it's such a drag that you guys can't be part of UEFA. i know you've got this CONCACAF pride thing going on for the WC, but it really seems like some awful purgatory for a country whose football fans are so european leaning.
i just can't see how MLS is going to grow either. i mean, despite the EPL's reputation, we still bleed a lot of our best players to la liga. how the hell is MLS supposed to hold on to any talent that comes through?
I'll reiterate what I said about soccer's overall popularity, the development of American players, and the success of Major League Soccer being three different goals.
It's simpler for fans in England, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Following your domestic league lets you watch top-level soccer, support a local team and attend games, and see the best players from your country. For an American to get the full experience, you could go to MLS games, watch EPL and CL broadcasts on Saturday mornings, and then use the internet to keep tabs on American players in the Bundesliga or elsewhere. It's a weirdly fractured, involved way to follow a sport, and it has to be an obstacle to growing a wider fanbase or attracting more casual followers.
That said, I'm not super worried. The sport is way more popular than it was 10, 15, 20 years ago and MLS certainly has a higher quality of play. I don't expect it to reach parity with the big European leagues in the forseeable future, but I think that's okay. It needs to keep the level of play high enough that people will be interested even with EPL games being so available, and to serve as a developmental platform. France, Portugal, the Netherlands, etc. never see their best players stick around in the domestic leagues, but you can trust the youth systems at places like Porto and Ajax to give top-level coaching to prospects.
The US obviously has a long, long way to go before it's a threat to the big European and South American powers, but as someone who could name most of DC United's lineup from the inaugural year of MLS, this is easily the healthiest soccer has been in the US in my lifetime.
