When the UEFA Champions League semi-finals begin at the end of the month, no Premier League team will participate for the first time since 2020.
There will also be no English representatives in the Europa League semi-finals, marking the first time since the 2014-15 season that the PL has not seen at least one club reach the semi-finals of one or the other of the two best European tournaments.
And when considering the profile of clubs that have failed this season, there is one lesson Major League Soccer teams should learn about their own repeated failures in Concacaf continental play: that many of these English teams were playing at this level of competition. for the first time in a long time.
Consider the four teams that have reached the Champions League: among them, only Manchester City had participated in the tournament in the previous four seasons. Manchester United’s last appearance was in the 2018-19 edition, Arsenal hadn’t reached UCL level since 2008-09 and Newcastle United hadn’t reached Europe’s top club tournament since 2002- 2003.
At Europa League level, Brighton and Hove Albion were participating in their first ever continental tournament in the club’s history.
That’s an unusual number of teams moving up in class in a single season. And part of the reason it’s unusual is that Champions League and Europa League representatives are determined primarily via rankings. (Although the FA Cup offers a place in the Europa League, the winner has often already qualified for Europe via their league ranking, in which case the ranking is used to decide the next Europa League entrant.)
Quality control
In contrast, of the nine teams that competed under the MLS banner in this season’s Champions Cup, three were competing in their first ever continental competition. Another – the Houston Dynamo – emerged in 2019 but had finished no better than 17th in the Supporters’ Shield standings over the past five seasons.
And considering these characteristics, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that only one of these nine players reached the semi-finals of the Concacaf Champions Cup, with the Columbus Crew set to take on CF Monterrey in a back-and-forth series that begins Wednesday.
Yet the MLS world has catastrophized this year’s performances in continental competitions and is generally coming to the conclusion that the only way to solve the problem is to encourage much greater and less restrained spending on squads.
This would certainly help MLS teams compete with the top clubs in Liga MX. But so would a system in which teams that perform above average year after year are more likely to win repeat trips to continental competitions, as is typically the case in the English Premier League and in other major European divisions.
It is quite well documented that experience plays a major role in decisions at the continental level. There are several reasons for this. To begin with, the fundamental nature of continental competition is so different from that of a championship. Additionally, there are only a limited number of additions a team can make to their squad during each individual season to make their squad better suited to continental play.
It’s no coincidence that the Seattle Sounders’ 2022 Concacaf triumph came in their seventh appearance in the competition. And it’s this repeated exposure that has allowed the Sounders to bolster their roster in a way that other teams often don’t, spending big on the international market to sign one of the best defensive midfielders in the league, Joao Paulo, and one of its best aerial defenders. to Yeimar Gomes Andrade.
Better days ahead?
The good news is that the expanded CCC format that was adopted in 2024 should ultimately allow more top MLS teams to gain repeat continental experience. Of the six guaranteed spots for MLS teams, four are tied to the MLS regular season standings: each regular season conference champion, plus the next two top regular season runners-up. That’s a better ratio than when previously only one or two of the league’s four automatic spots were based on regular season standings.
But MLS can still do certain things to improve the quality of its continental entrants. To begin, it would be necessary to work with Liga MX to reconsider the format of the Leagues Cup, which is contested by all MLS and Liga MX teams, decides on three tournament bids.
Last season, all three bids were won by MLS teams. But the tournament was played entirely in MLS stadiums, meaning the competition was relatively meaningless in terms of gaining experience of what it’s like to play in a continental competition on the road. It would not be difficult to share the burden of organizing matches between the two countries, although it would likely reduce the bottom lines of MLS and Concacaf.
The league could also consider reformatting the MLS Cup playoffs so that the end of the regular season has much more importance in terms of respecting the possibility of winning the MLS Cup. The current format, with its best-of-three first-round series, arguably makes the finishing order of the regular season slightly more important than in the previous single-elimination format used by the league from 2019 to 2022. But the series in best of three are also vulnerable. to teams that perform at a mediocre level for the first two-thirds of the season, then add an unusual amount of talent and depth during the secondary summer transfer window.