CHARLOTTE, N.C. — During the final few months of Charlotte FC’s inaugural season, Christian Lattanzio said he’d field phone calls from time to time from players across the world who’d ask about playing in Charlotte.
“Obviously I cannot name names,” Lattanzio told reporters in an Oct. 7 press conference, “but I can assure you that there are many, many players — and not just from within this league, but also from Europe — who make inquiries to try to come.”
The then-interim and now-permanent manager took a crack at explaining the elevated interest in his club at the time. He cited the special atmosphere in Bank of America Stadium. He cited “the football that our boys are playing.” But there was a broader truth tugging on all of this — one that Lattanzio, a coach with connections to the top levels of soccer leagues in Europe, would without hesitation beat the proverbial drum for.
And that’s this: Major League Soccer has risen close to the top echelon of the sport.
The 2022 World Cup might just be the biggest milestone of the league’s ascension yet.
MLS is home to 36 players who’ve been tapped to join teams competing in the World Cup, which officially begins in Qatar on Sunday. That’s the most in the history of the league, and it’s more than every league in the world besides Premier League (England), LaLiga (Spain), Bundesliga (Germany), Serie A (Italy) and Ligue 1 (France).
For the first time, all eight World Cup groups will feature at least one MLS player. And many are expected to make impacts on the world stage: Take Wales’ Gareth Bale, the LAFC forward who’s widely considered to be one of the best wingers of his generation. Take Karol Swiderski, Charlotte FC’s leading scorer who was announced as a starter for Poland on Wednesday. Take Walker Zimmerman of Nashville SC and DeAndre Yedlin of Inter Miami CF and Xherdan Shaqiri of the Chicago Fire — all of whom have internationally recognizable names.
For Dan Courtemanche, the executive vice president for communications of Major League Soccer and one of the original members of the MLS staff prior to the league commencing play in 1996, the World Cup will showcase “the incredible progress our league has made.”
“From an MLS standpoint, the World Cup is the world’s largest and most influential sporting event, and the 2022 World Cup will be a signature moment for Major League soccer,” Courtemanche told The Observer in an interview this week. He added, “If you look back to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, we had six players in that World Cup. And now we have 36 players in 2022. As I mentioned, it’s an all-time high.”
He added: “The World Cup, overall, every four years, raises the profile of Major League Soccer.”
The rise of MLS is no secret. Since the league’s creation in December 1993, which was part of the successful bid by the U.S. to host the 1994 World Cup, the league has gotten deeper, larger and more talented in an effort to shed a bunch of its undesired labels — of not of the same caliber of other American-based leagues (like the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL), of being a league for greats past their prime.
And shedding those labels have taken time.
League polices have been added and adjusted to attract talent. Ambitious owners have bought in. Teams have begun spending more. In 2022, four teams spent more than $20 million and half of the teams spent more than $15 million in wages — a stark increase from just two seasons prior, when only two teams spent more than $15 million.
Perhaps most important, though, the league began rapidly expanding. That’s where teams like Charlotte FC, home to fans from different parts of the world who have been waiting for a soccer team to call their own, come in.
“Without a doubt, the expansion of Major League Soccer has fueled the overall popularity and growth of the league,” Courtemanche said. “And part of that is simple math: We started with 10 teams, we now have 29. ... This year, we had an all-time record of more than 10 million fans attending MLS matches. And that’s really fueled expansion, especially throughout the Southeast.”
Charlotte FC sporting director Zoran Krneta agreed.
“There is a new drive, new initiative, new ideas, new personalities,” Krneta told The Charlotte Observer. “Everything is new, as you said, and the communities in these cities are embracing it this way or another, and suddenly, that’s part of the rise. That’s part of the expansion of the soccer scene in USA.”
Krneta said the World Cup is a huge catalyst for the league’s expansion, too.
“I don’t think this is a make-or-break, but it would speed up the process (of further growth), that’s for sure,” Krneta said. “That’s the World Cup, which everybody watches, and even the people who don’t watch soccer, they would watch the World Cup. And then of course, there is the news generated all over the world, and if USA beats England or Wales, there’ll be headlines all over the world and that will help growing number of young men and women in USA to kind of start taking the sport more seriously.
“They would actually push the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the mothers of these youngsters to come to start watching, and you can’t stop that progress.”
Per MLS, 18 of the U.S. team’s players who are either currently playing for MLS clubs, who have previously played for MLS clubs or who came up through MLS’s academy. Nine are current MLS players. And that’s not counting the 18 Canada men’s national team players with MLS ties. (Canada qualified for its first World Cup since 1986, an expressed goal of MLS when it expanded to Toronto in 2007.)
“In the early years of Major League Soccer, the performance of the US National Team certainly had an impact on the overall popularity of our league,” Courtemanche said. “And I think all of us who are Americans and fans of the US National team want to see them perform well and go deep into the tournament. But Major League Soccer is a league made up of players born in 82 different countries. And there’s tremendous momentum behind our league led by a lot of the expansion to the Southeast over the last few years.”
If the 2022 World Cup is important to Major League Soccer, then the 2026 tournament will be doubly important, Courtemanche said.
“The next four years will be arguably the most important period for the sport in the history of our country and I would say Canada too,” he said. “Because we have the World Cup coming here — U.S., Canada, Mexico, first 48-nation world Cup, first three-country World Cup. This is a league that was born out of World Cup ‘94. And it’ll be the 30th anniversary of Major League Soccer in 2026.
“So we keep telling people, man, this next World Cup is going to be like rocket fuel for the overall popularity of soccer and Major League Soccer.”
