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 2nd-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.
