The awakening of a sleeping giant.

The MLS got off to a rough start following its debut season in 1996, bleeding money in its early years as it struggled to attract fans in a North American sports market dominated by American football, basketball and baseball.

But after its initial growing pains, it began to find its audience with attendances averaging more than 22,000 fans per game last season, a league record.

Major League Soccer’s average attendance of 21,358 from 2013–18 ranks №8 in the world, trailing Ligue 1 in France (21,556) and Italy’s Serie A (22,967), according to a study conducted by the CIES Football Observatory. Atlanta United, which debuted as an MLS expansion team in 2017, boasts the 10th-best average attendance of 51,547 between 2013–18. The 2018 MLS Cup winners and league’s most valuable club ($330 million) were featured among global giants including Manchester United, Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.

For many years MLS was known for being a “superstar graveyard”, the place where the likes of David Beckham and Thierry Henry went to slowly fade into the soccer horizon, not much more was going on of interest other than that. The lack of strategy was real and there was no clear identity to compete with other leagues, grow and cater to a sustainable audience.

Until a few years ago it was quite common to see MLS games played in stadiums with NFL hash marks on the pitch, semi-empty crowds and stadiums seemingly too big and not appropriate for soccer crowds. All this was very off putting for the casual fan trying to get into the MLS, everything looked very unprofessional and the sense that the sport didn’t belong in the US was very real. You couldn’t really blame anyone that decided to just not care about the MLS and not take it seriously.

Slowly this changed through the years — NFL football hash marks started to disappear, new stadiums were built, and the clubs began to pay more attention to their image, focusing on the experience, creating traditions and all together focusing on making the in stadium experience much more cooler, family friendly. In 2019 going to an MLS game is a great experience, the league knows it and makes their whole product about it, and they mean it.
In 2019 you still have the late career european stars, but the league is no longer about them, the franchises/clubs are no longer focused entirely on them, today the teams know they need to have an identity behind, a fan base, a city. And that’s why creating culture is much more than just bringing an overseas lone star, the franchises need to survive without the stars, in fact they need to thrive.

For so many years, the biggest problem with the MLS was the lack of culture and identity, but if you think about it those struggles were entirely normal, soccer is the most popular sport worldwide but this wasn’t and isn’t the case in the US — Football, Baseball and Basketball still run deep with strong tradition and roots, for years and years, professional soccer in the US just wasn’t an option, all the best athletes ended up playing other sports, despite having played soccer at some stage of their development. Naturally the growth soccer has come very slowly, but surely.

Now soccer is an option, MLS has been making sure that they are able to follow up on the high number of youth practitioners, ensuring they have an appealing model to keep them engaged in the sport, incentivizing franchises to develop their own academies to funnel the talent to the MLS.

Meanwhile the league is set to keep expanding in the coming years with seven soccer-specific stadium projects planned, giving the league legitimacy on a level Garber, the MLS commissioner, never dreamed of. New stadiums are currently planned in Miami, Cincinnati, Columbus, Austin, Nashville, Sacramento and St. Louis.

United States is now experiencing the maturation of soccer, the league finally knows their audience, their identity and who they want to become. We’re now looking at an MLS league that truly knows their product and how to make it better.

Step by step, the MLS is becoming a much more robust product, growing in popularity but also in terms of quality of the product.