Major League Soccer (MLS) will host its annual All-Star game on Wednesday night. Twenty-six of the best players in MLS will compete against the All-Stars from Liga MX at Allianz Field in St. Paul, Minnesota. The game will kick off at 8:30 p.m. ET and air on ESPN. It will also stream on WatchESPN and fuboTV.
Of the 26 players on the MLS All-Star team, three are from LAFC — defender Diego Palacios, midfielder Ilie Sanchez and forward Carlos Vela. The host team, Minnesota United, will feature two players as playmaker Emanuel Reynoso and goalkeeper Dayne St. Clair will look to put on a show for the home crowd. Minnesota head coach Adrian Heath will lead the MLS quad which will face Liga MX for the second consecutive year.
Videos by PopCulture.com
“We played Everton a couple of weeks ago and after the game, the one thing they said was, ‘The gameday experience was fantastic,’” Heath said on The Call Up’s live episode Monday. “And I think we’re going to get a full house again. Our supporters turn up and they’re going to get behind this group on Wednesday.”
Liga MX is the top soccer league in Mexico and was formed in 1943. The all-star team will be led by manager Diego Cocca and captained by goalkeeper Camilo Vargas, who is a member of the defending champion team Atlas. The MLS stars know they are going to be in for a battle just like it was last year.
“Judging off of last year, it’s a competitive atmosphere,” Walker Zimmerman of Nashville SC said. “The game is not something that you see in a typical all-star game, whether it’s the NBA, baseball – it’s very competitive. “Having it last year in LA, fans were all behind it, it was passionate and then we won it in a PK shootout. So now we’re looking to run it back, and it’s a great game with certainly a high level of competition. And again, you don’t see that all the time in an all-star game.” At the all-star break, the leading teams in MLS are the Philadelphia Union and LAFC. The Union is in first place in the Eastern Conference while LAFC is on top of the Western Conference.
