What are your expectations for the U.S. men’s national team, who are returning to their first World Cup since 2014 after failing to qualify for the 2018 World Cup in Russia?
It’s going to be really interesting to see how people react to this team because I sense and maybe I fear that there is this emerging tendency here to let them off the hook because they are so young. I actually think the opposite. This is a group that has been given everything from an early age. They have taken pathways that have never existed before. For example, for me to play in Europe, I had to star in a World Cup. We have players now that don’t even play a single game in MLS and are getting picked off and given opportunities here. I don’t begrudge them at all. It actually warms the cockles of my redheaded heart to see that. This is progress. This is what I want.
But with all of these new opportunities, resources and just incredible assets that they have at their disposal comes higher expectations. We should expect this U.S. team to get out of this group. This U.S. team, I think, is better than Wales, and it’s better than Iran. You take your chances against England, and certainly we have had a history of success. We will go in there with a belief that anything can happen, but it’s still an elite team in England. Does it mean we can’t lose to Iran or Wales? Nope.
It would be a failure not to get out of the group, and it should be framed as such because our expectations, even without qualifying [in 2018], which I do think was an anomaly and an aberration there, should be reflective of how far we have come.
MLS still lags behind the Big Four sports leagues in popularity. What can the league do to become a bigger part of the national consciousness?
Look, if I had the answer to that I'd be a rich, rich man because that is an evergreen type of question, and I don’t think there’s a simple “do one thing.” The migration that happened to England was due to the European community opening up, the Bosman ruling. All of these players didn’t go to England because of the weather and the food, OK?
They went there because of the money and some really strategic and smart marketing on the English Premier League’s part, both in terms of how they marketed the league both domestically and internationally, and the influx of some very, very rich people and entities, which made it a must-see destination. That same type of migration can happen someplace else. It’s going to be hard to wrestle it out of the hands of England at this point.
However, the advantage that North America has — particularly the United States — is people want to go there. They want to live there. If you can afford them the lifestyle, obviously the paycheck, all of the things that come with that and they don’t lose any credibility — I’m talking about the players — then not only does it change the perception of players but also the internal perception changes.
If you're told constantly that England is the best league, that's what you want. You have to change that narrative. A lot of that comes with spending more money and doing as many things as you possibly can to be relevant. It's a very different type of landscape with our history compared with the foothold that so many other leagues have, some of which have a 100-year head start.
The reality is this is a slog. Sometimes we kick ourselves for what we haven’t done, but we also have to pat ourselves on the back for how far we’ve come in a relatively short period of time when it comes to Major League Soccer.
You put it up against any league or any sport out there in terms of the evolution and the progress that it’s made, it has been very, very fast. It doesn't mean that there aren’t problems, it doesn't mean that you stop now, but it’s been pretty impressive. If you extrapolate that out for the next 27 years and where it will be, good times are ahead.
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