MLS All-Star Game should be changed to actual game between MLS all-stars

An All-Star Game happened, but it didn't have the feel of one. Perhaps because when a selection of Major League Soccer stars beat Tottenham Hotspur 2-1 just outside of Denver Wednesday night, they were hardly all stars.

On the MLS side some were, to be sure. Kaka and David Villa anchored the league delegation, supplemented by a raft of U.S. national teamers whose names, like Dempsey and Altidore, will have resonated with the local audience. On the other side, however, that was less the case.

That's because Spurs made for an uninspiring opponent. While the likes of Christian Eriksen, Harry Kane, Nacer Chadli and Moussa Dembele are able craftsmen and highly respected professionals – some of whom, Eriksen and Kane in particular, have the makings of true stardom – they aren't bona fide household names exactly. Because these days, the real stars leave Tottenham for bigger clubs when given the chance. That made this game a fairly forgettable affair, lacking in actual star power.

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You can debate the merits of all-star games – you can set them on fire, for all I care. But if MLS insists on conforming to American standards and having such a game, it should think hard about the format. If it retains the present one of fielding just one all-star team opposite some imported European powerhouse, that team must actually be a properly big club.

In a press release, MLS called Tottenham a "legendary English Premier League club." But the truth is Spurs have never won the Premier League and claimed the title of its First Division predecessor just twice – in 1951 and 1961. They have never won the Champions League, or even come close. They have eight FA Cups, but none since 1991. They have won the UEFA Cup, in 1972 and 1984, and the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup in 1963. The League Cup is the only thing of note Tottenham has won since the turn of the millennium.

Hardly the stuff of legend. Tottenham didn't measure up to last year's MLS All-Star Game adversary, Bayern Munich, or the three-year stretch from 2010 through 2012 when Manchester United came twice and Chelsea did once.

Even though MLS was missing Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Robbie Keane, Michael Bradley and Sebastian Giovinco, Kaka and Villa still gave it more famous names in its lineup than Spurs had. And had those men not all been late scratches with injuries, an old-fashioned East-versus-West would have felt a lot more like an All-Star game than what we got instead. It certainly would have contained more glitz.

That isn't to say it was a bad game. In the 20th minute, Kaka put MLS ahead with a well-taken penalty after Chadli stuck his arm out at the ball in his own box off a corner kick. Three minutes later, Villa redirected a hard, low cross from Kaka – who would be named the game's MVP – to double the score. And after Kane was denied several times by goalkeeper Nick Rimando, he capitalized on a Matt Besler slip to scamper away, face up Omar Gonzalez and smash his finish into the top corner from the edge of the box late in the first half. After a raft of substitutes in the second half, the teams continued to exchange chances. Still: meh.

During the halftime show, MLS commissioner Don Garber himself indicated that the league might be ready to return to an East-West format. With the recent influx of major names – almost all of the aforementioned are in the first year in the league – such a move would better showcase the league and resolve the optics issue. (To the league's many skeptics, an MLS win only comes as a result of the opponent being stuck in some low preseason gear, while an MLS loss confirms its inferiority.)

"I think the time was where we needed to show the world that we could play against them," Garber said on FOX Sports 1. "Doing it East versus West, with all the great players we have, probably makes sense [now]. And maybe it's time for a change. But we'll go through a process during the year. We'll try to figure that out."

MLS might be coming to some of the same conclusions as those taking a hard and critical look at Wednesday's All-Star Game are. Unless you can snag a true world power to face the MLS outfit every single year, you're better off using every spot on the field to promote – which is the entire point – the league itself, which has recently added Andrea Pirlo, Giovani Dos Santos and, just the other day, Didier Drogba. Why share the spotlight with some non-elite European club merely looking to make commercial inroads into the American market?

It's time to remake the MLS All-Star Game as a game consisting of all MLS stars.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.