The case for Zlatan in MLS... and the case against Zlatan

Major League Soccer doesn’t need Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

And yet, MLS could really benefit from Zlatan being here for a year or two.

On Friday, the 36-year-old Swedish superstar announced his arrival in Los Angeles to play for the Galaxy in the most Zlatan way possible, with a simple yet charmingly arrogant full-page add in the L.A. Times.

The signing has raised from the dead a conversation about what kind of league, exactly, MLS is and should be. For the first two decades of its life, it was plainly the sort of circuit that provided a cozy home for aging stars looking to glide into retirement, ideally within easy distance to New York City or Los Angeles.

There’s no need to rehash all the big names that have passed through the league over the years. We’ll just collectively call it the Beckham Era, following in the wake of David Beckham’s signing in 2007. Certainly, there were big names recruited before then, but the adoption of the Designated Player rule – initially dubbed the “Beckham Rule” – opened the floodgates.

And that was fine. It brought attention and credibility and accelerated the growth of teams, infrastructure and revenue. But MLS was also affixed with the dreaded “retirement league” label.

Lately, that image has changed.

The last batch of aged star imports had a relatively limited impact. These big names lumbered in but in a lot of cases delivered little except the cachet of their reputation. Steven Gerrard was forgettable with the Galaxy. Kaka was solid-but-not-exceptional for Orlando City. Didier Drogba was influential on the Montreal Impact but forever seemed on the brink of leaving. New York City FC spanned the entire spectrum: Andrea Pirlo was a bust; Frank Lampard was good for a season and mostly absent for another; and David Villa has turned out to be an MVP and perhaps the best striker in league history.

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Yet none changed the landscape for MLS. There hasn’t been a seminal DP signing among those expensively extracted from Europe to cast their refracted shine over the league. There was no other Beckham. No second coming of Thierry Henry. No new Cuauhtemoc Blanco, even.

The first paradigm shift was a brief strategy of bringing home the pillars of the U.S. national team, rather than foreign stars, resulting in a flurry of massive contracts for the likes of Clint Dempsey, Michael Bradley, Jermaine Jones and, later, Tim Howard and a few others.

But in the last year or two, teams have turned toward younger but unestablished talent on the upswing of its career to fill those higher-paying roster slots, and to spend whatever transfer money there is on a cast of young South Americans. That trend was driven home by Atlanta United’s record signing of Argentinian teenage super-prospect Ezequiel Barco this winter.

Signing Zlatan, he of the strutting persona and piercing glares and wondrous goals and outsized character, would be a regression to the mean, of sorts. A temporary one, perhaps. But nevertheless a return to the league’s old star-loving ways.

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The implications thereof might be to remind the world’s players of what the league was, rather than what it is. And it once was a place where you went after you’d already played your best soccer, not when you hadn’t played it yet.

Since reputation is everything when players choose their next league, that could be damaging. A lot of progress has been made, and a lot of work done, for MLS to establish itself as a launching pad where promising young players gladly sign.

The league doesn’t need Zlatan. It doesn’t need him to fill seats or get people to tune in. Some more will come to the stadiums to see him. And a few extra households might flip their TVs to a game that promises his participation. But he won’t move the needle significantly.