Major League Soccer: Can the MLS revolution survive and thri

[grigor]

A lot has changed for "soccer" in the US since Steve Nicol arrived nearly 15 years ago.

"When I first got here I couldn't find the football scores in the papers. Now you can watch live games from any league you want," says the former Liverpool and Scotland star, who went west in 1999 to take a player-coach role at the A-League's Boston Bulldogs.

The league and Bulldogs are no more - going the way of so many American soccer experiments before them - but Nicol stayed, moving to Major League Soccer's (MLS) New England Revolution, where he spent 10 seasons at the heart of something close to a football revolution. MLS is currently coming to the end of its 18th season, which makes it the longest running professional football league in US history, beating the old North American Soccer League's (NASL) 17-season run from 1968 to 1984.

An average of nearly 18,600 fans have attended this season's games, putting MLS third behind the National Football League and Major League Baseball in terms of gates in US professional sport, and comfortably in the world's top 10 football leagues.

It is also growing. Having had only 10 teams as recently as 2004, 19 teams, three of them in Canada, played this season. A 20th, the Manchester City-backed New York City, joins in 2015, with four more "franchises" by 2020 - David Beckham's Miami "Nice" being perhaps the most eagerly anticipated.