Don Garber’s Major League Soccer is a league drunk on ambition but stumbling through a fog of its own making—a circus of social media tantrums, revolving-door coaching tenures, and ownership limbo that undermines every slick promotional video. While the commissioner dangles the prospect of signing Mohamed Salah, the Egyptian superstar whose agent Ibrahim Hassan has openly flirted with MLS as a retirement cash-out, the on-field product and front-office stability look like a Saturday morning rec league. Vancouver Whitecaps, for instance, spent last season lurching from one tactical identity to another, their front office leaking uncertainty like a cracked pipe, while CF Montreal spiraled into chaos after parting ways with Marco Donadel—a player whose leadership was never the problem—and then handing the keys to Philippe Eullaffroy, a man whose previous claim to fame was coaching in the French fourth tier. That’s not a glitzy star system; that’s a family-owned carnival where the ride operators keep quitting.
The numbers tell the same story. Montreal under Eullaffroy posted a 1.2 points-per-match average through the second half of last season—barely playoff fodder in a league that grants entry to nearly half its teams. Meanwhile, the Whitecaps’ ownership group, still dithering over whether to sell or stay, has allowed the club to drift without a clear transfer strategy, cycling through three head coaches in four years. This is the environment Garber hopes to sell to a 32-year-old Salah, a man used to Liverpool’s institutional rigor and the global spotlight of the Premier League. Does anyone honestly believe a player of his caliber wants to be the centerpiece of a league where a key club’s coaching hire feels like a favor to a friend? Where the expansion fee for San Diego’s new franchise topped $500