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Americas Champions League


Louis

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  • 2 weeks later...

The logistics of a Pan-American tournament is beyond nightmarish. Just imagine when Seattle Sounders have to travel to Santos, Brazil to face Santos FC. That is 6791 miles. One way. A flight would take 14 hours if it was a straight flight, but there is sure to be transfer points for such a route.

And what about their domestic leagues? Let's take our Seattle Sounders vs Santos FC example. Seattle has to travel to Brazil, so they are going to need a bye week to travel down and train a little and then have their completion. So if this ACL is on a Wednesday (UCL is always staged on Tuesday or Wednesday) then the Sounders would need to leave at least by Friday or Saturday to get a full day of travel, a few days to recover from said travel, and then training time to get use to environment conditions (heat/cold, elevation, etc). Then they have their ACL game. Great, now it is time to go back home on Thursday. One full day of travel and several to recover. Do you make the Sounders play a league game on Saturday? Ok, making them play on Sunday, but is that still enough time? They missed last week to travel down to Brazil and they just arrived late Friday from Brazil. They'll need a few days to recover, not to mentioned they have not had any prep time for their league match. So they get another bye week? That would be 2 bye weeks in a row? But can you avoid it to be fair to the Sounders in league play?

Due to the salary cap, MLS teams are not deep enough to handle such a huge travel intensive tournament and league play at the same time. It is easy to say, well, the Sounders will have to play their B team while A team is off at the ACL. But MLS teams are not that deep yet to give a B team depth to rely on a solid performance. Maybe with in a short time now they have a better support system with USL, but not right now.

This American Champions League will never get off the ground. The travel is way too much compared to UEFA's, which makes it ultimately unprofitable. The time required for teams to compete would wreck havoc in their home leagues, so there will be push back from that. There is no way this is going to happen unless teleportation gets invented.

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USA/Canadian teams really only care about their local teams and European clubs.

The attendance is really poor for current Concacaf Champions League, because no one really cares about teams from Panama.

If it ever became logistically possibly with advancement of flight speed, MLS teams would rather join UEFA's tournaments, than anything in the America's.

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