Stefan Szymanski is the Stephen J. Galetti Collegiate Professor of Sport Management at the University of Michigan and co-wrote Soccernomics, which has drawn comparisons to Michael Lewi's Moneyball.

Szymanski was interviewed by Hudson River Blue about the economics of Major League Soccer.

"I understand the single-entity model," said Szymanski. "I know how much they spend and where most of their revenue comes from. I don't know the exact figures for the accounting data because, of course, you can't see that anyway. I'm also deeply skeptical about the MLS model.

"In a nutshell, I think it's "Minor League Soccer," and that's fine. I don't have a problem with it as Minor League Soccer, but it will never be "Major" League Soccer as I understand the term."

Szymanski was asked how the MLS could become competitive worldwide. The players and owners of the MLS are currently in a labor dispute.

"That's the fundamental problem. It's really incredibly simple: if you're going to have "Major League Soccer," they would have to be spending, for each team, upwards of $50-100 million on player salaries-- ten to twenty times what they're spending now. And there's no bridging that gap, in my view. There is nothing else that you could conceivably do that would raise it to a level that made it globally competitive and ultimately attractive to the majority of Americans.

"I think it can be a niche, as it is now. It's a very successful "minor league." To me, the model is Minor League Baseball until the arrival of the broadcast era. They didn't pretend to challenge the Majors. They served local markets, and would have gone on being successful if they hadn't been taken over by the Major League teams and served into feeder clubs. To a large extent, that was a consequence of the broadcast era, where fans locally transferred their allegiance to the Major League teams in their region, because they could see them. They followed the quality.

"This is not an American thing, but a global thing-- people like to see the best, and you only need to watch Real Madrid or Bayern Munich or Manchester United for a few games to know that it's a different world from MLS. The quality is way in excess of anything that's produced here, so the fate of MLS is to be a minor league."