No surprise: Don Garber lies about the state of MLS

As most football fans know, it's time to crown the champion of MLS on Saturday night. You didn't know? Well you should watch this below ...

Anyway the championship game will be held in Canada for the second time, with Toronto FC hosting Seattle Sounders, a team you will recall this blog went to see back in August when we scouted Nicolas Lodeiro and company. It's a great matchup that features Lodeiro for the Sounders and Italian star Sebastian Giovinco for TFC, marking a rare title game in which both teams' best players are not even 30 years old, let alone the minimum age requirement of 35 for most foreign stars. 

This fact has caused MLS Commissioner Don Garber to go into full-on bragging mode about the quality of MLS, Garber claims that we have "young stars" to look forward to as he continues to make MLS one of the "best leagues in the world."

Said Garber: "Without doubt the target is younger players who are coming at the prime of their career or even as they're beginning to establish their career.

"The strategy in the past might have been to sign players that were well known who have already established their legend playing someplace else. Now we're able to bring in a (Nicolas) Lodeiro who is an accomplished player at 28, but he's the MLS newcomer of the year and we're hoping he can create a legend for himself in Major League Soccer and in Seattle.

"Certainly Sebastian Giovinco has been able to prove that, and Giovani dos Santos who has seen his career really rise to an entirely new level by playing in (Los Angeles). It's part of the evolution of our league."

Let's examine this statement. Bragging about players 28 years old is great and Lodeiro and Giovinco are solid. But if we are talking about great players at that age, we are talking about this guy and this guy. Lodeiro only made 13 appearances for Seattle though he is a player on the rise while Giovinco has never been considered one of the top 50 players in the world.

Meanwhile, it's true that Dos Santos has been more productive in MLS than anywhere else in his career. But is that rising "to an entirely new level," as Garber says, or simply dominating an inferior league. Garber is ridiculous in thinking the U.S. fan somehow won't understand this. Obviously, Giovinco never dominated Serie A like this. To put things into perspective, when The Phantom is playing goalkeeper with little boys and girls in summer camp, he morphs into a fearsome combination of Gigi Buffon and Edwin van der Sar. Those 10-year-olds don't stand a chance!

You can read more nonsense from Garber here.  He wasn't asked about the embarrassing fact that MLS teams fly commercial, and if he was, he would probably tell you that flying Southwest is part of his master plan to "grow the game" and make MLS "one of the best leagues" in the world. Much like Sunil Gulati with the U.S. team, Garber exists to try to fool American fans into thinking MLS is a premium product. It's not and won't be anytime soon, given his plans to expand the league to such lengths that we could eventually have a top flight as big as a 48-team World Cup.