As The MLS Bubble Turns

I hope everyone enjoyed the holiday weekend as Denver blew up half of Wyoming's inventory of fireworks.  We had some significant developments around the MLS Is Back tournament in the last 36 hours.

Sunday the Rapids were scheduled to fly to Orlando, until they weren't.  The final round of tests conducted on Friday returned two positive tests, which meant that nobody could fly yesterday and the whole travelling group had to be retested.  Yesterday the Rapids sent out an official update that the team would fly down tomorrow (Tuesday).

That lasted about 24 hours until news broke that the team was back at the Dick this afternoon preparing to leave, and sure enough they did.  When they reach Walt Disney World tonight they'll be the final team to enter the MLS bubble in Orlando.  This evening the team sent out another official update saying the team had gotten the results of the tests from yesterday back and everyone tested negative.  The two people that tested positive yesterday still stayed in Denver and will join the team in Orlando once they have a second negative test returned after at least 24 hours.

Once that news came out the big news of the day broke, that FC Dallas has been withdrawn from the tournament by MLS due to having 10 players test positive since they reached Orlando.  Even after having rescheduled their first game it was determined that it was not viable to have them try to compete.  MLS has not yet announced how the tournament will change to deal with this missing team or how Dallas will make up the three group stage games that are meant to count towards the regular season standings.

That may be because there's more to come.  There are reports that Nashville has 5 to 8 members of their party that have tested positive.  If accurate that may lead to them needing to be removed from the tournament as well, which would leave the league with a much easier 6 groups of 4 teams to deal with.

I said it last week, and I still feel that this tournament is a bad idea at this time.  The best move is just to end it now.