If perception is reality – it is – and people are generally lazy in forming those perceptions – they are – then MLS has an All-Star problem. A fairly sizeable one, in fact.

Most hard, angular opinions melt in the lamplight glow of experience, and in this we have the fundamental issue of politics. You can say anything to a braying audience from a dais, but to sit in a fresh Syrian immigrant’s living room and say the same toneless inanities is something else. People, or at least those people worth acknowledging, simply wouldn’t do it. You’d listen to their plight, their struggle, and experience their tears and drink their tea and soak in their hospitality and suddenly your world is a slate gray where once it was white and black.

In this way, global soccer is far more perception than reality. There is simply too much of it to be had by any one person, and so we lean on lazily constructed preconceptions like a crutch and hope they are not unbound by those people on the ground floor living in grays rather than absolutes.

– The French Ligue 1 is ____ because ____

– Zlatan Ibrahimovic needs to ____ because he frankly cannot _____

– Cristiano Ronaldo is a _____

– Mongolian soccer need only ____ to join the world’s _____

(I have a thing for Mongolian soccer. Let’s… move on).

There are more opinions than there are things to be opinionated about, because they are easy to come by and we feel entitled for reasons that stretch into the mist. But the frank fact of the matter is that we only really have space to generate those conceptions – and really dropping the pre – by sitting in the league’s or the player’s or the fan’s living room and hearing his words form before us like building blocks instead of smoke. The former is real – built on real world experience and time spent inside the culture – and the latter is internet polity.

The worst preconception MLS harbors is that it is an old man’s league, a retirement community making space for Frank Lampard and Andrea Pirlo because there are not enough good players here. There is nothing so damaging to the league’s reputation, and nothing that drives away young players more quickly than the preconception that MLS is for the Olds and the Not Readys. And what’s worse, those swirling opinions say, the European retreads are, to a man, the league’s best, brightest and most fundamentally sound players.

It is not true. None of it is true anymore. And yet the MLS All-Star Game screams it from the hilltops to the rest of the world: if you are paying attention, your lazy preconceptions are correct.

Aside from allocation rules and the salary cap, the MLS All-Star Game may be the undisputed king of benign fan regret. There has been talk of scuttling it (I have specifically talked about scuttling it), or rebranding it, or adding a skills competition a la the NBA to make the weekend more of an event. There has even been talk of returning it to an East vs. West event, ripping out the European opponent and making it an all-MLS affair.

These are all fine and good. Ideal scenarios being what they are, the MLS All-Star Game should probably go away. But if we decide to live in this world – in American soccer in the year of our lord 2016 – we have to admit that it is here for the foreseeable future. Players have immutable ASG bonuses baked into their contracts the league is not simply going to dissipate for a couple upset fans. At least until the next CBA hinge point, the game is sitting in the corner of the room, silent and sullen but very much there.

The problem isn’t necessarily the game itself. Or even that Arsenal or Manchester United or even West Ham reserve teams use the so-called best of MLS as a backboard to sharpen their swords for the season. The game is an exhibition and the results don’t matter and everything else. On the ground floor, in the moment, you can lose all the outside fluff and just kind of take in the moment with a mild sense of enjoyment. “Hey that’s Jack Wilshere where’s ur cigarette m8 lol I will take another Heineken yes.”

But MLS is fighting a global war of perception; with its own targeted domestic casuals, with international fans, prospective young signings in major global leagues, with even its own hardcore fan base. And the MLS All-Star Game is frankly a horrible representation of the league on a platform it has raised above the rest of the regular season by its own volition.

The All-Star Game is a time capsule, and fans attempting to see the league for what it currently is and not what it was will struggle to see through that. It is easy enough to snipe at MLS for physical play and The Olds coming over and dominating from the jump and whatever else you heard about the league in 2004 and have yet to amend, but it’s another to experience it from close up on a regular basis. It is a different league than it was, outgrowing the shackled constraints the All-Star Game wore and escaping to new horizons.

And the caveat we must broach: Yes, MLS is still not technical enough, and it is nowhere near the world’s top leagues in myriad ways, and it is not even the best league on its own three-nation continent. But it is so much better than the All-Star Game would lead you to believe.

All-Star Game rosters are essentially a fevered fantasy based on theoretical ceilings. Frank Lampard makes the 2015 game not because he’s even in the top 10 of the league’s best midfielders, but because he is a Name and he was Once Good. He was selected – like Clint Dempsey was selected this year – because he is theoretically good. If we wipe the slate of age and form and elevate each of these players to their peak in their prime – even if it was 10 years ago – well, these players belong here.

Not all of the picks were thus – Wil Trapp, who has the second-most completed passes in the league this year (behind Ozzie Alonso, who was not selected), made it despite the scourge of youth – but the plague will persist until the game crumbles under its own weight. It’s an exhibition and the artifice that these players are actually being picked on form and current quality and not marketability falls to the floor real fast.

Peel back the layers and you have the real league, the one that might actually smash a few lazy preconceptions, with Fanendo Adi and Diego Valeri and Tommy McNamara and Jordan Morris and Matt Hedges and Saad Abdul-Salaam and Micheal Azira (MLS fourth-leading passer Micheal Azira!) and tons more. If you were picking based on season and current quality, the current All-Star team would turn over twice.

Those in MLS’s living room understand where MLS is going. It is slowly trending younger – it is now officially a younger league than Liga MX – but preconceptions are a hell of a thing to break. MLS still has so, so far to travel in its perilous journey to join the world’s best leagues, and fronting retreads during one of the league’s showcase events is not helping anything.

Perhaps the league is learning. Last year, Don Garber’s commissioner’s picks went to Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, neither of whom had done anything in the league. This year’s went to Kyle Beckerman (eh) and Mauro Diaz (yes). So that’s fine.

But to my eyes there are two options for the future: either make this game an actual All-Star Game reflecting the best, most in-form players in the league (you can even keep fan votes, just pick your own players on the bedrock of form), or get rid of it. At the very least, match up the young kids against the old guard and see what happens. I suspect the preconceptions would go running for the hills.

Half measures only serve to feed the lazy, stereotypical narrative that old and tired beats young and hungry in MLS. It is a poison that infects the future growth of the league outside its own borders. And that, it would seem, is no longer the case. Shouldn’t the All-Star Game better reflect that new reality?