León F.C. won its first international trophy after holding its lead against Los Angeles Football Club.
The stage was set for the second leg of the Scotiabank CONCACAF Champions League Sunday. León and its fans made their way to the City of Angels in hopes of proving a worthy representation for Mexican soccer.
The 3252, LAFC’s leading fanbase, was not going to make it easy for its rivals. In an impeccable atmosphere, the Los Angeles fans felt they could be the twelfth player on the field needing just one goal to tie the aggregate score – a 2-1 lead secured by León at home last Wednesday.
Both teams played an enormous game, but in the end the Liga MX team scored once and would come out with an aggregate score of 3-1. With this, the trophy returned to a Liga MX team only a year after MLS representative Seattle Sounders won the CONCACAF Champions League.
Thirteen Liga MX teams have won the competition since its inception in 1962, while only three MLS representatives have secured the trophy during that time frame. This, along with the recent results between these cross-national matchups, spices up the ongoing debate as to which league is performing better.
CONCACAF recently launched a new method of measurement with a ranking system that awards points based on numbers of international games won. Currently the list has eight Liga MX teams in the top ten with Philadelphia Union and LAFC being the only MLS teams. While this does not validate the level of play among the two leagues, it does show the enormous head start Mexican teams had in this competition.
Professional soccer in Mexico began its era in 1943, a whole 50 years prior to the debut of the MLS in December of 1993. By far it is a business of experience, but MLS has found great success in convincing big-name players to form part of the league. The list is endless: from David Beckham to Zlatan Ibrahimovic, to more recently Xherdan Shaqiri.
However, the debate will never end, since we will always have another matchup to disrupt the previous comparison. One of the greatest opportunities to level things out will come this summer, when the two leagues will meet in a new format of the Leagues Cup. The format consists of fifteen groups of three teams with the two league champions waiting for rivals at the Round of 32 stage of the tournament. This will all take place starting in July, awarding the two leagues yet another battle to prove who is the current champion of the never-ending battle between Liga MX and MLS.