Major League Soccer is not the greatest league in the world talent-wise, and their players who are talented are either rare Americans who jet out quickly to Europe or were highly overpaid European footballers who are at the end of their career.

The MLS financial situation is way down, with the exception of D.C. United and Seattle Sounder FC, which are doing great financially.

The MLS and their owners can’t keep putting out big contracts to one player, like David Beckham in Los Angeles, to be their only player in reality. Meanwhile, Landon Donovan still stays here for only $1 million.

Now, there are some great European players, most notably Freddie Ljungberg, that have come over to MLS and really wanted to play and be a winner.

Ljungberg talked about this very point:

"I spoke to the boys, and if you wanna be a winner like Arsenal, and all the top Euro clubs, you look and they don’t make mistakes. In the past few games, we made some mistakes and let the other team back. Today, no mistakes and we win 3-0, so it’s all about winning and not making mistakes to be a great club like this club can be."

That’s the kind of European player that MLS needs: Someone who actually cares about the game and wants to win.

So, the MLS can bring in some old Euro vets, but that won’t last for long, because those vets have about two or three years left in them.

The MLS' future is going to rely on their development of young U.S. and foreign players. That development also includes young South American players like Fredy Montero and Alonso, who the Sounders FC scouted and signed.

In the future, the MLS possibly should do what some MLB teams do and have an academy in third world countries and South America. That way, they can have a much easier time finding future great talent.

Then, they would bring those young players into the MLS for three or four years, and when they get noticed by big European clubs, they could sell them to make money.

Or, they can elect to keep a few that would love to stay, like Fredy Montero, who said he loves Seattle.

If the MLS wants to grow and be a competitive league, other than against itself, they are going to have to become a lot better at developing talent and finding foreign talent like Montero by scouting the entire world, not just Mexico.

Those teams also have to sign the players, like the Seattle Sounders FC are going to do with Montero after this season. He will cost about $5-7 million in transfer fees because Seattle already owns 60 percent of Montero's rights, which only costs them $1 million.

It will probably cost $5 million because of how well he has played this season, which is fair. Montero won’t cost DP money though.

So, the reality is that the MLS and all of their teams are going to have to improve their development of great young players by creating a development league. That should hold about 15 players on a DL contract, which would be $55,000 or less.

The next part is improve their scouting a lot by doing what the Sounders did and scour the globe to find great young talent.

That will help improve the quality of the league now and for the future, and when they sell some of the players, they can turn that money right around and reinvest it back into finding and acquiring talent.

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