🏆 - LAFC or Tigres? CCL final is about two teams, not two leagues
Tuesday's final won't mean anything beyond that one team is the best in Concacaf
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Brace yourself. The takes are coming.
No matter who wins tonight in the Concacaf Champions League final between Los Angeles Football Club and Tigres, some of my colleagues are going to write about what it means. If LAFC wins, the tide has turned. MLS is gaining ground. Its supremacy as the best league in the region is just around the corner. Should Tigres win, Mexico is still the top dog, no doubt. MLS is bad.
You’ve seen it before, and you know it’s coming. Maybe you even agree. The thing is, though? LAFC and Tigres aren’t necessarily flying the flags for their leagues. They want to win this for themselves.
“I don’t think it goes beyond this: It’s the championship of Concacaf. We’re not playing the Mexican league against the American league here, we’re playing for the Concacaf title. That’s what we’re playing for,” Tigres manager Tuca Ferretti said at a news conference Monday. “If you (in the press) want to put some things in play, I think you have the right to, but it’s the champion of champions of Concacaf. It weren’t Mexico-U.S., if it were U.S.-Honduras or Honduras-Mexico, I’d say the same. We’re talking about the champion of champions in Concacaf.”
Both teams have plenty of reasons to want to wear that crown, namely that neither club ever has worn it. With so much of the narrative focused on MLS’ failures, the story of the Mexican clubs often escapes attention.
Tigres have plenty of trophies in the trophy case but never have won an international title. Ferretti conceded it’s something of a ‘thorn in the side’ even if Ferretti’s apparent lack of interest in the tournament so often looks like the reason Tigres haven’t ever celebrated a CCL triumph.
LAFC manager Bob Bradley said it was a pretty simple formula for him as well. This is the young club’s first-ever final, so it’s the most important match in club history.
Of course, LAFC has the extra motivation of trying to be the first MLS franchise to lift the CCL trophy. But what happens in this single match, or even LA’s impressive run beating three Mexican clubs to get to this point, hardly dictates what would happen were, say, the Colorado Rapids to meet Puebla or Chivas to square off with FC Cincinnati.
“I think it’s very difficult to compare one league with another. They’re different (types of) football. Everyone can see the sport in their own way and interpret it like they want. There’s not a style of play or anything that is ‘correct’ or every one can choose based on their taste or whatever,” LAFC forward Diego Rossi said during Monday’s pre-match news conferences. “I think it’s tough to compare one league or another because there are different situations.”
That’s more true than ever this year. Absences happen in sports. Andre-Pierre Gignac and Javier Aquino may not play in tomorrow’s match because of leg injuries (while both missed training Monday, I’d be stunned not to see Gignac in the Tigres starting XI, but who knows).
But in this season that has seen players miss because of COVID-19 or contact tracing, in a year in which Concacaf had to switch to a single-leg format for the semifinals and final to even pull it off, it’s worth remembering that one or two games is far too small a sample size to use to draw any big-picture conclusions.
Winning the CCL title once doesn’t mean MLS has caught or is catching Liga MX. Winning it consistently does.
Of course, to win it regularly, you do have to win it for a first time. Perhaps we’ll look back on this strange tournament in this strange year and recognize it as the start of MLS finally contending for CCL titles. Maybe it will be the anomaly. The one year an MLS team got one over on a big, bad Liga MX squad. Maybe it’ll be another year that the Wikipedia entry listing CCL winners has the Mexican flag by the winner’s name.
We know MLS is not a bad league. We know there are MLS teams as good or better than teams in Liga MX - one of those is LAFC, which topped now-champion León, Cruz Azul and América en route to this match. And we know MLS is getting better - something that doesn’t preclude Liga MX clubs from also improving and perhaps keeping a gap.
We also know an MLS vs. Liga MX final is the most intriguing one we could have. It’s a matchup we’ve never seen before. It features star names like Gignac and Vela, Pizarro and Rossi. It’s a matchup of two legitimately good teams, teams that are fun to watch, that will fight to control possession because they make the most of it when they have the ball.
It’s a final worthy of the tournament. Hopefully we enjoy this and many more.
🇸🇻 - Have they considered a GoFundMe?
El Salvador is working hard to get back to the upper echelons of Concacaf when it comes to men’s soccer and is the highest-ranked team in what looks to be the easiest group of the first round of World Cup qualification. Yet, rather than blue skies, it’s storms ahead for the Central American country.
The national team played two matches in 2020, losing 1-0 to Iceland in January and the 6-0 smashing at the hands of the United States earlier this month.
When the team returned to the country, there were rumors La Selecta manager Carlos de los Cobos was set to be given the boot. Instead, he got backing from federation president Hugo Carrillo.
Now that game is being described as the straw that broke the camel’s back. The consensus is that De Los Cobos has to go. The presidents of the first-division clubs are planning to put out a statement saying as much, citing the defeat and De Los Cobos not showing up to a news conference “which was a lack of respect toward the people of our country on the part of the manager,” in the eyes of Once Deportivo President José Antonio Salaverría.
The issue? The coach’s contract. Émerson Ávalos, a FESFUT Vice President, said in an interview Saturday that they would be open to a business or interested party paying the $480,000 it would take to get rid of De Los Cobos.
“The committee is analyzing, chatting with coach Carlos de los Cobos to come to an agreement and annul the contract, hoping that in the coming hours we might have a favorable answer to be able to let the fans and media outlets know,” Ávalos later said.
The federation has bigger problems than a coach it doesn’t like looming. A complex dispute between it and El Salvador’s governing body for sport is still at loggerheads and if it’s not cleared up, FIFA may step in.
Obviously, if you’re reading this in this newsletter, De Los Cobos is reading the news about the situation as it comes out as well. On the one hand, it can’t feel nice to know everyone is just plotting to get rid of you. On the other, if you want to pay me $500,000 to quit writing this newsletter, get in touch!