else.
Will Kuntz joined the LA Galaxy in April 2023. (Robert Mora / LA Galaxy) — www.LAGalaxy.com —
A decade ago, Kuntz left the New York Yankees, where he was on a path to be an MLB general manager, to join MLS. Kuntz, who ironically was a Red Bulls season ticket holder, believed in where the sport and the league were going.
“I knew that if I didn’t jump, then I’d always be looking back over my shoulder,” Kuntz said. “I think about what I would have thought if I was still working in baseball and I saw Atlanta United come online with 70,000 people at their games, and LAFC come online with their ownership group, and with what all these new franchises have done. I’d be kicking myself.”
On Saturday night, Kuntz said he still felt the same way he did 10 years ago when he took that leap. He believes in MLS and what it can be.
“Everything is here,” Kuntz said. “We have more than we need already. We can definitely make better use of it, but I’m incredibly bullish on the future of this league.”
Saturday’s MLS Cup showed so much of that potential. But, like the Galaxy, MLS needs to find a singular vision and push forward with it to reach the next level.
The reward could be just as fruitful.
(Top photo: Shaun Clark / Getty Images)
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