La galaxy MLS Cup winner showcased the league’s secret. Now, MLS  decide what’s next

In many ways, Saturday’s MLS Cup was about as good an advertisement as MLS could have asked for its league.

The game had young and in-prime stars, such as Joseph Paintsil, Gabriel Pec and Dejan Joveljic, that have been a focus of league spending in recent years; it had recognizable names with extensive European resumes in Marco Reus and Emil Forsberg; and it even had five players born in New York or New Jersey in the starting lineup for their hometown team as John Tolkin, Daniel Edelman, Peter Stroud and brothers Sean and Dylan Nealis took the field. The game also had two major media markets and two of the more recognizable brands in MLS: the LA Galaxy and the New York Red Bulls.

Played in front of a sold-out crowd at one of the first soccer-specific stadiums in the country, the match-up was entertaining, too, even without Galaxy star Riqui Puig on the field. In the end, the Galaxy lifted their record sixth trophy, resurrecting what was long the league’s most iconic brand.

MLS Cup final takeaways: LA Galaxy 2 New York Red Bulls 1 – No Puig, no problem as Vanney’s team win sixth MLS Cup

The showcase game left a distinct feeling of the league’s potential.

Next season will mark the 30th in MLS history. How far the league has come is remarkable. MLS has one of the most impressive and wealthy ownership groups across professional sports. Over the last three decades, their investment has built world-class stadiums and training facilities across the country

The infrastructure is there. The league feels primed for its next steps.

The question now is: where do MLS owners want to take it?

MLS commissioner Don Garber was asked Friday at his State of the League address, and in both the MLS Cup pregame show on Apple TV and halftime show on Fox, what big plans the league might have in store to grow its on-field product.

The questions were hardly surprising. North American soccer is in the middle of an unprecedented era, with Messi signing in Miami and the Copa America, Club World Cup and World Cup all being played on the continent. For the past 18 months, MLS stakeholders have talked about how the league is studying changes it might make to capitalize on the moment. Yet, asked specifically about changes to spending, Garber said Friday he didn’t “expect anything significant happening in the next couple of years.”

For three decades, MLS has dictated spending via various roster mechanisms. The idea has been to control costs and enforce certain league-wide initiatives to ensure competitive balance. Today, the rules are structured in such a way that teams rarely make decisions based on who is the best player. Instead, it’s who are the players that fit these narrow constructs.

If clubs could build rosters with the same ambition and freedom with which they’ve constructed facilities — take a budget and build it as best you can and try to one-up your competitor along the way — the story of MLS might start to change.

MLS Cup left a distinct feeling of the league’s potential partly because it hinted at how far teams might be able to go. The game showcased teams with “two distinct styles and two really distinct ways of building a roster, both of which, I think, are the blueprint for MLS,” Kuntz said.

The MLS rules undoubtedly helped the league get to this point. Over time, teams have forged identities in terms of how they want to build and where they want to invest. The job now is to trust those teams to do it to a higher degree.

But MLS must also convince a wider audience in the U.S. that it’s grown up, according to Garber.

“I do spend a lot of my time trying to explain domestically what Major League Soccer has done,” Garber said. “And that probably will change in time, maybe when there’s a different commissioner standing at the podium.”

The league’s reputation in the domestic sports landscape lags behind the reality of the progress it has made on almost every front. MLS has to find a way to close that perception gap.

To do so, the league should follow the Galaxy’s example. The idea should be to find the best possible players for the investment owners are making. Right now, MLS rules tell people more about how teams can’t spend. MLS Cup showed Saturday there are compelling stories right now about how teams are spending. Plenty of owners have indicated they’d be willing to do even more.

Altering the rules is as much about altering the narrative around the league as anything else.

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