The most exciting time of year for soccer fans around the world is upon us: the MLS all-star game. That’s right. As the giants of Europe awaken and stomp lower-league teams into the Earth while completing transfers in a confusing array of currencies, the most expensive players in America, plus three or four seemingly random other people, will play a game against one of the aforementioned European giants. Just for funsies. Fans will argue that the underappreciated player from their team deserves to be there over Designated Player X. Some pundit, somewhere, will try to make a very shaky correlation between the result of the game and MLS’s standing in the world. And MLS will claim that something called a “homegrown game” happened.



If that all sounds terrible to you, well, it usually is. The MLS all-star game is a dreadfully uninteresting affair where teams’ best players get sent out to play an extra mid-week game for no reason other than to try to...