It is a very intriguing idea that if pulled off well would really great. How awesome would it be, for example,to host a regular-season match at BBVA against the real Chivas!
The one thing I can never see happening under any circumstances, however, are existing MLS franchising agreeing to any system that could even under the remotest of possibilities ever see themselves being relegated to effectively minor league status.
If a "merger" were to happen I think it would go down something like this:
- While some things (like marketing and television deals, league rules of play, player discipline, training and assigning of officials for games) would be combined under the new umbrella organization, to a significant extent the leagues would continue function independently much like Major League Baseball did for most of the 20th century.
- Liga MX teams would all be in one "conference" together and the MLS teams would constitute the other "conference." While teams would largely compete within their own conference for most of the regular season, perhaps as many as 8-10 matches would be "inter-league" matches which would count as regular matches in the tables.
- At the end of the regular season the top teams from each conference play in their own playoffs to determine a conference champ with the two champs meeting in a final two-leg series to determine the overall North American champ.
- Under this arrangement the Liga MX "conference" could even still haverelegation/promotion (like it functions currently) within their "conference" while the MLS conference would not... and the conferences wouldn't even have to have the same number of teams.
- To me the more difficult issues to work out would be things like labor issues, trades, drafts, transfers, youth development systems and access to those players, and whatever political/legal issues would come up as a result of being in three different countries. Even something as simple as American players not willing to be traded to Mexican clubs and vice versa could be much more problematic an issue and much more frequent a problem than say being traded between a US/Canadian clubs.