Major League Soccer will look very different in 2017. Because it will be joined by the respective Uniteds from Atlanta and Minnesota, to be sure. But mostly because it will likely sport less star power than it has in several years. That is to say, it will employ far fewer aging European household names, tempted stateside for a last hurrah, payday and curtain call.

This is a good thing.

And this is the legacy of the league’s 2016 season.

Because this past season, the Designated Player Rule came full circle. The sorts of players the rule was designed to attract – David Beckham and all the rest, whose magnetism and fame would bring new attention to a league going nowhere fast – now no longer represent the best use of the three dispensation players each team is allowed without counting towards their salary cap.

In 2016, Steven Gerrard quietly piled up 11 assists for the Los Angeles Galaxy but missed almost half the regular season with injuries and was never the most important player on his team. Frank Lampard scored 12 goals for New York City FC but was hardly the primary reason the club was so much improved. Robbie Keane no longer carried the Galaxy on his shoulders after being its linchpin for four years. Didier Drogba was actually benched by the Montreal Impact in favor of journeyman nobody Matteo Mancosu. Andrea Pirlo remained a very expensive piece of bling for NYCFC.

Next year, all but Pirlo will be gone, as their expiring contracts were not renewed. Had Pirlo’s deal been up, he may have suffered the same fate. Because in the grand scheme of this sort of signing, he’s now more a relic of a flashier and less practical time than a value-for-money asset.

The DPs that made the difference this season were of the 2.0 incarnation, the more recent interpretation of the rule by teams favoring lesser-knowns who will help them win trophies, rather than jersey-sale standings. They were Toronto FC’s Sebastian Giovinco, Michael Bradley and Jozy Altidore. Mauro Diaz of FC Dallas. The New York Red Bulls’ Sacha Kljestan and Bradley Wright-Phillips – both MVP finalists. They were the Galaxy’s Giovani Dos Santos. Nicolas Lodeiro of the title-winning Seattle Sounders. Ignacio Piatto of the Impact. Diego Valeri in Portland. Shkelzen Gashi in Colorado.

They were mostly men only an aficionado would have heard of before they came stateside – save for the American and Mexican national teamers. And they came while they were at their best, or even earlier.

Indeed, the only traditional DPs to decide games this year were MVP David Villa for NYCFC and Orlando City’s Kaka, who scored nine goals and assisted on 10. But this year, they were the exception to the rule.

There once was value in being a retirement league – and for a long while, MLS certainly was that. There are only so many ways of gathering traction in an impossibly crowded domestic sporting landscape. Or to gain attention from a global soccer community that very much rates leagues by reputation.

Do these things matter? Absolutely. Players decide where they’ll go by cachet and cash. You need both. Signing big names, no matter how far over the hill they are, injects that cachet instantly. Things snowball from there. Viewers, in turn, choose what foreign leagues they’ll watch by which has the most players they like, or have heard of. If you’re going to be a globally respected and marketable and monetizeable league, you need those big names to get you started.

So after a decade of treading water and trying not to go under, MLS signed David Beckham. And then Thierry Henry. And then Cuauhtemoc Blanco. And then things started to happen very quickly. The rapid expansion, the soaring expansion fees, the soccer-specific stadiums, the climbing attendance, the arrival of non-minuscule television money, growing ratings. They are all post-Beckham landmarks. Certainly, the league had done yeoman’s work of its own to solidify and stabilize, but a lot of things don’t happen, or don’t happen as quickly, without the famous men putting on the right jerseys.

Yet we come to a point where all of that isn’t necessary anymore. The shiny stars have carried the league past the point of their own usefulness, making themselves obsolete. The soccer is markedly better from even a half decade ago. Salaries are rising. Teams are developing real prospects and signing respected pros from abroad in their primes, and not just as DPs. People watch for the action now – not the names they’ve been told to watch for.

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