I agree, except when they play Newcastle, who are less far along in their sportswashing project and whose owners are even worse. The fact that PSG are so incompetently run is definitely a good thing; Newcastle’s ownership appearing to be good at this an extreme disappointment.

Every Newcastle win makes the world a sadder, more dangerous place.

They (and the other major Continental leagues) need to take a page out of the English playbook and spread out the TV money across the league, instead of letting Barca and Real take their enormous share.

English dominance in the sport right now is built on them having a strong base of support well down the pyramid, and lucrative rewards beyond that for simply existing in the Premier League. Continental pyramids have the same theoretical structure, but with PSG, Bayern, etc hoovering up all the attention and getting payouts to match, their competition is left in the dust and continues to decline. By contrast, English clubs get substantial revenue sharing assistance, and invest it into making their teams credible competitors domestically and in Europe.

To oversimplify further, top English teams cede a much larger percentage of the revenue “they” earn to their inter-league competition, and are rewarded with a high quality and ultimately even more lucrative final product. Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, etc do far less revenue sharing, and the top teams gorge themselves on lacklustre competition as their leagues slowly fall further and further.

Everybody pumped for Qatar vs Saudi Arabia?

Because I know I’m not, at all. May they both manage a maximally embarasing flop.

Having said that, I think MLS would be far more attractive to fans if the money paid for designated players was spread out and used to increase the overall wages for the whole team.

I want to agree with this (and there’s no question that it would produce better teams that might actually compete with the best of the Mexican league, etc), but the situation with Messi is going to be a powerful indicator of how much influence a perfect designated player situation can have on the league. It may be that Messi really does draw huge numbers of people, some of whom will become real fans, or it may be that the Messi crowds see all the mediocrity around him and decide to stick with whatever they were watching before.

The other position I would take with this is that the owners of MLS/USL should be thinking long term. Their target fanbase is people born in the last 10-15 years or earlier, who very likely play soccer themselves at some level, and whose families are likely to bring them to games. Keep the tickets relatively cheap (which they have done), keep the games at reasonable times (it’s a mix) and make sure as many teams as possible have something interesting to play for, for as much of the season as possible. Playoffs more or less mirror the race for Europe in the EPL, etc (although devaluing the team which tops the table in the regular season becomes a problem), but promotion/relegation add real stakes to the bottom of the table, and substantially more excitement to the top of lower leagues.

Or in other words, they should try to do the opposite of all the blatantly consumer-unfriendly things that teams in other American sports routinely do. They are selling an alternative product to what most Americans currently care about, with hopes of becoming a big thing with future generations. Lean into that.

And there’s a pretty good chance MLS never will measure up to the top european leagues. They have a ton of competition for national sports interest with the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL; getting on the same level as the lower two of those four would be an extraordinary accomplishment. But that’s okay, as long as they can develop enough local interest that they come to games, buy shirts, and keep money flowing that way. Any owner who jumped in hoping to cash out a multibillion dollar franchise some day will be disappointed, but I really do not care.

This after Everton (stupidly) balked at £8M for him. That gave me hope that my Brentford would be in on this, but seeing what he ultimately went for I am merely ambivalent on missing out.

Good for Gyökeres, he’s going to dominate Portugal.

As for the oligarchs deciding a rising tide lifts all boats… the tide lifts their boats. That’s all they care about. It’s a cartel where they don’t compete against each-other. Instead they collude against the players and the fans so that their cartel can bring in the most money.

This happening in all American sports leagues is a big part of what has driven me to fallowing european soccer almost exclusively (with the exception of my local USL2 and baseball Futures League clubs, of course). Sports teams shouldn’t be investment vehicles, they should be vanity projects for these disgustingly rich people to spend money on, money that would otherwise be hoarded away. There is no reason why we should give a damn about “protecting their investment”, we should be forcing them to fight each other for safety, promotion, and silverware. Same as the european clubs.

We’re here for the players. I don’t watch MLS because those players mostly suck, because MLS does not provide salaries competitive with european clubs, because they are run by people who are used to simply having a cartel of the best players in insert-sport-here and totally unaccustomed to genuine competition from comparable or better players (funded by comparably deep pockets) in other leagues abroad. This kind of genuine competition for top players is sorely needed in all sports, especially baseball, but soccer seems to be the only (semi-)major sport in the US where it exists at all. Relegation is the mechanism by which intra-league competition is enforced, and that competition is necessary to keep these owners from collectively investing the absolute minimum and scraping as much profit off the top as they can get.