MLS fandom can be a lonely pursuit, certainly when such interest is held from thousands of miles away. Scotland might be a soccer hotbed, but its fervour for the sport doesn’t quite stretch as far as North America. If soccer had an underground scene, MLS would be a part of it in Scotland.
So I might not have to rely on homemade fanzines and long-range radio broadcasts to satisfy my yearning for Stateside soccer — as any Scot following the heady days of the NASL would have — but even in the Internet age following MLS is something of an ostracised pastime.
For starters, MLS’s spider’s web of a TV contract makes watching games live as they happen challenging, with the search for that one stream without a popup for “hot girls in my area” a tedious pre-match routine. Even when BT Sport — the MLS rights-holders in the UK — do show the occasional game (almost always the L.A. Galaxy or the New York Red Bulls) I watch against the pitch-dark backdrop of the morning’s early hours, with the gentle glow of the screen a drowsy companion.
West coast games have come close to breaking my resolve, but for every Chivas USA non-event there has been an exhilarating Cali Clasico. Nevertheless, to the MLS fan in Scotland, Red Bull is more synonymous with the drink that gives you wings — and more importantly keeps you awake — than the team playing out of Harrison, New Jersey.
Over time, as Scottish soccer has suffered its gradual decline, I have gravitated towards MLS and the North American game. As a writer I have followed the US men’s national team around Europe, to Sarajevo, Cyprus and slightly closer to home, Glasgow, adopting Jürgen Klinsmann’s team as my own at last summer’s World Cup. I haven’t shunned my native game as such, but it’s fair to state that my MLS interest is starting to outweigh all else. But why?
My maiden first-hand experience of MLS shouldn’t have hooked me. An end-of-season dead rubber game between Toronto FC and the New York Red Bulls at BMO Field, back when RBNY wasn’t very good and TFC was even worse, should have thrown me off the league forever.
But something about it drew me in.
There was a couple on what looked to be a first date in the seats in front of me, making small-chat and joining in with the occasional crowd chant. And while this would have been an utterly alien scene were it to have happened at a Scottish soccer ground, it appeared completely natural in this setting. I’m guessing few have given this theory the litmus test, but Ross County v. St. Mirren doesn’t quite have the same first date allure — which has as much to do with the way Scottish soccer is sold as a product as much as anything else.
A fundamental misunderstanding of how to package soccer has handicapped the Scottish game for years. Teams and the league structure as a whole still regard social media and web presence as something of an awkward add-on, with fan engagement way down on the agenda. Of course, the centralised structure of MLS makes it easier for the league to market itself and implement a uniformed branding strategy, but the Scottish game could still learn plenty from its North American counterpart.
Traditionalists will contest that turning soccer into a social event be considered a good thing, but there is already a demand for such evolution in Scotland. When St. Mirren staged a pre-match fan zone just last month, complete with beer on tap, big screens and live music, all 1,000 tickets were sold in a matter of days. The desire is there, but Scottish soccer is largely ignoring it.
Ignorance still taints Scottish consideration of MLS and the North American game as a whole. Upon Robbie Keane’s transfer to the L.A. Galaxy in 2011 one newspaper claimed that the Republic of Ireland international “the MLS is an inferior product to the Scottish Premier League (as it was then)” and that the striker had “essentially hung up his boots” by making the move Stateside.
Even with the Tartan invasion of Cascadia a few seasons ago — when Kris Boyd, Stevie Smith and John Spencer were at Portland, with Martin Rennie, Barry Robson and Kenny Miller at Vancouver — the impression made by MLS on the Scottish soccersphere was minimal. (Although that Boyd mattress commercial remains a favourite over here.)
Some use the primitive nature of the American as a stick to beat it with, but there is an allure to the way MLS has built its self from the ground up in a relatively short space of time. Scottish soccer fans often ponder how their national game would be different were it redesigned for purpose in 2015, just as MLS has done over the past two decades. League reconstruction, and the form it should take, has become a hotly discussed topic in recent years, but if there is one commonly agreed consensus it is that the country simply has too many teams.
My home village of Doune — just outside Dunblane, Stirlingshire — offers something of a prime precedent, with no less than six senior league clubs (Alloa Athletic, Clyde, East Stirlingshire, Falkirk, Stirling Albion, Stenhousemuir) all within a 15-mile radius. With a catchment of just 340,000 inhabitants, and the soccer heartlands of Glasgow and Edinburgh just a half hour drive away the market is far too saturated for it to thrive. The sport in Scotland — which boasts 42 senior league clubs for just over 5 million people — is suffocating itself.
MLS fans might wish to distance themselves from such repute and patronisation, but there’s still an endearing innocence to the North American game. Canada and the US are two nations that now take their soccer seriously — of that there is no doubt — but not too seriously. And as any Scot who has been worn down by the toxicity of their national game will tell you, that’s a good thing.
Scottish radio phone-ins take countless calls from fans irate at the stock exchange dealings of club shareholders, with Internet forums battlegrounds for the sour, vindictive and deluded. Scoring goals is the obvious essence of soccer, but in Scotland it has become about off-the-field point-scoring as much as anything else. And it’s tiring.
Despite the in-fighting and tiring politics, Scottish soccer still retains some worth and plenty charm. The country’s top flight has this season been reinvigorated by the emergence of Aberdeen and Dundee United as unexpected challengers to Celtic’s supremacy, with Gordon Strachan’s Scotland national team at its strongest — and most exciting — for the best part of a decade too.
Not all Scottish soccer fans are fuelled by resent. Look at the way over 40,000 fans packed Ibrox to pay tribute to former Rangers captain Fernando Ricksen, who is battling motor neurone disease, Sunday, with Glasgow rivals Celtic even contributing £10,000 to the fundraising efforts. But with the first Old Firm clash in nearly three years just days off, the bitterness and acrimony will return soon enough.
It’s not a question of which league is better. Both leagues have their good and bad players, good and bad teams, good and bad games, just like every other league. MLS has its glaring issues and weaknesses, as the Scottish Premiership does too, but while my myopic national game can’t agree on a new direction North American soccer strives to better itself. Maybe one day following it won’t be so lonely.
