Inter Miami’s players — or at least the ones not felled by injury and fatigue — schlepped onto an airplane Tuesday for the 44th leg of a monthslong journey.
They dragged their weary bodies out to a tarmac, up a flight of airstairs. They flew three-plus hours to Chicago. They are “spent,” head coach Tata Martino has said, but there, on Wednesday, they’ll play their 16th of 17 games in 67 days, and their 34th in less than 22 weeks.
“It’s really crazy the number of games we’ve played,” Martino said Saturday.
And all around Major League Soccer, a growing chorus of players and coaches agree.
“It’s ridiculous,” Philadelphia Union goalkeeper Andre Blake told The Inquirer. “And players have to speak up.”
Their concerns, of course, are not unique to MLS. Overworked stars and calendar congestion are global problems. The ruthless men who govern the sport keep adding more tournaments and games in an endless quest for more revenue. Players and coaches, male and female, European and otherwise, keep telling governing bodies to stop. “We are going to kill the players,” Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola said — six years ago. He reiterated his critiques for the umpteenth time last week.
What is unique to MLS, though, is that a majority of its games are ultimately inconsequential.
It stuffs 34 regular-season rounds into less than eight months — and works around three other competitions — to eliminate only a whopping 11 of 29 teams. The other 18 make the playoffs, where one or two losses can override the February-to-October grind.
This, in a nutshell, is the absurdity of the MLS season. It overloads players. And it really doesn’t have to.
The public’s main culprit has been the Leagues Cup, a recently invented tournament plopped in between the second and third trimesters of the MLS regular season. It featured all 29 MLS teams, plus all 18 from Mexico’s Liga MX. It is largely responsible for the barrage of matches that Miami and others have endured ever since it began in July. And it was largely ridiculed when devised.
But at least its games felt meaningful. Thanks in part to Lionel Messi, it captivated fans and concluded with a spectacle. It was designed to capture new audiences, namely Mexican Americans, so it felt…