Christian Seifert first met Don Garber in Miami in 2007. The year was an important historical marker for the working legacy of both men, albeit in significantly different ways.

Two years earlier, Seifert was elevated to CEO of the DFL, the governing body of the top two tiers in German soccer: the Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga. A former executive at MTV, Seifert brought a distinctly different and 21st century approach to the position. In 2000, as part of a broad effort to reorganize the German system following a string of disastrous performances from the national team, the DFL was formed to oversee the top two tiers as a sort of single conglomeration of individual shareholders. This is how Seifert saw the clubs, not necessarily as separate entities but as 36 individual parts of a single overarching business.

The only other nation to do it this way is France, and the German model quickly separated itself as the city on a hill. Among other benefits it allowed the second tier to benefit more heavily from TV revenue, the impressive rise of which in Germany has been badly overshadowed by the funny money being tossed around in England.

Nevertheless, in 2007 Seifert was in the early stages of turning German soccer away from its historic myopia – “the Bundesliga completely underestimated for a long time the power and the meaning of presence in foreign markets,” Seifert says now – and into the bathing glow of Bundesliga matches on televisions in Jakarta and Beijing and New York.

One nation, meanwhile, was not so slow to adapt to the changing tide.

The Bundesliga quietly began its reorganization in the early 2000s, a process that would ultimately establish the basis for the new academy system that produced nearly every World Cup-winning player in 2014. At the same time, the Premier League was reaching its tentacles into every corner of the globe to establish the basis for what is now the most popular league in the world (whether or not it’s technically “the best” on matchday). In the late 1990’s, chief Premier League executive Richard Scudamore sent more than 700 inquiry letters to media companies around the globe about putting Premier League games in front of their consumers.

Fourteen responded.

Scudamore persisted, almost nagged, and by the time Seifert came on board in Germany with global outreach in mind in 2005, the Bundesliga was already badly behind. One of his first efforts in 2005 was to reach out to providers in the U.S., but none were interested. In fact, ESPN told Seifert they’d be happy to distribute Bundesliga games. In the dead of night. And they would not pay for them.

“That was in fact the answer in the beginning, and I completely understood, because it was the honest answer and the right answer,” Seifert says. “We didn’t treat the U.S. market good.”

So by 2007, he was feverishly coming up with new ways to break into a U.S. soccer market suddenly awash with Liverpool and Arsenal and Manchester United jerseys. There are still some English second-tier clubs with higher profiles in the U.S. than the likes of upper echelon German clubs like Werder Bremen and Wolfsburg and Hamburg.

Seifert’s first summit with Garber caught the MLS commissioner in a similarly awkward place. MLS was mired in a transition year in 2007, caught between the league’s first iteration of sagging ticket sales and contraction and a looming spasm of expansion that had already begun its crawl toward the present day. Portland, Seattle, NYCFC and Orlando – generally the league’s four biggest matchday draws of the moment – were still several years away from joining. The latter two didn’t even exist yet.

And the mortar had barely dried on the nascent youth program. MLS had only just begun its academy program in 2007 via the newly formed Development Academy. Considering every other developed soccer nation had academy systems in place for decades, MLS was late to the game. Garber and MLS as a whole were doing their best to make up for lost time with rapid speed.

Seifert’s view of MLS was – and is – bullish. MLS did not have the resources to reel in a bevy of big players, so Garber’s approach was always to focus on the scaffolding of the league first to ensure players actually had a stable league to join first. Things like expansion fees that became a financial life raft, the frantic search for TV rights that’ve continued to pay out more money, and the concerted effort to build so-called soccer specific stadiums.

“I think one of the most important decisions in the past of the MLS was first of all they started to invest in infrastructure and not in players,” Seifert says. “It’s one thing that you have the players, but you have to have a specific atmosphere at matches to get a feeling for soccer. I think to invest and to build dedicated soccer stadiums – I know it’s not everywhere in the MLS – but just dedicated soccer stadiums is very important for the experience of soccer.”

The Bundesliga knows authenticity. The league has the most forgiving ticket pricing structure for any of the world’s so-called big leagues, and the DFL supports the clubs’ decisions to keep tickets almost comically cheap. The fan culture demands it. When Bayer Leverkusen raised season ticket prices by €10 in 2016, fans practically revolted. The price of the new season ticket? €180. By Seifert’s reckoning, Borussia Dortmund makes around €75 million less per year than Manchester United, which has similar support and stadium size, because it refuses to hike its ticket prices to similar heights.

That, in Seifert’s view, has generated real fan support in the league’s bustling standing terraces, which are almost always full in every Bundesliga stadium every weekend. As Seifert puts it, “no matter if you’re a top manager or a bus driver, you should be able to afford a ticket to a soccer game.”

Those small kinds of infrastructure decisions add up. And in Seifert’s mind, the next big frontier MLS has to conquer is not luring high-paid stars from abroad. It’s building up its own development infrastructure like Germany did. That allowed the Bundesliga to combat the Premier League’s ungodly coffers with a system that’s produced far better young players than anything coming out of England. As far as Seifert is concerned, it’s only a matter of packaging and pushing that in front of skeptical U.S. viewers historically shielded from Bundesliga matches. Before signing on with FOX for the 2015-16 season, the Bundesliga’s highest profile TV contract in the U.S. was with GolTV, which had a minuscule reach.

As for the academy system, Germany’s smaller size makes its comprehensive scouting system for players as young as U8 and U9 – generally when Bundesliga academies begin – more effective than it might be in the U.S. But that doesn’t mean Seifert doesn’t see the importance in trying to cover as much ground with as many scouts as possible.

“I think this is a very important issue,” Seifert says. “In these academies of the Bundesliga and the 2. Bundesliga, 5,000 players are educated today. Because each Bundesliga club has the obligation to start at the U12 team up to a U19 team. Germans love rules. This is why we stand on the street no matter if the light is red or if there’s a car or not. Everything is very much ruled and obligated: the number of pitches, the number of coaches, the qualifications of the coaches, the number of doctors, whatever. All must be dedicated to youth development.

“This is one of the most important reasons why we have so many young and talented players. Every year I get asked, ‘Is it not a problem that (former Schalke midfielder) Leroy Sane goes to Manchester City?’ I would say no, because the next Sane here is already playing in one of the youth academies. Probably the next World Cup winners are playing there. Unfortunately we don’t know how old they are right now.”

If this seems like an extraordinary amount of hubris – Seifert basically allowed that a bunch of 10-year-old World Cup winners are toiling in obscurity in German academies at the moment – Germany’s earned the honor. The likes of young international stars like Toni Kroos, Julian Brandt, Max Meyer, Mario Götze, Mats Hummels, Jerome Boateng and Manuel Neuer have a way of backing up development-centric boasts.

Plus, the scouting infrastructure in the Bundesliga is more comprehensive than any in the world. The Bundesliga’s top clubs employ more than 100 part time scouts scouring mostly small hamlets within 70 kilometers of their home base. This was how Bastian Schweinsteiger was identified in a small city of 61,000 called Rosenheim near the Austrian border, and many more besides. Not in massive population centers but in the quiet of the carpeted hills and the rolling forested countryside.

Would they have been identified and pulled into a nurturing academy structure in the wilderness of the U.S., where even the might of the U.S. Soccer Federation employs about as many full and part-time scouts as a single Bundesliga club? Indeed, only about half of MLS clubs even have a single staffer on the payroll with the word ‘scout’ in the job title.

“I think first of all you see a lot of talented U.S. players,” Seifert says. “Some of them are playing right now in the Bundesliga, if you think of a Christian Pulisic or John Brooks or Bobby Wood. An 8-year-old kid is not more or less talented for soccer if he lives in the United States or Germany or Spain, Brazil or Russia. It’s about recognizing the talent and creating structures that you can develop that talent. I think this is the biggest challenge for the MLS, because there must be thousands of very talented players in the U.S., but I would say this is nothing you can change or can solve with some kind of time machine.

“In Germany we have a very developed system starting from each village with only 2,000 people living in it has a soccer team that plays in its own league. Therefore you see very soon very talented teams and players are scouted and they go to the next team. From today’s perspective, one of the biggest advantages is that every club that plays in the Bundesliga and the 2. Bundesliga has to run a youth academy.”

It’s an abiding cliche that Germany runs on the quiet, devilishly effective efficiency of its people, but it is also not exactly incorrect. Galvanized to action, the Bundesliga and the overarching DFL created a development empire in Germany that’s globalizing at a faster rate than any league in the world.

The Premier League may forever hold the heart of the U.S. as the country’s foreign league of record. But the Bundesliga contains far more useful examples for MLS to follow of how to build from within sans perhaps the mega-prestige and bloated transfer fees. Seifert certainly sees that. Perhaps so too does Garber.