MLS is trending

The MLS Superdraft was this morning, and I actually watched ESPN2's coverage. This is pretty big for me, considering less than a year ago I was strongly opposed to following the league at all. I got into football as an Arsenal fan (if you read this blog regularly, you probably know that already), and after watching Premier League and Champions League football, the game in the MLS looked like that of a U7 league. You don't often see stuff like this, or this, and definitely not this, in MLS. Basically I was spoiled by the awesome level of football in Europe and I didn't see any point in bothering with MLS.

I have since changed my mind. Sure, the football being played in MLS is, for the most part, awful. That's okay though, because if you watch it you have to do so in mind of the fact that as a football-playing nation, the United States is decades behind the rest of the world. In England, the Football League First Division formed in 1888, and "became" the Premier League in 1992. The MLS was formed in 1993 and first played in 1996. The United States didn't have a top-flight football league from 1984, when the NASL folded, to 1996. So I think we can be excused for having a sub-par league (which, by the way, is improving, but that's a conversation for another day).

The realization that I had was that my complaining about MLS being awful wasn't going to help it stop being awful. While most of the time I don't support bad products, the way to improve football in the United States is to help the game grow, and if fans of the game avoid the league that's never going to happen. So I'm in, MLS.

More stuff

Anyway, I watched the draft mainly because I was curious about where IU's Will Bruin would end up, and was hoping to see him drafted by one of the teams I "follow" (namely the Chicago Fire and Portland Timbers FC). In case you're wondering, he went to Houston Dynamo, which mildly upset me.

But I noticed something during the draft (I refuse to refer to it as SuperDraft, as that is a stupid name) that surprised me. I was on Twitter, keeping up with the various Fire and Timbers tweets, and I noticed the trending topics. They included #mlssuperdraft, Omar Salgado, and other related stuff. Four of the ten worldwide trending topics at one point were directly related to the MLS draft.

Now I know that's not a huge thing, but it's far more than I expected. I was pretty sure that I was the only person in the country and probably one of five in the world who cared even a little about the MLS draft, much less actually watched it. Evidently I was wrong. This will not, in one fell swoop, make football in America popular. But it seems to show that not only are people here interested in the game, but people here and around the world are actually at least briefly interested in our domestic league. And that can only help things.

Final thought: I occasionally have arguments with people over whether or not football will ever catch on as a major sport in the United States. My stance is that while it will likely never be as popular as the NFL (actually, almost definitely not), it can become a fully mainstream sport at least at the level of the NHL, and maybe higher. A lot of people disagree, and that's fair. Many of them will likely dismiss this as nothing, and that's fair too - I totally disagree, but I'd be loathe to put too much stock into Twitter trending topics, to be honest.

But watch this. It's from a Timbers match last year, when they were still in the second tier of American football. When we have lower level teams with this kind of support, I have a lot of faith in the possibilities of American football growth.



This game can thrive here; whether it will or not is another question.