A Chiefs-style dynasty in American soccer? Don’t count on it
On Sunday, hundreds of millions of people will tune in to potentially witness the coronation of a dynasty. As the Kansas City Chiefs strive to become the first NFL team to win three Super Bowls in a row, their status among sports’ all-time greatest teams across multiple seasons is under constant debate.
A dynastic reign is among the most revered feats in sports, a way to guarantee a legacy that lives long beyond the players and staff involved. A young baseball fan’s education isn’t complete without studying Babe Ruth’s New York Yankees in the 1920s, or the late-1990s vintage led by Derek Jeter. Every great NBA team is measured against Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls of the 1990s and the modern era is still largely reactive to the 2010s Golden State Warriors. The Houston Comets didn’t allow any other team to win the WNBA until the league’s fifth season.
The U.S. women’s national soccer team have certainly come close to dynasty status. No other nation can match their four Women’s World Cup titles and the United States has also won five Olympic gold medals since women’s soccer joined the list of events in 1996. But the U.S. has never won three consecutive major tournaments, with three titles often requisite to cement a team as being dynastic.
This isn’t just an American fascination with sustained greatness, either. The history of soccer is littered with similar feats, from Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United to the dominance achieved by Spain and Argentina’s men teams. Brazil won three of four World Cups from 1958 to 1970 thanks to Pele’s generational gifts.
Europe is currently grappling with recurring champions in each of the big five leagues except for Italy. Paris Saint-Germain has won six of the last seven Ligue 1 titles. Manchester City has enjoyed an identical win rate in the Premier League. In 2023-24, Bayer Leverkusen pulled off a shock by taking the Bundesliga title away from Bayern Munich for the first time since the 2011-12 season, while Barcelona and Real Madrid have won 18 of the past 20 La Liga campaigns, with Atletico Madrid claiming the other two.
For a league that habitually must balance its influences from American sporting customs and global soccer, MLS is a curious outlier. It, as with the similarly structured NWSL, now seems immune to fostering such dynasties. This is seen as a desired outcome given the league’s curated commitment to sustaining competitive parity.
MLS has had two great dynasties — D.C. United in the late 1990s, and the 2010s LA Galaxy of David Beckham, Landon Donovan and Robbie Keane — but both came at a time when there were fewer league mechanisms to strictly define how clubs could build their rosters. The league has also evolved rapidly since Donovan won the last of his record six MLS Cups in 2014, with an expansion push nearly doubling the number of teams and owners spending far more on their rosters and facilities alike.
In a week Patrick Mahomes, a co-owner of the NWSL’s Kansas City Current, may achieve a feat that no other NFL quarterback has managed, MLS fans have seen one of the greatest teams in recent memory get picked apart just over a year after their greatest triumph. That’s just the way it goes in American professional soccer at its highest level.
When the Columbus Crew won MLS Cup in 2023, the team seemed well-positioned to sustain their excellence.
The Crew’s squad was built around Cucho Hernandez, an ideal attacking centerpiece who could score 20+ goals in a full season and dole out double-digit assists. He was supported by Uruguay international Diego Rossi, two tireless wing backs providing wide service, a top-class engine room with homegrown midfielder Aidan Morris and modern MLS legend Darlington Nagbe, a defense that seldom let games get stretched, and a number of veterans expertly executing their roles. Behind them all was rising USMNT goalkeeping prospect, Patrick Schulte. They were brought together by general manager Tim Bezbatchenko and led by head coach Wilfried Nancy, whose game model won hearts and minds — with Thierry Henry among his vocal supporters — with aesthetic panache and dependable efficiency.
But the post-win honeymoon didn’t last for long. In January 2024 Julian Gressel left for Inter Miami in free agency, depleting the squad of a versatile and creative veteran. In June, Middlesbrough snapped up Morris for a $4 million transfer. Bezbatchenko also left in June and now serves as director of the multi-club group headlined by AFC Bournemouth. New acquisitions struggled to embrace Nancy’s system to the same extent, leaving the Crew vulnerable for a first-round upset in the 2024 playoffs against the New York Red Bulls.
The cap constraints forced a more dramatic squad overhaul this winter as players asked for new contracts. Two starters in MLS Cup 2023 — Yaw Yeboah, who scored the winner against LAFC, and attacking midfielder Alexandru Matan — left as free agents. Christian Ramirez, whose heroics helped the Crew reach the title game, has been traded to the LA Galaxy. The real gut punch came on Europe’s transfer deadline day, as Real Betis brought Hernandez back to Europe for a $22m fee.
Fourteen months after the Crew won its third MLS Cup title since debuting in 1996, Columbus has been left to rebuild.
This is the price of success in MLS. The league’s restrictions are far more severe than most competitions, setting limits on wage spending via a salary cap, limiting off-cap spending to just a handful of players through designated player slots, the U22 Initiative and targeted allocation money.
Those who follow the NFL, NBA, WNBA or NHL know that salary caps are an American tradition, much like Coca-Cola, hot dog eating contests and fast food chains. The difference is that each league of those leagues are such a powerhouse in their sport that there’s always a rising crop of young players, drafted and signed to lower scaled wages, who can replace older peers looking for a raise. MLS’s draft often aids the back-end of its teams’ squads and the NWSL did away with its rookie draft entirely in 2024. It simply isn’t a like-for-like comparison.
The far more imposing limit is MLS’s global standing. In 2024, Opta ranked MLS as the ninth-best men’s league in the world using its power ratings model, directly trailing the top leagues in Portugal and Belgium while resting ahead of England’s second-division Championship and Argentina’s top flight.
If the NFL was the ninth-best football league in the world, people would stop watching. Yet as it stands, there is limited interest in sustaining other competitions that would be dwarfed by the NFL juggernaut. As the world’s game, however, soccer has a deep and vast pool of talent around the globe and the best talents (generally) go to its best leagues, leaving other competitions with a mix of domestic players, rising prospects and veterans.
The NWSL also has a salary cap and other rules to promote competition but it has a baked-in advantage as the domestic league of the most successful national team in women’s soccer history. The USWNT is the only side to have won four women’s World Cups, most recently in 2019. Many of its players have headlined NWSL rosters, but a recent flurry of top NWSL players opting to leave for European clubs hints at a sea change where, like on the men’s side, the possibility of the UEFA Champions League gives the continent an unparalleled advantage for the sport’s best players.
Two NWSL teams have won back-to-back titles: FC Kansas City in 2014 and 2015, and the North Carolina Courage in 2018 and 2019. Neither team won a third league title at any point.
The one exception is the University of North Carolina’s women’s team, which won 22 NCAA titles in 31 years from 1982 through 2012. The difference is the unique arena of college recruitment, where the best programs have an inside track to secure commitments from the nation’s best prospects each year. Their list of alumnae dwarfs that of many professional clubs: Mia Hamm, Kristine Lilly, Heather O’Reilly, Tobin Heath, Lucy Bronze, Crystal Dunn, Alessia Russo and Emily Fox, to name just a handful.
Mahomes has told media he’s looking forward to playing on Sunday in front of Lionel Messi this weekend, calling him the “GOAT of his profession”.
Yet with the leagues’ curation and this nation’s commitment to keeping parity in the sport’s professional ranks, the odds of Messi’s Inter Miami or any other MLS or NWSL team achieving dynastic status are even thinner than that of a Super Bowl three-peat.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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