MLS quarterfinals set for next weekend

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/11/2024 (296 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you listen closely, you can just about hear the silence.

Pleasant, isn’t it? The soccer calendar can get so full, so very full, and it’s sometimes nice to just relax and watch a holiday movie. After all, no one wants to think about sports on weekends in mid-November.

Take MLS, for example.

Now, you might be wondering, “What even is an MLS?” Fair enough.

It stands for “Major League Soccer,” which is the United States’ top division of the world’s most popular sport, though three Canadian cities also have teams.

Understandably, you may have missed a number of matches — such as a June head-to-head involving Canada’s largest city and the U.S.’s third-largest (that would be Toronto FC vs. Chicago Fire) — as it was played during EURO 2024, on the same day Spain faced Croatia.

OK, but you surely caught that World Series preview-in-miniature, LA Galaxy vs. New York City FC a few days later. No? Oh right — that was still during the Euros, and hosts Germany played Hungary that day. Shucks.

Last try. LA Galaxy vs. Los Angeles FC? They even have a nickname for it: El Trafico. And it was on the Fourth of July! What’s that? A Copa America quarterfinal between Ecuador and Argentina that featured Lionel Messi? The same day? Rats.

Messi, though. He plays in MLS for Inter Miami. They even resuscitated a tournament for him — the Leagues Cup, and the first player to lift it following its relaunch was Lionel Messi. Some things just work out.

Quite conveniently, all MLS matches are streamed on AppleTV. All you have to do is pay for an AppleTV subscription, and then also pay for an MLS Season Pass subscription. But you get to watch Messi whenever you want. Except for now, as his team’s been eliminated.

Don’t feel bad for him, though. If anyone needs cheering, it’s Apple’s sports marketing chief, who just last month excitedly declared that his company was “getting behind Leo Messi’s historic MLS Cup Playoffs debut in a big way.”

He might regret saying that now, but at least AppleTV broke its MLS viewership record when Messi and Miami took on Atlanta in the Eastern Conference quarter-round-final-one-best-of-three, thing. Okay, so they didn’t actually publish the viewership stats, but that’s likely because the numbers were so high that we don’t even have names for them yet.

Besides, that was, like, 22 days ago, when this year’s MLS Cup Playoffs were, like, young. We’ve still got another 21 to look forward to. That’s the beauty of playing playoffs for 13 per cent of the calendar year.

It also makes the regular season more meaningful, as important races for eighth and ninth go right down to the wire. It’s almost the same as some late-April jockeying between Bournemouth and Fulham, Parma and Empoli, Strasbourg and Nantes or really any of the other mid-table teams in leagues that find themselves packaged on the same streaming service; and who’d want to miss that?

The important thing is that MLS has AppleTV all to itself. The Leagues Cup’s on there too, of course, and so is the 109-year-old U.S. Open Cup. That venerable competition was made available to stream as soon as Apple learned what it was.

Anyway, if you’re an MLS novice, you’ve picked the perfect time to hop on the bandwagon. The playoffs are now at their quarterfinal stage, which means it’s really the conference semifinals. Atlanta, after dispatching Messi and the 2015 Champions League winners, er, 2024 Supporters’ Shield holders, will host Orlando City, which is where Kaka and Nani played before they left.

In the other Eastern contest, we’ve got a sort of Subway Series between New York City FC and New York Red Bulls.

NYCFC play their home games at Yankee Stadium unless they don’t, in which case, such as the present, they’re tenants of the Mets at Citi Field. Red Bulls are actually in New Jersey, so it’s not a Subway Series per se, but more of a Take-the-7-and-then-the-5-and-then-PATH-then-walk-half-a-mile Series, and it’s less a series than a single game.

Out west, LA Galaxy and Los Angeles FC are in separate match-ups, which invites the prospect of El Trafico for the semifinals/Western Conference Final. It’d be a who’s who of the league’s most famous players, including, for Galaxy, ex-Barcelona midfielder Riqui Puig and ex-Borussia Dortmund forward Marco Reus, and, for LAFC, ex-France duo Hugo Lloris and Olivier Giroud. It’s always nice to keep tabs on one’s exes.

One of the L.A. teams will battle the Seattle Sounders and the other Minnesota United, though it doesn’t really matter which, although it’ll matter a bit if either of them advance to the final. But that’s sometime next month.

This is the here and now, baby. That is, whichever playoff round MLS is holding next will be here for you on Apple TV’s extremely accessible service — the app works especially well on non-Apple devices — anytime now. Except for this weekend. There’s another international break, you see, and MLS knew it had to pause for the vital Nations Leagues after playing through the Euros and the Copa.

Really, it’s best to approach MLS as a sort of thinking-person’s league. Like, for smart people. Those of us who ponder questions like, “If an MLS happens in the soccer forest, can anyone hear it?”

Maybe if you listen closely. Or maybe not.

jerradpeters@gmail.com

@JerradPeters.bsky.social