The first year Major League Soccer existed during a Copa América, two players from the league made tournament rosters. Both played for D.C. United. Both represented Bolivia. MLS was less than a year old when South America convened for its 1997 confederation championship, but when it did, only Marco Etcheverry and Jamie Moreno represented the league at that tournament.
For most of MLS’s existence, that story went unchanged. Until Copa’s 2019 edition, MLS sent between zero and two players to compete for South American teams at the continent’s premier competition. The pair the league had at 2016’s Copa America Centenario, Seattle’s Nelson Valdez and Dallas’s Carlos Gruezo, matched a high that hadn’t been touched since 1999.