Bob Koep
Senior Staff Writer
InsideSoccer Magazine
If the MLS ever wants to establish itself as a top professional League in this part of the world
(meaning CONCACAF) it will have to come up with some convincing scores in the round-robin group play of the Champions League.
MLS has four teams in the group stage, Columbus, Seattle, Real Salt Lake and Toronto and must get at least one of them into the final next spring in order to prove a point. It cannot be that Mexico keeps putting four teams into the semi finals, as it did last year, and make the Champions League final stages an all-Mexican affair.
There are four groups of four teams each in our Champions League and conceivably MLS can get all its four teams into quarter-finals, but so can Mexico!
In Group A, there are two MLS teams, Toronto FC and Real Salt Lake but both could advance as the top two teams in each group go to the knock out stage.
Three of the four MLS teams opened their campaign with victories as only Seattle Sounders suffered a 2-1 defeat at Marathon of Honduras, that club not necessarily being a household name.
With the second round of games coming up this week (Toronto is at Arabe Unido of Panama) we
will see how MLS teams do away from home. The three home games ended in MLS wins but playing away may tell a different story, as it did in the Seattle case.
With the MLS having improved its product, albeit slowly, in recent years it must now take the next step
and assert itself in CONCACAF play. In fact if its teams get stranded again one cannot help wondering why its image is still rather poor overseas.
Mexican team Guadelajara, finalist in this year’s Copa Libertadores, the South American Champions League, is not even in this tournament as it failed to qualify in the highly competitive Mexican environment. Mexican teams often compete in the Copa Libertadores as guest teams. At the end of this week we will see what the real MLS chamces are. Particularly Toronto has its work cut out at the Panama match tomorrow (Aug 24).
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