MLS kicks off 25th season with long-awaited return to Miami, debut in Nashville

NEW YORK — MLS threw a big bash on Wednesday to kick off the league’s 25th season, inviting a horde of media from around the world to meet with executives, team owners and other dignitaries.

As you’d expect, there was a lot said by a lot of people; and as you’d expect, much of it was fanfare. But there was plenty of news along the way. Here are some of the highlights:

"At the time when we had Chivas USA launch, we thought it was a really, really good idea. But we had the strength and the courage to walk away from that, and look where we are now with LAFC.

So it’s the understanding that we have to recognize mistakes that we’ve made to be able to have a new path going forward. I think that in 20 years, there have been more mistakes, or more decisions I’d rather do differently.

I think in Chicago, [moving the Fire to] Bridgeview made a lot of sense for us in 2006. We’ll be at Soldier Field this year, we’re going to have 30, 40,000 people at the opening game. I think that [leaving Soldier Field for Bridgeview] probably wasn’t the best decision we made. But rather than just hunker down and fight the fight for something that we did then, we came up with a new plan."

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"We realize that the people who get the least amount of information are those fans in the stadium. We’ve developed a number of different tools that we can use …

There is a Twitter feed, @MLSVAR, and that gives you every decision during the weekend on your Twitter feed. It may take a minute or two longer, but you will get the decision. So it will say: violent conduct red card, 34th minute. We will say exactly what it is, and you will get that update.

The other piece of in-stadium communication is trialing, testing, what others U.S. leagues do, which is announce the decision in the stadium by referees. We think it's the way to go, we think it's inevitable, and there's a number of other big competitions like the [German] Bundesliga, [English] Premier League, Dutch League, who are very supportive of this and have done trials. We've done trials. …

We are waiting for the AGM to occur at IFAB [the global rule-book author] on February 29, to get some direction. And we hope that is positive such that we can implement at least a testing phase for in-stadium communication."

"The biggest lesson is, I’m more persistent than I thought I was, and I’m more stubborn than my wife thinks I am. That’s the biggest lesson. Never take anything for granted. Never assume that things can happen overnight, because they definitely haven’t. …

Everything that we’ve tried to do to get this franchise up and running was a challenge. It wasn’t one thing. From finding the land, picking what kind of stadium we want, what kind of players we want, what kind of manager we want, even down to what tiles we have in the showers — everything was a challenge. But like I said, I wasn’t going to give up, I was never going to give up in any way. There were moments where I looked, and I thought this might not happen. You know, there were definitely moments like that.

And I sat with the commissioner — and the commissioner has done an incredible job for this league in this country — and even me and him would turn around to each other, and it was like, honestly, do we really think this is going to happen? And there wasn’t one moment where I said, ‘You know what, I’ll walk away from this,’ because I knew that Miami was the right place to do this. My commitment was always to the league. I wanted to be successful on the field, and thankfully I was, but my commitment was always to MLS and to try and grow this league."

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"As of now, we do not have anything to announce -- specifically as to our jersey sponsorship or any other major naming rights, be it for our stadium or our training facility. We’ve been in conversations and discussions with global brands. You will see the jersey sponsor or the major naming sponsors having global footprints.

Specifically, Qatar Airways has significant involvement in soccer throughout the world: they’re involved with multiple teams, be it Boca [Juniors, in Argentina] or Roma [in Italy] or Barcelona [in Spain], etc.; and their involvement with with FIFA.

So we have nothing to announce at the moment. I read the same reports, but as we get closer to any type of announcement we will be addressing all of those potential issues or not — because it obviously could be someone that’s not Qatar Airways — at that time. So we’ve made no comment because we really have nothing to comment on."

"All the way through the journey, particularly on tickets, a lot of the constant messaging we were getting from people like Ticketmaster, the ticketing partner at Nissan Stadium, and other people, other teams -- the Predators, the Titans -- everyone says this is a late market, people come late.

And I was talking to the commissioner earlier and he said, ‘You know, you did say that it was going to come later.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m not sure I believed it myself in the time, in the moment.’

But the market has shown fantastic support, particularly in the last month or so. We’re selling over 1000 tickets a day. They’re moving like crazy. We just opened the final section of the stadium …

There won’t be a lot of [Atlanta United] black and red. We know where the tickets are going. I think Atlanta will be well-supported, but not to a point where you think it’s any way dominant."