Big-name targets? Looks like they're back on the menu, boys
MLS teams are once again browsing the "Over 30" aisle in the world market
Wrote a column for MLSs this week on the hows and whys of MLS teams going back to the trough for global stars of, shall we say, a certain age:
I listed four guys MLS teams will/should go for, and for the sake of laying down a marker I’ll go ahead and bet that two of those four (Lewandowski to Chicago and Salah to San Diego) actually happen.1 Yes, that is correct: I really do think that Mo Salah is going to be an MLS player by late summer.
No inside info here, just connecting the dots on the pieces that are actually in place, what’s been reported and most especially the how it’s been reported. Go watch that clip of Tom on Soccerwise, and note how very careful and specific he is about the timeframe he’s reporting on.
Begs the question, right?
Maybe I’m reading too much into all of the above. But… I don’t think so.
Originally that column was going to be a brief yadda yadda lede and then just a list of 10 or 12 guys with recognizable names that I thought could/would end up here sometime this season. But I really did feel it was important to contextualize the difference between the older guys arriving now, who are driving high-level winning, and the older guys who arrived in the back-half of the 2010s, who were almost uniformly band-aids on broken teams.
• Bastian Schweinsteiger in Chicago? He really was superb for one year, helping get that team into the playoffs. But that run ended in the play-in with a humiliating multi-goal defeat, and the Fire wouldn’t touch the postseason again until this autumn with a very different roster build.
• Didier Drogba scored for fun in the regular-season with the Impact, but only once in six playoff games, and they didn’t win anything – not even a Canadian Championship – in his year-and-a-half. They were the same Impact after his time in town as they were before his arrival.2
• The 2018 season remains my favorite MLS season for a lot of reasons, one of which was the mind-meld Wayne Rooney and Lucho Acosta shared for the final 15ish games of that year with D.C. United. But… they lost in the first round of the playoffs, did the same the next year (Rooney neither scored nor assisted in either game) and haven’t been back since.
• Of course 2018 also saw the arrival of Zlatan, whose debut goal will never, ever be topped. But he choked on Decision Day that year (the Galaxy lost at home to Houston to miss the playoffs; Zlatan was awful) and then, in 2019, squandered multiple chances as LAFC ran out to a multi-goal lead a playoff El Trafico, eventually winning 5-3.
So like I said: bandaids on broken teams who didn’t drive either high-level winning or cultural change. All four of those guys were worth signing – they helped make bad sides decent – and to be clear, none of those four were the problem3 with their teams.
But they weren’t the solution, either. So instead of superstar-driven titles, it was the likes of Atlanta, LAFC, Toronto and Seattle, all built around guys in their respective primes, who dominated that era in MLS.
The difference now, as I wrote in that column, is the global stars arriving these days are mostly asked to be the final piece, not the centerpiece.
Here’s the other “globally recognizable stars” I debated including in the MLSs column:
• Virgil van Dijk. He’s 34 now, and as Jamie Carragher said, is no longer super-human. He remains, however, one of the dozen (or so) best center backs in the world.
He’s under contract through the 2026/27 season, and is still a starter. Bet we see him in MLS after that.
• Leon Goretzka. Like Gnabry he’s a 30-year-old Bayern Munich player who’s out of contract this summer. Unlike Gnabry he’s seen his role reduced as he’s become a bit marginalized, and is unlikely to re-up.
He’s also not really a name brand, and plays an unsexy brand of soccer at an unsexy position. I think he’d be great in MLS, to be clear, but more likely he’s sticking around in Europe for another few seasons (I do not truly believe the Barcelona links, but he’d make a hell of a lot of sense for Atleti).
• Harry Maguire. Stop laughing!
Maguire’s been mostly a depth piece this year, has seen his role steadily reduced over the past three or four years, and has fallen out of the English national team picture. But he’s still a good Premier League center back, and presumably that would translate here (provided he doesn’t melt in the heat, as has happened with many of his countrymen). He’s out of contract this summer.
I’d love to see him here. Just to see what happens.
• Kalvin Phillips might be perma-injured, which makes him risky, and he’s hardly a name brand. But he was an excellent player for a good amount of time and is out of contract this summer.
• And then finally, there’s Raheem Sterling. He was decently effective (1g/5a) in about 1000 all-competition minutes on loan for Arsenal last year, but hasn’t played a single minute back home with Chelsea.
He’s on huge wages through the summer of 2027 so the Blues have had a tough time finding any takers, either on loan or permanent – in part because of the long-held belief that the 31-year-old would only sign on for another London club. That now appears to have changed (or was maybe always a misapprehension?), as Newcastle are, I guess, the frontrunners.
• Antoine Griezmann… might still happen? He’s 34 now, but is still super productive (9g/1a in 1100 minutes). The rub is that his contract was extended until mid-2027, and that I’d imagine LAFC are sick to death of the waiting game they played with him.
But still, I wouldn’t be at all shocked if he ends up here, in some market with an NBA team.
I would be perpetually furious, if I were an NYCFC fan, that the mothership was not routing the likes of De Bruyne (last year) or, potentially, Silva (this year) to Queens.
Seriously, I could not think of a better player for the Pigeons to build the next half-decade around, as they move into that glorious new stadium, than Silva. ↩
At least until they changed their name, anyway. ↩
Unlike Lampard, Pirlo, Gerrard, Pipita Higuain and a few others. ↩
