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The MLS Is Back Tournament kicks off this week, starting with Orlando City vs. Inter Miami on Wednesday. Major League Soccer’s odd little tournament will follow the NWSL as the second major professional team sports league in the U.S. to return since the novel coronavirus pandemic, with an MLS quarantine set up in Orlando, Florida. But is it safe to be playing sports in this country right now? Is it worth it?
Nearly four months ago sports leagues across the U.S. suspended play after the NBA’s Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19. During those months, most Americans quarantined as best they could to prevent the spread of the deadly disease. The idea was to shut the country down while ramping up testing, which in conjunction with contact tracing would greatly diminish the impact and spread of COVID-19. A number of nations around the globe did this well; South Korea and Germany quickly got things under control and the K-League and Bundesliga returned earlier than any other leagues. Aside from a few instances, COVID-19 was contained without any major issues.
The NWSL Challenge Cup returned on June 27 and has given the rest of the U.S. hope. While the Orlando Pride pulled out of the tournament, it seemed as though most of the athletes properly quarantined and were ready, in shape and raring to go when the league returned. The result was record viewership for the first match of the Challenge Cup.
For the most part, the NWSL bubble in Utah has successfully maintained a safe environment for players and staff, showing the other pro sports leagues in the U.S. that a comeback was feasible.
Major League Soccer is showing the opposite: That a return to sports means sacrificing the competitive integrity of the league.
Over the last week, a tidal wave of bad news has smashed into the league’s plans to return as the first men’s pro team sports league in the U.S. — and with it arrived a current of bad omens for other leagues. Some of the best players in MLS have opted against competing, FC Dallas is completely out of the tournament after 10 players tested positive for COVID-19, more players and teams are likely to follow.
— FC Dallas (@FCDallas) July 6, 2020
Aaaand FC Dallas is gone. https://t.co/dxqwOJo1yN
— The18 (@the18com) July 6, 2020
“Given the impact of the number of positive tests on the club’s ability to train and play competitive matches, we have made the decision to withdraw FC Dallas from the MLS is Back Tournament,” Garber said in a phone interview Monday. “As of today, we have tested 550 players that are already in Orlando and we had 13 positive tests and that is a very low percentage. 10 of those 13 are from one team so clearly we had to remove Dallas from the tournament.”
While Garber’s stats made sense on Monday, by Tuesday two more teams announced a significant number players would not be playing. Nashville SC has at least five and possibly nine players with COVID-19; the Vancouver Whitecaps have five players staying home from the tournament. An MLS quarantine bubble won’t work if it was never uncontaminated to begin with.
“We have not said it will be X number of teams before we make any decision to change our plans, but if anything should happen that we believe would threaten the health and safety of our players and staff then we will make the decision to not go forward with the tournament,” Garber said Monday.
With teams coming from all over the country, we’re seeing the result of not having any sort of leadership from the federal government in response to this pandemic. Individual states have been left on their own to determine public health rules, with some states having done better than others.
It’s no surprise the team with the most COVID-19 cases comes from Texas, a state where the governor actively fought against any sort of precautions and even prevented cities from instituting their own safety measures. (He eventually reversed course, far too late, and even the State Fair of Texas was canceled for the first time since World War II.) But even states that have done better, like Colorado, have had issues. The Rapids had to delay their flight to Orlando because of two positive tests, but then flew soon after once they retested and determined they were false positives. The fact the country still can’t reliably test its citizens only exacerbates the problem.
And it doesn’t help MLS and the NBA are trying to create safe bubbles in Florida, a state led by a governor who doesn’t seem the least bit concerned about the health and safety of his constituents. On Monday, the death toll from the coronavirus surpassed 130,000 in the U.S., with a record 11,000 new cases reported in Florida. The U.S. shattered the single-day record with 55,274 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday.
Sports were supposed to return once we got the pandemic under control, not when things were worse than ever.
All of this highlights just how hard it is to resume sports in this country — and shows how difficult it will be for the other major leagues in the U.S. to return. You can’t blame any professional athlete for refusing to play right now, not when we still don’t know what long-term health effects of COVID-19 could be.
Of course, this was pretty apparent even before the NWSL came back. The fact an entire team had to pull out of the tournament because of one supposed trip to a bar should have been enough of a warning sign, and it didn’t help that many of the league’s best players opted out.
The NWSL continued on undeterred. In some respects, it was the right decision for the league. Americans love to talk about how much they love the USWNT every four years but then ignore the domestic league like it’s someone telling them about CrossFit. Having the spotlight has proven beneficial to a league that far too many Americans don’t know exists, let alone know how to find on TV. CBS ratings showed what happens when the NWSL is broadcast on a channel people can actually find, even without CBS putting much in way of promotion for the event, in part thanks to the dearth of other sports in this country. (It’s a shame most of the remainder of the tournament will be behind a pay wall on CBS All Access.)
Other leagues don’t have quite as much upside to playing during a pandemic. MLS would benefit from not having to share the spotlight with NBA, MLB and NHL, but it still has to contend with European leagues, which are usually on break during the summer. The other major sports in America know whenever they return they’ll have plenty of viewership, but the risk at this point doesn’t match the reward.
No one wants to win a league title with a giant asterisk next to it, which is what will happen when leagues push to play with certain teams and players missing from the competition. What happens when LeBron James decides he doesn’t want to put his family at risk by playing in Florida? What will MLB do when half the Texas Rangers end up sick with the coronavirus? What if Patrick Mahomes tests positive for COVID-19 in the second week of the NFL season? Can we really say whoever wins the NBA, MLB or NFL earned the title during such a season?
On Tuesday, 24 hours before the MLS Is Back Tournament was scheduled to start, the league was still scrambling to revamp its schedule following more delayed flights and positive tests. Nashville could be forced to pull out of the tournament, as could more high-profile players. The group stage was meant to count toward the regular season, so what happens to a team like FC Dallas that doesn’t compete in Orlando? Make-up games? Forfeits?
MLS is Back Tournament Schedule Updatehttps://t.co/GYqdUR3ogv
— Major League Soccer (@MLS) July 7, 2020
None of this is surprising.
Our country, for a variety of reasons, has failed to contain COVID-19. Those three-plus months you spent alone in your apartment? A complete and utter waste because states rushed to reopen, throwing precautions out the window without a proper testing and contact tracing plan in place. Because even the wearing of masks has been politicized, the pandemic is here to stay in this country; many regions are no longer capable of doing contact tracing because of recent the surge in cases. And yet some teams have already scheduled matches with fans in the stands.
The world-wide leader in COVID-19 cases and deaths trying to restart sports is like a blind man running through a fireworks factory with a torch in both hands — it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
After nearly four months, the U.S. is still not ready to return to normal. But health and safety be damned, America wants its sports back. So if we’re really going to play sports in the U.S. in 2020, we have to accept that these competitions will be flawed, incomplete and lacking any sporting integrity. A lot like the country’s response to the pandemic.
Information from Reuters was used in this story.
