The Road Is Tough

As a founding supporter of the Columbus Crew and MLS, I’ve had discussions/arguments with soccer fans worldwide about MLS’ “quality of play” since 1996.  If there’s one topic that someone unfamiliar with MLS brings up, that’s usually it.  Inevitably, the conversation moves on to trying to stack-rank MLS with some lesser-known European league in order to gauge its significance/relevance to the football purist.  A sane soccer fan, which I consider myself, would not assert that MLS is on the same plane as EPL or La Liga, for instance.  Those leagues’ players are some of the most talented, highly paid and captivating athletes in the world.  But I’ve always held that a giant difference between MLS and European domestic leagues is all-too-often brushed aside – travel.

Major League Soccer faces many obstacles that other leagues do not when it comes to providing a platform that delivers a high quality of play, fairness among clubs and competitiveness on the international stage.  Travel, in my opinion, is its greatest.  While tens of thousands of miles in the air per year may be the norm for teams in the American sporting scene, it is absolutely not the case abroad.  Even with UEFA Champions League matches factored in for those clubs that qualify, MLS clubs’ travel dwarfs that of their European counterparts.  This means higher travel costs, higher difficulty for supporters to attend away matches and a measurable impact on the bodies and spirits of the athletes themselves.

This issue hits home on a deeper level for me, because the last two years I have been employed as an IT Project Manager and Corporate Trainer.  In this role, I travel to locations of my company’s stores to train and support our employees during software conversions.  In 2012, I’ll log about 85,000 miles in the air plus another 2,500 on the highways.  The physical and social impact on my life is tremendous.  Simple tasks like doing the laundry and getting a haircut are shoehorned into busy weekends (Editor’s note: Great Clips is usually open until 9pm, fellas).  All this travel has bolstered my opinion about MLS’ unique challenge and has increased my empathy for the athletes’ situation.  But while all that empathy is great, nothing beats facts (yes, even in election years).  So I decided to roll up my fake sleeves and get my inner spreadsheet nerd on in a quest to dissect the MLS travel schedule.  While I found some very obviously true things to be true, I also found some of MLS’ newly unbalanced schedule to be confounding and damn near controversial.  So if you’re a stats or MLS geek, get a bowl of pretzels and a bevvie.

Step 1 – The Lay of the Land (Literally)

To correctly compare the leagues, first I wanted to understand better the geographic differences.  I consider myself to be a well-traveled geography buff, but… how big is the United States?  How does one even answer that question?  Everyone knows the shape, and that Alaska’s huge and stuff, but do I really know how big it is compared to the whole of Europe?  Is Spain bigger or smaller than Texas?  For me, the best way to get this perspective was to see it.  With a little Google Maps and some magic beans, here’s what I created: 

What most struck me was the relative (lack of) size of the UK, and specifically the island of Great Britain.  Imagine the entire EPL being played in Minnesota; it is about the same size as Great Britain.  Currently, the EPL team located farthest to the north is Newcastle United.  With the farthest southern team being Southampton, the longest trek in the entire league turns out to be 281 miles; I knew this thanks to a fantastic site called Sport Map World.  281 miles is roughly the distance between Columbus & Chicago.

Again to the map, this time with MLS club locations pinned:

This image shocked me.  I’ve been lucky enough to experience a few “NorOnTour” events hosted by the Columbus Crew supporters’ groups.  They routinely plan trips to Chicago, DC, New York & Philadelphia, all of which are equal to or farther than the longest road trip even possible in the EPL. 

I was then curious to create similar images featuring Spain’s La Liga & the German Bundesliga, shown below:

 

 So, Crew fans, here’s your bar trivia for this week:

League	Farthest Distance Between Clubs (miles)	Comparable Distance Between Columbus Crew & MLS Club
EPL	282: Newcastle United – Southampton	279: Chicago Fire
Bundesliga	397: Hamburger SV – SC Freiburg	403: Philadelphia Union
La Liga	629: Deportivo a Coruna – RCD Mallorca	627: New England Revolution

With the proper perspective now established, let’s take a moment to recognize a truth: MLS’ geographic setup is wildly different than that of any European league.  Think about how many more nights prior to and after matches the players, coaches and support staff have to stay in hotels compared to those across the pond.  Think about how many more times that means eating on the fly, and how many hours of sleep are lost to unfamiliar surroundings or lumpy mattresses.  Think about, as has already happened to the Columbus Crew and likely many other teams this year, the flight delays and missed connections.  Think about the negative effect all this extra time away has on the personal relationships of those involved; it’s staggering.

Not to say that these players are being put in undue harm or an untenable situation.  Road trips create bonds on teams.  They can benefit players by exposing them to vastly different parts of the country, or reconnect them with old friends, college colleagues, etc.  Finally, these burdens are shared across the league evenly… right?  Or do some teams travel more than others?  And if so, what is the cost involved?  After a few of these questions sat on my brain, I knew my next move: Dissect the 2012 MLS schedule and see if it could teach me anything.

Step 2 – Us And Them

If I was going to understand nuances of the MLS travel schedule, I would need to establish a good baseline of how far the clubs were positioned away from each other in the first place.  It would stand to reason that teams already located farthest from other teams in the league would have to travel more miles during the season.  Aided again by Sport Map World, I was able to build a matrix of one-way distances between clubs:

Not surprisingly, the 5 west coast clubs are the top 5 farthest teams from everyone else.  Vancouver has the highest total at 28,484 miles, but the other four left-coasters are right behind them, all within a 2000-mile difference.  The far northeastern teams (Montreal, New England) also break the 25,000 mark.  Also not surprisingly, the most centrally located team in the country, Sporting KC, finds itself with the shortest total distance to all other teams.  So while there may not be groundbreaking info here, it gives us a basis from which we can start asking questions later.

Step 3 – Factor in the 2012 Schedule

So we’ve established that MLS has a uniquely difficult issue, excessive travel, with which to contend, and we now know how far apart all their teams are.  How did MLS deal with it in 2012?  This is where I thought things might get really interesting.  Which clubs truly logged the most travel miles in 2012?  How closely would that follow the above list, if at all?  Would clubs that are positioned close together bear similar travel burdens or not?  For instance, would the LA Galaxy travel about the same amount as Chivas USA?  Same question for the New York Red Bulls and Philadelphia Union?

To find out, I needed to compute total miles traveled.  This involved a few steps:

1.     Build another matrix, this time populated with the number of away trips to each opponent.  Since the 2012 schedule was unbalanced, one couldn’t simply plug a “1” into each cell.  3-4 in-conference teams were visited twice, and 4-5 non-conference teams were not visited.

2.     Multiply the number of away trips to each club by the one-way distance, then by 2 (expecting a round trip).

3.     Search the schedule for possible multi-game trips.  (This part stunk).  My intern was off this month, so I decided to set up the following parameters and figure this out myself:

a.     I’m assuming all flights taken on commercial travel – no idea how true that is.

b.     If team had 6+ days between consecutive away matches, I assumed a trip back home.

c.     For short haul trips (under 300 miles), I assumed a trip back home.

d.     Only MLS league matches were assessed.  CONCACAF Champions League or friendly travel was not involved in my computations, but the affected teams are Houston, LA Galaxy, Toronto, RSL, Seattle.  I also didn’t take into consideration the so-called “award travel” of international call-ups or the MLS All-Star Game.

With all this in place, I built the following results:

 

 Houston, it’s a good thing United has a hub waiting for you at IAH.  Dynamo players had to travel nearly 20,000 miles more than Columbus Crew players, who won’t even make Premier status based on miles alone.  However, this brings up a flaw in these figures; distances shown assume no connecting flights.  While that’s a level of detail I’m not choosing to factor in my calculations, it’s worth noting that Columbus has no major carrier hub at their home airport.  Seattle and Portland have a large presence from Alaska Airlines, and the same can be said for Sporting Kansas City with Southwest at MCI, but those clubs’ airports will certainly force them into a taking a connection a few times a year, assuming they’re not chartering jets for those teams.  But that aside, what do we see in these numbers?  A few initial reactions:

Houston & Dallas

I was surprised to see Houston on the top of the miles traveled list, as they are centrally located east-west and were in the middle of the pack in terms of distance from other clubs.  But a dig into the schedule revealed a couple reasons for topping the list. 

·         Houston & Dallas met only once this year, that being in Dallas.  Why not have these clubs meet 3 times a year?  An FC Dallas match would be the closest away match by 3 hours for a Dynamo supporter, but there was none scheduled in 2012.  I hope this changes in 2013.

·         After Dallas, Houston’s next closest clubs are Kansas City & Colorado, at 651 and 882 miles, respectively.  Which brings me to the obvious conclusion: Dallas & Houston are simply isolated from the rest of the league at the time being.  If San Antonio or Austin get an MLS team someday this will alleviate some of the travel, but for the next few years there probably isn’t much help in sight – even a shift to the Western Conference wouldn’t make much of a difference.  More combined-game trips in 2013 would help the cause, but that also comes with the challenge of playing 2 games in 4-5 days.

LA & New England

Other than Houston & Dallas, 6 of the top 8 clubs match in both lists.  Which two clubs got off without quite as much travel as expected?  That would be the LA Galaxy and New England Revolution. 

The Galaxy accomplished this with a near-perfect schedule setup; the trips skipped were all in the northeastern corridor, and the trips doubled were all along the coast except for twice visiting the Rapids.  In fact, they “visited” Chivas USA twice at the Home Depot Center.  Which begs the question – how does Chivas feel about traveling 5000 more miles than the Galaxy even though they’re located in the same city?  Favoritism for one of the league’s marquee clubs, or simply concessions made due to CONCACAF play?

The Revs pulled another favorable schedule, visiting zero venues in Cascadia (a shame for their players and staff, really).  Three of their four twice-visited venues were in the northeast, rounding out a somewhat helpful schedule compared to how far they are from other teams.

CONCACAF Champions League

I’m not sure if MLS took this into consideration, but the Galaxy, RSL and to a lesser extent Toronto seemed to get the benefit of schedules of a shorter distance than one might expect.  Certainly Houston and Seattle didn’t get any special treatment, with the most and 2^nd-most miles traveled in 2012.

Columbus

No excuses here, Crew fans – Columbus has the least travel burden in the league this year by 2500 miles.

Step 4 – Over Analyze This

If you’ve read this far, you now have homework – put on a tinfoil hat, find something else in the data and come up with a conspiracy theory as to why MLS has given unfair advantage to one team or another. 

One thing I’ve grown fonder of after this exercise is the conference setup and the unbalanced schedule, as it reduces travel for the clubs and potentially supporters.  I also begrudgingly have inched closer to supporting NYC2, as it will reduce travel for not just NYRB, but all teams on the eastern seaboard.

As everyone’s favorite Barbasol commercial reminds us, the road is tough.  For some, though, it’s tougher than others.  I initially started this investigation as a tribute to all the road warriors out there – athletes, consultants, auditors, journalists… you know who you are.  But I found there are also serious questions of fairness that arise when the travel burdens on teams is different.  Hopefully we’ll see MLS continue to make accommodations to balance this challenging situation for some teams.  It will be an interesting journey.