Is Major League Soccer ready to take a step up in the world? Its profile has undoubtedly increased in recent years, with the arrival of the likes of Juan Pablo Angel, David Beckham, Thierry Henry and Rafa Marquez helping to get the league in front of non-soccer television audiences. The national team’s relative success in South Africa sent Landon Donovan out onto the chat show circuit and football, finally, is beginning to gain some traction. The next frontier for MLS is nothing like as grand as becoming the leading sport in the USA, or attracting millions of overseas supporters. The next challenge is simply to smash a ceiling, to grab a larger overall share of the domestic sports market and, perhaps more importantly, to turn Americans who prefer to dismiss the league in favour of the European game on to MLS.

In order to snare most of those fans MLS must improve in quality, that being the watchword for the league’s harshest critics. South American football expert Tim Vickery wrote recently about the relationship between competition and quality of play in Argentina, arguing that each is the cost we must pay in order to have the other. Nowhere is that truer than Major League Soccer, a league built on the very American idea that parity is essential. MLS operates a single entity system whose purpose is not only to ensure that the league stands up on its own two feet, but to make it competitive.

Parity is something of a bone of contention among those who want to see MLS progress. In a league with no promotion or relegation, the teams finishing at the bottom of the table one season are given the benefit of favourable drafting rights for the following season. Salary budgets - with the noteworthy exceptions that I’ll come on to - are capped at $2.55m, affording teams the option of building an all-round strong squad or top-loading it with a couple of star players. Parity is part of why the New York Red Bulls have gone from being the worst team in MLS last season to being a genuine contender for the title in 2010. It’s also - again, only partly - why DC United have sunk from mid-table to being cut adrift at the bottom.

In some ways it sounds ideal. It means no team owner will ever vote for relegation, of course, but at least MLS will often have different champions in successive seasons. But is it holding the league back? By capping salaries, MLS ruled itself out of the chase for big name, high quality players. The erosion of the league’s parity principle began in 2007 when the Designated Player Rule went live, allowing former England captain David Beckham to join Los Angeles Galaxy. The rule was a simple one: every team had one designated player slot, and filling it would cost $400,000 (later increased to $415,000) from the salary cap but allow the club to pay a bigger salary on top.

Earlier this year, the Designated Player Rule was extended. Each MLS club now has two designated player positions to fill (at a reduced cap cost of $335,000 apiece, or half of that for half a season) and the option to add a third in return for a luxury tax paid into the single entity’s allocation kitty and distributed evenly to teams without a third designated player. Some teams were quick to react and added star quality to their rosters. The Red Bulls have three, in the shape of Angel, Henry and Marquez. Chicago added Freddie Ljungberg and Nery Castillo. LA promoted Donovan to designated player alongside Beckham, Seattle Sounders signed Alvaro Fernandez and Blaise N’Kufo, and Toronto brought in the Spaniard Mista to add to Julian de Guzman.

The idea is to raise the quality of the league as teams add better players in the search for silverware and shirt sales. But as well as encouraging people through the turnstiles and increasing television audiences, the extended Designated Player Rule also marks the beginning of the end of MLS parity. The depth of league owners’ pockets now has an effect (in theory) on the pitch, not just in marketing budgets and the standard of the matchday experience. That may not be a bad thing, as star quality, like money, talks and talks loudly. But there is another side to the parity coin. As Vickery would say, by increasing quality MLS will compromise its level of competition. The top of the division could become more predictable and although that’s not necessarily a bad thing it would take a little bit of the edge off the league.

Perhaps more interesting is the situation at the bottom of the table. Can the league work without relegation and parity? If the poorer teams become stranded at the bottom of the table with only the draft to pull them out of the mire, further reform will be inevitable.

Elsewhere, plans are afoot to give MLS clubs a better grip on their increasingly demanding schedules. The squads are set to be increased to a maximum of 30 players (26 senior professionals and four developmental players), a respectable limit in anyone’s book. Presumably coupled with a modest increase in the salary cap for 2011, this is reform without an obvious fly in the ointment. With larger squads, MLS teams should be able to be more competitive in the CONCACAF Champions League without reducing their ability to compete domestically for the duration of a more demanding 34-game season. In turn, that might even help the competitive edge return post-Beckham Rule.

Even more positively, the effects of deeper rosters could well reach the roots of the American game in an area MLS has neglected lately. Major League Soccer’s reserve league was abandoned in 2008, leaving youngsters, rookies and fringe players in MLS without competitive football. Along with increased rosters, MLS is set to reintroduce a reserve league format in 2011 to provide more players with a chance to prove themselves. With players emerging from MLS clubs’ academies as well as being drafted out of college, the fact that MLS had no reserve league should be a little surprising. Its return is welcome.

To cut an extremely long story short, MLS is at something of a crossroads in its development. There are questions to be answered and gambles to be taken, and it should be a fascinating journey. Don’t take your eyes of this league for a second - this is a football like no other.