While MLB and the MLBPA remain at a standstill, MLS will return to the pitch July 8, with the MLS is Back Tournament. The 54-match tournament will take place at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Walt Disney World in Orlando and will conclude Aug. 11. It will serve as the lead-up to the MLS regular season, which has been on hiatus since March 12 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Might there be an opportunity for MLS to gain some eyeballs if baseball doesn’t return in 2020?
“In this landscape, it’s a nice, tight, compact tournament where you can get in there,” Caught Offside podcast host JJ Devaney said on The DA Show. “Everybody loves the World Cup format. I think it’s bite-sized MLS. I think the question I would pose to MLS is, ‘Okay, you’re having this tournament. What if it’s a great success? Then you’re going to go back into regular-season play in empty stadiums in your home markets?’ . . . The MLS tournament final winner, where do they rank that trophy when you’re going to go back, play a regular season and then have an MLS Cup final? I don’t know how that’s going to work. . . . But just talking about the MLS tournament itself, I think it’s a really good idea, and it might help the casual fan quickly – over a short period of time – get [accustomed] with the league and the players and see the fun side of it.”
As Devaney explained, soccer fans are very much looking forward to the MLS is Back Tournament. Whether baseball fans tune in, however, remains to be seen.
“The soccer fan in the United States is probably already really locked into this,” he said. “They have the broad palette. They don’t just watch MLS; they’ll watch the different leagues. . . . I’m not sure how baseball [factors] into that because I think there would be a lot of baseball fans who are already soccer fans. It’s part of their palette of sports that they watch. The sports are so different. The hardcore baseball fan is not going to become a soccer fan just because it’s there and baseball isn’t there. I just can’t see it. The rhythms, the flow of the game are so different. But could they start taking an interest? Sure.”
While MLS has struggled to gain consistent traction in the United States, soccer as a whole is doing quite well.
“We talk about baseball being on its knees, but baseball over the last two or three years has seen really good TV numbers – whereas, for example, MLS is still struggling to get regular-season eyeballs on the game,” Devaney said. “I don’t know how this is going to work. I don’t see baseball suffering that much, except it’s suffering because it’s doing this. I think soccer has been eating away at the major American sports as a whole – not just baseball – for the past 10 years for a variety of reasons.”
Safety issues in football. Pace-of-play issues in baseball. The list goes on.
“I love baseball, but I love it as a casual pursuit,” Devaney said. “But I think soccer has been making inroads in all the sports, in all the American sports, for quite some time now. I think soccer has taken a real stronghold in American culture and in the psyche of the American fan.”