Pretty good article from The Athletic on What to expect from the MLS is Back tournament in Orlando
theathletic.com/1865234/2020/06/10/what-to-expect-from-the-mls-is-back-tournament-in-orlando/?source=dailyemail - By Sam Stejskal Jun 10, 2020 42
MLS is back. Officially.
One week after the league and the players agreed to terms on a pay cut, a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) and the broad outlines of a return-to-play plan, MLS on Wednesday morning revealed some of the particulars of its upcoming Orlando tournament. Commissioner Don Garber elaborated on some of those specifics in a conference call with reporters in the afternoon.
Many of the biggest details were already known: MLS will house all 26 of its teams at the Swan and Dolphin Hotel. Teams will begin arriving on June 24th and will train and play at the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex, with the league announcing on Wednesday that matches will begin on July 8th. Every team will play a minimum of three group-stage matches that will count toward the regular season. The group stage will be followed by a knockout round, in which the results will not count toward the regular season. The maximum time any team would spend in Orlando would be seven weeks, and MLS will aim to return to action in home markets at the conclusion of the tournament.
Still, plenty of new information emerged on Wednesday. Here’s a rundown of where things stand, and what still needs to be figured out:
Health and safety
With COVID-19 cases in Central Florida spiking this week, health and safety protocols are easily the most important item on the league’s agenda as it moves closer to the Orlando tournament.
Garber made clear on the call that there is no “specific protocol for how many positive tests” it would take either before or during the tournament for the league to call off the Orlando event. The league is monitoring the situation in Orange County, however, and feels it has a robust plan in place to minimize the impact COVID-19 has on its own traveling party. Here’s how it will work:
Every club will travel via charter plane to Orlando and, though clubs that can fully train in their home markets will be allowed to arrive in Florida later than June 24th, every club must be on-site no later than July 1st. Prior to leaving for Orlando, every member of every club traveling delegation will take two Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests 24 hours apart. Players will also receive a serology (antibody) test as part of a broader physical exam. Anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 via PCR test will not travel to Orlando; they will remain in their home market, where they will be isolated and monitored by club medical staff. Those individuals who test PCR negative but serology positive will be allowed to travel if asymptomatic.
Upon arriving in Orlando, every member of the delegation will immediately receive another PCR test. Testing will continue every other day for each individual for the first 14 days of their stay in Florida. After those first 14 days, players, coaches and referees will continue to be tested regularly, including the day before every one of their matches.
Positive tests will lead to the individual in question immediately being quarantined in isolation for a period of two weeks. The league will conduct contact tracing to identify those in close contact with the individual who tested positive.
Self-temperature checks and the completion of standardized screening questionnaires will be required for anyone traveling to the Wide World of Sports complex or to the MLS hotel. Anyone with a temperature above 100.3 degrees fahrenheit or with a positive response to the daily questionnaire will be isolated immediately and given a PCR test.
Members of the league delegation will not be able to leave the hotel or the Wide World of Sports complex under their own volition. The league will provide some off-site activities for players to participate in to help pass the time, but it will maintain tight control over where they’re going and who they interact with. Garber mentioned golf as one of a “significant amount of” potential activities for players.
However, the bubble will not be entirely closed. Staff at the hotel and at the Wide World of Sports complex will not be quarantined. They’ll continue to live their lives outside of the bubble, then come into contact with members of the delegation — cooking their food, cleaning their rooms, driving their buses — during working hours. Garber said that the league is comfortable with that arrangement.
“I think the key point there is that the staff will not be coming into close contact with our players, and if they were, we would manage it through a different protocol,” said Garber. “So we’re all going to be living in a world where we’re not going to be able to test every person that comes in contact with each other or comes in contact with us as we go on with our lives. We do need to manage social distancing, we will have that in place and we will need to manage face masks and other PPE for anybody that is involved in this project. We will have sanitizing and things like temperature checks and the like for those that are involved in the hotel and in housekeeping, but those are not our employees. And we’re confident. Having gone through this protocol, not only with our own infectious disease doctor, but also sharing that with the MLSPA’s infectious disease advisor and with the state authorities, this is a protocol that we’re confident about and we will manage it with real discipline.”
Of course, not every player will make the trip to Orlando. Some with pre-existing medical conditions that leave them at heightened risk of contracting or acutely suffering from COVID-19 will be granted exemptions. Those exemptions will be determined on a case-by-case basis after evaluation with personal and club doctors and with the league.
That case-by-case approach will extend to players who apply for an exemption due to family reasons, including, though not limited to, having a pregnant wife or partner. LAFC star and reigning MVP Carlos Vela is one player with a pregnant spouse.
“Clearly, any player that has a medical issue and would not be able to play for medical reasons, certainly is not going to be required in any way to play,” said Garber. “And, by the way, that would also exist for any staff that are in a vulnerable group or have pre-existing conditions, etc. etc. We are working with our teams to manage through those situations.
“With Carlos, his wife is pregnant, we have other players that have wives who are expecting and we have other special situations that we’re managing through between now and the start of the tournament. We and our clubs will work with our players to ensure that we can find the right way to manage those issues.”
Competition
The most eye-catching wrinkles to come out of Wednesday’s announcement and availability involved the format of the tournament itself.
The league will draw each club into one of six groups. There are six “seeded” teams who will headline each of the individual groups: 2019 conference finalists Atlanta, LAFC, Seattle and Toronto, Real Salt Lake (which finished third in the 2019 Western Conference regular season standings) and “hosts” Orlando. Clubs will only play clubs from within their own conference during the group phase. Nashville SC, which began the year in the West, will move to the East for the tournament and the remainder of 2020.
That realignment leaves the West with 12 teams and the East with 14. For the Orlando tournament, the West will be divided into three groups of four; in the East, Toronto and Atlanta will headline groups of four, while Orlando will be in a group of six clubs. The top two teams from each group and the top four third-place finishers will advance to a single-elimination, 16-team knockout round.
The league will hold its draw on Thursday afternoon. According to a spokesperson, there will be no seeding procedure for the 20 teams who aren’t headlining a group. They’ll simply be divided into East and West pots and drawn into one of their conference’s groups.
The group stage will be contested from July 8th-23rd. Three matches will be played many days of that stretch, with the summer heat of Orlando prompting the league to schedule its triple-headers to begin at the relatively cool times of 9 a.m., 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. ET. The round of 16 will be held from July 25th-28th; the quarters on July 30th and Aug. 1st, the semis on Aug. 5th and 6th and the final on Aug. 11th.
One detail that wasn’t discussed on Garber’s call or highlighted in a press release: The league will do its best to keep East and West separate until the final. Unless three of the four third-place teams that qualify for the knockouts come from one conference, an outcome that would necessitate an inter-conference elimination match prior to the final, Eastern Conference teams will play Eastern Conference teams and Western Conference teams will play Western Conference teams on the road to the title game.
That title game will have stakes. As announced by MLS and CONCACAF, the winner of the tournament will qualify for the 2021 CONCACAF Champions League, taking the spot that would’ve been allocated to the team who finished atop the conference opposite the Supporters’ Shield winner in the regular season standings. It will also carry a significant cash incentive, with a prize pool for the entire tournament sitting at $1.1 million. The exact specifics of how that money will be divided aren’t yet clear, but one source said that it’s expected that the MLS Players Association will make a recommendation to the league on the topic on Wednesday. The source said the winning team will likely receive “a couple hundred thousand dollars” to be divided among players and first-team staff. The source said that the players’ union is expected to recommend that the league give its standard win bonus of $14,000 per team for all group stage matches, with each team that advances to each individual knockout round receiving an increasing sum all the way through to the final.
No specific information was provided regarding tie-breaking for the group stage, but there’s no reason to think MLS will stray from its normal procedure in which the first tie-breaker is number of wins, second is goal differential and third is goals scored.
With so much uncertainty around how COVID-19 will progress in the coming months, Garber couldn’t say for certain what the league’s 2020 future will look like after the conclusion of the Orlando tournament. He was clear, however, that MLS will make every attempt to come back in home markets — preferably in front of fans — later this summer and into the fall. The Athletic reported on May 21st that MLS was working off a plan that would see teams only play teams within their conference for the remainder of the regular season following the end of the Orlando tournament.
“I’m very optimistic. I expect that we will be back in our stadiums, we just don’t know the exact date,” he said. “Obviously this is all unfolding in real time and literally every day, more of the markets are opening. … So, I do believe we’ll get back to our markets. Our fans should expect that to happen, when that will happen is still uncertain, whether or not we’ll have any markets with fans is also uncertain. We’re hearing about different guidelines state by state, and it does seem like there’s a possibility that some fans might be able to attend games at some point.”
Broadcast
As detailed by The Athletic last month, one of the major forces behind the entire Orlando tournament was the broadcast element. Not only is staging the competition a way for the league to begin to make good on its agreements with U.S. national rights holders ESPN, FOX and Univision, it’s also a show of good faith to those partners (particularly ESPN, whose president, Jimmy Pitaro, drew an individual mention from Garber on Wednesday), and other media outlets ahead of the crucial round of TV negotiations that will occur following the 2022 season.
ESPN, which is owned by Disney, is expected to handle all of the production for the event, according to sources. The network will combine with FOX and Univision to broadcast all of the tournament in the U.S. International MLS broadcast partners such as Canadian network TSN will be able to pick up the ESPN-produced world feed and show it to viewers in their own countries.
Expect some technological innovations, too — increased number of mic’d up players and coaches, new camera angles, some types of virtual fan involvement, etc.
“We very much knew from the beginning that producing games in an environment outside of our stadiums and without fans would be challenging,” said Garber. “Challenging operationally, but certainly a challenge from a production perspective. We’ll invest deeply in creating an environment on-air that will be exciting and compelling for all of our viewers, we’ll see new technologies being used from an audio perspective, from a camera perspective, new angles, new types of cameras being used, all sorts of technological innovations that we might be able to utilize in the future. … We will work to integrate our fans into these broadcasts. Those details and projects are in their final stages, we’re not yet ready to announce those, but you can be sure that we will have an environment that will bring our fans and our supporters close to these matches.”
The timing of kickoff should be interesting, too. The early group stage games will begin at 9 a.m ET, raising the possibility of soccer with scrambled eggs for the millions of sports fans still stuck at home due to the pandemic. That morning time slot isn’t an unfamiliar one for North American soccer supporters, who tune in by the hundreds-of-thousands, sometimes millions, for mid-morning weekend broadcasts of the English Premier League and German Bundesliga.
“The game times were a function of weather, but 9 o’clock in the morning is actually a time that one of our broadcast partners is very excited about,” said Garber. “They’re looking to have programming there, and, as you know, there are other soccer leagues that are broadcast at that time of day.”
