For years and years now, the dream of many a soccer player has been to “make it big” in Europe, and for good reason. In countries like England, France, Spain and Germany, soccer is the biggest sport, capturing huge audiences and huge TV contracts.
Europe is where players go to make money, to seek fame, and perhaps most importantly, to test themselves at the highest levels of the game against other players who are on their level. In the United States, the soccer landscape is a bit different from Europe. It’s not the primary sport, lagging behind football and basketball in attention, audience and money.
It’s telling that when the hypothetical American question of “what if our best athletes played soccer?” comes up, the examples come from the NBA and NFL. And yet, the growth of Major League Soccer, the U.S.’s top-tier soccer league, is beginning to attract more attention from soccer fans all over the world.
The question we’ll examine in this article is “Where is it harder to play?” Is it in the U.S., where competition is getting keener and more talented players in their prime are landing. Or is it still Europe, which has the reputation for the world’s best soccer leagues?
Table of Contents
- What are the best leagues in the world?
- How do MLS teams stack up against other club teams?
- How do MLS players fare on the world stage?
- Still, Europe reigns supreme
What are the best leagues in the world?
Before we look at where it’s harder to play, we have to size up the competition. Even though Major League Soccer is in a stronger position from where it was even five years ago, the best leagues in the world are all still in Europe. According to globalfootballrankings.com, with pulls from the club rankings from Five Thirty Eight, eight of the 10 best leagues in the world are first-division European leagues, with Brazil and Mexico’s top-flight leagues the only non-European ones cracking the top 10.
The best leagues in the world, according to that list, are the ones you might expect. The Premier League is number one, the Bundesliga is number two, and La Liga is number three. For fans who have seen teams from England, Germany and Spain face off in Champions League competition, that’s not a surprise.
What’s perhaps more surprising is who is farther down that list … and where the top North American league sits in comparison. Though some rankings out there generously have MLS rounding out a top ten, globalfootballrankings.com puts MLS all the way down to 15th, with even one second-division league, the English Championship, ranking above MLS.
But Europe’s a big place, and not all European first-division leagues are created equal. So, per these rankings, MLS still finishes ahead of top leagues in Switzerland, Scotland, Denmark and Greece, and is on par with leagues in Belgium, Austria and Turkey.
As for individual clubs on the Five Thirty Eight list, big names like Bayern Munich, Manchester City, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Arsenal top the list. You have to work all the way down to 123 on the list before you get to the first MLS team, LAFC, one spot below Burnley.
How do MLS teams stack up against other club teams?
Though it’s an imperfect test, the FIFA Club World Cup is a competition putting the top teams from each federation against each other in an annual competition. The current reigning champion is Real Madrid, who won the February 2023 tournament in Morocco.
MLS had its first-ever entrant in that global tournament this year, with 2022 Concacaf Champions League winners Seattle Sounders FC making it, only to be knocked out in a tight 1-0 loss to Al Ahly in the first round. Because of the competition calendars being the way they are — with most of the world on an August-May schedule and MLS on a February-October schedule — the Sounders faced one of the best teams in Africa on preseason form, while their Egyptian opponents were in midseason form.
Given that the Liga MX representative has won many previous CCL tournaments, an MLS team just getting to the FIFA Club World Cup is a sign that MLS is challenging Liga MX for supremacy in the region. There are other indications of that as well — in 2021 and 2022, the two leagues put together All-Star teams and faced off against each other in head-to-head competition, with the MLS team winning both contests.
How do MLS players fare on the world stage?
Certainly, top European leagues are well-represented at the World Cup. The epic 2022 World Cup final featured teammates from perennial French champions Paris Saint-Germain — Argentina’s Lionel Messi and France’s Kylian Mbappe — in a duel that was arguably the greatest World Cup final ever.
But MLS is increasingly being represented in World Cup competition, giving the league more visibility than ever. As the MLS site reported, 36 MLS players, plus one in its developmental league, made international rosters for the quadrennial tournament in Qatar.
That also highlighted what’s becoming increasingly an international league. Observers not familiar with MLS might assume that American players dominate MLS, but only nine of the 37 players represented the Yanks. There was quite a big contingent from the surprising Canada team, with 11 making the pioneering squad, but players from all over the globe, including Australia, Cameroon, Ecuador, Uruguay and Wales, moved from the 2022 regular season to the international competition.
That included Thiago Almada, a promising young Argentine player who earned a medal as a tournament winner.
Still, Europe reigns supreme
Despite the gains that the MLS game is making, nothing can compare to the history and the deep roots that soccer has in Europe. Many European clubs — including the biggest and most victorious in Italy, England, Spain and Germany — date back to the late 1800s and early 1900s, and been able to build up the reputation and riches to attract the world’s top players.
The Premier League is watched by viewers all over the world, and the TV money and sponsorships that global audience attracts perpetuate a system in which many of the world’s best players will seek paydays with English clubs. Even in the U.S., where soccer has only a fraction of the audience that the “Big Four” sports of football, basketball, baseball and hockey enjoy, TV rights for the Premier League went for £2 billion for a six-year deal in 2021.
MLS, by contrast, has roster rules and a single-entity set-up that keeps salaries at a much lower ceiling compared to top European leagues. That’s not to say that an elite group of MLS players aren’t making bank, but there are more plentiful opportunities and more top league in Europe where talented players can find bigger paychecks and a higher-level competition.
That said, a number of players are now finding MLS to be a springboard to Europe, developing for a few crucial years before moving to a top team, be it Miguel Almiron moving from Atlanta United to Newcastle or Jhon Duran moving from Chicago Fire to Aston Villa. But some players have gone the other way to enjoy their primes in MLS, coming over from Europe to challenge for the MVP title — that includes Germany’s Hany Mukhtar, who came from Danish side Brøndby to Nashville SC to win the 2022 MVP and Golden Boot, and Argentina’s Sebastián Driussi, who came from Zenit St. Petersburg to Austin FC to challenge Mukhtar for both awards the same season.
So, while overall it’s still harder to play in Europe than in the U.S., soccer is improving appreciably in the U.S., and we expect that it will continue to move up the world soccer rankings, displacing some European leagues along the way.
