When Barça arrived in the United States for the pre-season tour in 2006, Carlos Naval, the team’s delegate, advised the MLS organizers that one of the points they needed to improve was the facilities. Sixteen years later, sixteen new clubs have been created, the last of them Charlotte FC, and fifteen new stadiums that have cost 5,000 million euros. Since 2015, 2,000 million have been invested in footballers. “MLS is no longer a promise, it is a viable reality,” says its executive director, Nelson Rodríguez, from the competition’s headquarters on Fifth Avenue.
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At the business level, “it’s going from strength to strength”, explains the sports director of the competition, the Spaniard Alfonso Mondelo, whose idea is “to be at the level of the best leagues in the world. The reality is that we still have years to go, but that is the goal”. For this, the MLS spares no effort and has a plan: “The most important thing now is football growth, for that the transfer policy was changed so that players arrive who are in the best moment of their careers or young people who can develop here”. One of the key points in the roadmap is to produce national players: “When we arrived there were no quarries, now all the teams have grassroots football”. Of course, Mondelo remembers that “we are not even close to where we want to be”.
The MLS, founded in 1993, started in 1995, taking advantage of the push for soccer after the World Cup in the United States. “The 94 was the takeoff and the 2026 World Cup can be the definitive step for the world to see how football is here at the level of facilities, fans…”.
At an economic level, all clubs have the same salary limit, although they have the possibility of bringing in three franchise players, of whose salary only a small part counts against that limit and the rest is paid by the club owners or sponsors. That would be the case of Messi: “Players with that worldwide projection are very important. There was a before and after David Beckham.” But they don’t rule out being able to bet on names like Pedri either: “Soccer players who are on their way to becoming world stars would also be extremely important for the MLS.”