It Could Get A Bit Messi In Here - The Football Thread.

Jan said:
I don´t know exactly how their ranking goes. but they are ranking them 14th in the world between the belgish and turkish leagues
www.globalfootballrankings.com

Football League Rankings

Football / Soccer League Rankings is a list of professional football leagues in the world and their strength Pretty simple! It takes the rankings of all clubs from FiveThirtyEight, groups them into what league they belong too, and calculates the average SPI (Soccer Power Index) and the standard...
www.globalfootballrankings.com www.globalfootballrankings.com
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That’s funny, I never knew such a ranking existed but off the cuff I was going to say the MLS is probably about as good as the Belgian league.

@Joe Mac i don’t think that’s too high for the MLS. They get a fair amount of late-career greats, which raises the quality somewhat. The thing that causes it to lag behind something like the Brazilian league is the fact that you don’t get many quality up-and-coming prospects in the MLS.
 
bettim84 said:
That’s funny, I never knew such a ranking existed but off the cuff I was going to say the MLS is probably about as good as the Belgian league.

@Joe Mac i don’t think that’s too high for the MLS. They get a fair amount of late-career greats, which raises the quality somewhat. The thing that causes it to lag behind something like the Brazilian league is the fact that you don’t get many quality up-and-coming prospects in the MLS.
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It’s just having seen a few games recently I don’t think the quality is all that. The matches are exciting to my eye more due to a lack of quality than a surplus of it. Maybe I’m spoiled by Premier League and Champions League but quality wise the matches don’t strike me as being any better than the better teams in the League of Ireland even. It does have bigger crowds and more atmosphere to it though.
 
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Joe Mac said:
It’s just having seen a few games recently I don’t think the quality is all that. The matches are exciting to my eye more due to a lack of quality than a surplus of it. Maybe I’m spoiled by Premier League and Champions League but quality wise the matches don’t strike me as being any better than the better teams in the League of Ireland even. It does have bigger crowds and more atmosphere to it though.
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It’s definitely better than League of Ireland. Probably worse than Belgium, maybe around League One level in the UK. But I do think MLS teams would struggle against League One teams since MLS is kind of it’s own thing. It’s not as physical and much more technical. It reminds me of Bundesliga in how open ended and swashbuckling it is but with far, far, far less quality.
 
wokeupnew said:
It’s definitely better than League of Ireland. Probably worse than Belgium, maybe around League One level in the UK. But I do think MLS teams would struggle against League One teams since MLS is kind of it’s own thing. It’s not as physical and much more technical. It reminds me of Bundesliga in how open ended and swashbuckling it is but with far, far, far less quality.
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Better League of Ireland is top level League One/Lower Championship. The best team has recently got to the group stages of the Europa League and they compete but can’t get though. The players tend to go from there to mid SPL/lower Championship. I think that’s the MLS level from what I’ve seen of it with a sprinkling of aging stars that obviously wouldn’t go to Ireland lol. Granted when you pas the top 3 in LOI the quality drops off substantially.

I still can’t take the franchise system and lack of promotion/relegation seriously either but maybe that’s more of a cultural thing!
 
Joe Mac said:
Better League of Ireland is top level League One/Lower Championship. They get to the group stages of the Europa League and compete but can’t get though. The players tend to go from there to mid SPL/lower Championship. I think that’s the MLS level from what I’ve seen of it with a sprinkling of aging stars that obviously wouldn’t go to Ireland lol. Granted when you pas the top 3 in LOI the quality drops off substantially.

I still can’t take the franchise system and lack of promotion/relegation seriously either but maybe that’s more of a cultural thing!
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Maybe I was unfair to MLS because a few times they have played some bigger clubs, albeit with an All-Star team and versus larger clubs in pre-season still getting their form.

Overall they’ve fared well. But that’s not really the best indicator of quality. I don’t think MLS is that bad but it’s not terrible either.

MLS All-Star Game - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org
 
wokeupnew said:
Maybe I was unfair to MLS because a few times they have played some bigger clubs, albeit with an All-Star team and versus larger clubs in pre-season still getting their form.

Overall they’ve fared well. But that’s not really the best indicator of quality. I don’t think MLS is that bad but it’s not terrible either.

MLS All-Star Game - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org
Click to expand...

I mean you and I both know that European teams use those tours and that game as fitness and commercial exercises. It’s all about minutes in the legs on the pitch and generating money off it. Results even between the European teams out there aren’t generally indicative of the competitive form in the season to come. It was the same and the results were broadly similar when they used to use Ireland and Scandinavia for their pre season tours pre-2000, they’ve just dropped those fans now for the more lucrative markets in the US, Far East and down under.

It also doesn’t cost them those fans because relative proximity means that televised games are at the same time as the home market and the more hardcore can attend competitive matches in England much easier.
 
Jan said:
I don´t know exactly how their ranking goes. but they are ranking them 14th in the world between the belgish and turkish leagues
www.globalfootballrankings.com

Football League Rankings

Football / Soccer League Rankings is a list of professional football leagues in the world and their strength Pretty simple! It takes the rankings of all clubs from FiveThirtyEight, groups them into what league they belong too, and calculates the average SPI (Soccer Power Index) and the standard...
www.globalfootballrankings.com www.globalfootballrankings.com

Edit : different sites rank differently, but they seem to all have mls between 10th and 15th place worldwide
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Joe Mac said:
That seems awfully high to me. It’s better than it was but having watched a few games recently the standard really isn’t that high!
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I haven't watched any MLS, but surprised to see MLS above SPL in that ranking
 
bettim84 said:
That’s funny, I never knew such a ranking existed but off the cuff I was going to say the MLS is probably about as good as the Belgian league.

@Joe Mac i don’t think that’s too high for the MLS. They get a fair amount of late-career greats, which raises the quality somewhat. The thing that causes it to lag behind something like the Brazilian league is the fact that you don’t get many quality up-and-coming prospects in the MLS.
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The main reason we don’t have up and coming talent is because we don’t have an academy system where kids are in feeder clubs to the larger commercial club. We have a lot of elite soccer clubs but they don’t have any real standardization of training among clubs. There is no clear feeder system which means that most of our talent then goes to college teams. This means that they split their time between school and sports, unless they can’t keep up with the school and they drop out. If there was a better system these people would just go to a semi pro or pro team because these teams would have been training them from the start.
 
nolalady said:
The main reason we don’t have up and coming talent is because we don’t have an academy system where kids are in feeder clubs to the larger commercial club. We have a lot of elite soccer clubs but they don’t have any real standardization of training among clubs. There is no clear feeder system which means that most of our talent then goes to college teams. This means that they split their time between school and sports, unless they can’t keep up with the school and they drop out. If there was a better system these people would just go to a semi pro or pro team because these teams would have been training them from the start.
Click to expand...

There are pluses and minuses to the college/draft system v club academy system. I think one is just culturally yours across sport and the other is more the way we have traditionally done it. Kinda it, franchises and no promotion/relegation are the things that make American sport seem kinda mad to us on the outside lol!
 
This is going to be interesting
euro-playoff-draw-with-hosts-2022-fifa-world-cup-qatar_1bch38t5cjx581seq6ob5omzk0.jpeg
 
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