Can World Cup mania grow MLS in the U.S.?

NPR sports correspondent Becky Sullivan phones in from a converted shipping-container barge in Seattle, where the Sounders are hosting an official World Cup watch party, and happens to be on air as Cape Verde scores its first-ever World Cup goal against Uruguay. With the U.S. co-hosting the tournament, she and Kenny Malone treat the summer as a real-time business experiment: the last home World Cup, in 1994, came with a condition that the U.S. launch a top-tier men's league, which became MLS two years later. The league has since grown from 10 teams to 30 with every game televised — so the obvious moves are used up, and each club has to invent its own play.

The New England Revolution's president Brian Bilello runs the field-of-dreams strategy: he lobbied for years to get the Boston area chosen as a host venue and landed seven matches including a quarterfinal, betting that fans who feel a World Cup crowd in person will accept MLS as the affordable way to keep that feeling. His origin story is literal — as an MIT undergrad volunteering at the 1994 World Cup, he appears in a stadium photo celebrating behind Maradona. Chicago, whose city government declined to host, is the opposite case: the Fire budgeted $2–3 million, rejected both flying 25 CEOs to the final by private jet and a million-dollar bracket contest, and instead rented a venue covering roughly a city block for one of the biggest watch parties in a non-host city. Their president compares it to Costco sampling: let people taste soccer fandom and some will buy in bulk as season-ticket holders.

The evidence that any of this works is mixed — studies of past hosts show attendance bumps that sometimes fade, and Italy's league actually declined after 1990. So the league office is aiming at a different audience entirely. MLS chief business officer Camilo Durana describes the league's biggest-ever marketing spend, anchored by ads in the semifinals and final declaring 'Thanks, world. We'll take it from here', and a quieter campaign aimed at players: about a dozen national teams trained at MLS facilities as base camps, and Messi's in-form World Cup — including a first career World Cup hat trick — is undercutting the league's retirement-home reputation in front of every star who might follow him.