The news came out
today that Liga MX and MLS are interested in
growing their partnership that started last year with the Campeones Cup
and continued this year with the Leagues Cup. You can read the proposal
for yourself for all of what has been discussed, but I just wanted to do
a thought dump on the whole idea here.
Like many Liga MX (and MLS) fans I’m very reluctant to the idea of a
combined Super League, but I don’t necessarily think all the ideas here
are bad. However after spending much of today drawing up plans on how
this could work their was one consistent problem: the schedule.
The league schedules create innumerable problems that I’m not sure how
to fix. The Leagues Cup expanding to 32 and being a home-and-away
tournament sounds cool, but where exactly are we getting room for 10
extra matches from? You can cut out the Copa MX and leave the US Open
Cup for the minor league teams, but this seems somewhat unlikely.
Interleague play during the regular season is a cool idea, too. Let’s
say every Liga MX team gets 3 regular season matches per tournament
against MLS competition. It would be pretty neat, but again, where do we
put these games? The Liga MX schedule is about to balloon to 19 games
per season, meaning interleague play would push it over 20 or some
Mexican teams would not meet every season, which I don’t like at all.
With the addition of the lengthy Leagues Cup, too, you have to wonder
when exactly these games could be played. You simply can’t have a 22
game regular season (44 games total) plus two sets of playoffs, 8 CCL
matches, and 10 Leagues Cup matches, especially with how intense the
travel between the two countries would be. The top teams would be
overwhelmed and would end up fielding B teams in the Leagues Cup,
defeating the whole purpose.
The Campeones Cup has the potential to be a really dope showcase event
as the sort of “interleague champion” though of course both it and the
Leagues Cup pale in comparison to the CCL, but again we must ask: When?
The current timing makes no sense, because Atlanta and América aren’t
even the same teams that won their titles way back in 2018. I also think
that while Liga MX teams are likely to take the game serious, the
qualification route is the Campeon de Campeones, which teams do not
always take seriously.
I think the most logical way to do this would be to do it between the
Apertura champion and MLS champion in December, right after the seasons
conclude as a sort of end of the year party. But this raises the
question of weather. What if Chicago is representing MLS? Well, then a
two-legged series is out of the question I suppose. I think this game
could become a neutral site match that rotates between Mexico and the
Southern US (or indoor stadiums in the North). This combined with the
timing of it being between fresh champions could give the game a real
Super Bowl feel to it, and makes it much more epic than being on a
random August Wednesday.
Obviously another issue with these proposals is that they are keeping
Liga MX out of the Copa Libertadores for the foreseeable future, which
fans are not happy about. I can’t blame them; even if the Leagues Cup
flourishes its hard to imagine it ever being as big as South America’s
premier competition.
In all, I’m worried about the plausibility of many aspects of the
MLS/Liga MX relationship, but I don’t think they’re inherently bad.
Seriously though, put the Campeones Cup at the Rose Bowl right after the
two champions are crowned. It would be super fire. A 32 team single
legged random draw Leagues Cup that replaces Copa MX/USOC would also be
cool.
