Analysis: Where does MLS ranks among the world’s best soccer leagues?

The true purgatory of the MLS follower is this: For every person who wants to tell you that soccer is boring or not a real sport, there is a purist on the other side of the aisle who’s desperate to remind you MLS is not one of the top leagues on the planet.

They aren’t wrong, of course — but over the past decade or so, there’s been a change that the most committed haters might not want to admit: MLS is starting to catch up.

Opta, the global soccer statistics behemoth, has MLS rated as the ninth-strongest league in the world. After the Big Five leagues from Europe — in England, Italy, Germany, Spain and France — there’s a big step down to the next group, of which MLS is rated near the top.

The site GlobalFootballRankings.com, which does similar mathematical rankings calculations, concurs. Both sites have MLS ranked just behind Brazil, Portugal and Belgium, and just ahead of England’s second division and the Argentine league. In a key ranking for the MLS league office, too, both have MLS ranked ahead of Mexico’s Liga MX.

Minnesota United coach Eric Ramsay grew up steeped in the British game, but he said that when he talks to people at the highest levels in England and Wales these days, he hears nothing but respect for MLS — especially from people who are charged with identifying new players.

“With the players that leave the league and the level that they go to, and the level of interest in some of the players — and particularly those like [former Chicago Fire forward] Jhon Durán going to the Premier League straight from MLS and suddenly being an 18 million-pound player seemingly overnight — I think that has spiked everyone’s interest to the level of talent here,” Ramsay said.

Not that long ago, it was pretty easy for those same people to dismiss MLS as a nouveau-riche soccer backwater, in the same category as today’s absurdist Saudi Pro League. David Beckham, the man for whom the designated player rule was created way back in 2007, was the shining example of this view of MLS: It was a league that was just a place for aging European stars to pick up some paychecks, without much in the way of competition.

Underneath it all, though, the league has seen a groundswell of actual development — and according to Loons striker Kelvin Yeboah, the quality and the intensity are high enough that, these days, it’s not so easy to waltz into MLS.

“Even you see when the top players, they come here and they think they have an easy time … most of the time it doesn’t work because it still requires a lot of effort and a lot of energy to play this kind of game,” Yeboah said.

Some of that development has been from structural changes and changes to player development. But what’s changed things more than anything is that, along the way, MLS’ owners realized they were going to have to spend some money — and not just to get a single big name to put on the stadium marquee.

In 2007, Beckham’s first year, his annualized guaranteed compensation was $6.5 million. Meanwhile, no other MLS team had a payroll over $5 million. Beckham made twice as much as every one of his LA Galaxy teammates combined, and more than one out of every seven compensation dollars, league-wide, went to Beckham.

Gradually, though, MLS has introduced ways for teams to pay more for players — and not just the three designated player spots. The league has seen far more improvement from increasing paychecks down the roster, not just at the top.

It tracks with what the venerable old book “Soccernomics,” by journalist Simon Kuper and economist Stefan Szymanski, found way back around the time that Beckham was moving to MLS. Their analysis showed that, from 1998 to 2007, 89% of the variation in the final standings in England’s first and second divisions could be explained by payroll disparities.

Even two decades later, when aggregated across an entire league, this basic law is still true. Getting better on the field is possible — but it’ll cost you.

Data aside, when it comes to firsthand evidence, you won’t find a better expert than Yeboah. There aren’t many other players who have played in four of the top seven European leagues like Yeboah has, plus in North America — and Yeboah’s pretty confident in the future for MLS.

“I think it’s up there in the top six, top seven,” he said. “I think MLS will easily reach there, because the top teams are really top.”