On U.S. national team players playing overseas vs. playing in MLS:
"If you can go play at Everton, if you can play at Fulham like Clint was, if you can play a little bit at Hull like Jozy was, that's great. If you're in Denmark or Norway or Sweden, you're playing a little bit or you're on the bench, that's not helping you. If you're playing in MLS every week, that's a lot better than playing a minor role on some team in Europe. So if you have the opportunity to actually play games at some of the big leagues in Europe, great. But if not, you're hindering your development by not playing games.
"Our league is **** good. Anybody who comes into this league from afar, it's always the same comment; 'I had no idea how good that league was, I had no idea how good MLS is.' For most guys, the most important thing is playing, and if you're not playing, you're not going to get better."
On the reputation of MLS around the world:
"It's sometimes difficult because you want to have a very clear identity who you are as a league. We all want this league to compete with the other sports in our country. To do that you have to keep young, talented Americans here and you also have to bring in quality players that make the league better. Now what we're seeing is that owners are starting to take more chances on big name players and bringing them in whereas in the past they didn't want to spend the money.
"It's always difficult because we're still a little bit behind as far as salaries go. And if you have an opportunity to go, you can't blame guys for wanting to make more money. So we're still a little bit behind, but we're slowly getting there. It would be a massive boost for our league to get some of (the national team players) back. We talk about it all the time as players, it's not only the Henrys and Blancos and Beckhams and Ljungbergs - it's the guys right underneath that that organically make each team a little bit better on the field. These guys are big stars that help the profile of the league, but the guys just below that actually make the league a lot better. And if we can get more guys wanting to come back here and play and we're able to pay them comparable salaries, it could help our league a lot."
