With the MLS Cup Playoffs on the verge of beginning, I’m going to embark on a post here that tends to evoke some debate. The diversity of opinions when it comes to how the top-flight of American soccer should decide their champion is vast. You could be a straight single table, most points takes all lover. Maybe you like the geographical conferences and a playoff system. Perhaps you even like what the current format has done. I’m not trying to say anyone’s method is poor, I just wanted to put out there an idea I’ve been developing, and would like feedback as well as input.
I am a guy who likes aspects of both systems. I like the fact that, in American sports, you have to prove yourself in that ultimate winner-take-all match. In the Big 4 sports, you don’t get to lose the last three matchdays and still back into a title based on early-season form.
MLS Cup Playoffs Start Wednesday
Of course, I also like that the regular season means almost everything in the European leagues. Every team plays the other twice in most leagues. It’s more about consistency than sneaking into a Wild Card slot and getting hot in the last two months.
So, here it goes. This would be what I would suggest as a hybrid method for deciding the Major League Soccer Champion each season.
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First off, there would be an absolute championship match. If MLS likes my idea, they can call it whatever they want. But this would be the makeup:
Ultimate MLS Championship Game = Supporter’s Shield Winner vs. MLS Cup Winner.
This has probably been suggested before. I have a tweak to the MLS Cup though, and it would coincide with the end of the regular season.
Within the last month or so of the season’s close, you begin the MLS Cup. Every MLS franchise gets a shot in my format, though. Seeding would occur based on a single table based on a midseason point total. Let’s take 2012 for example: with 19 teams, #14 plays #19, 15 plays 18, 16 plays 17. Then from there, you would have a typical tournament bracket. The Cup matches would not be home-and-away aggregate, but if the higher seed is drawn at their stadium, the match would move to the away club’s venue (a la the FA Cup). Extra time and penalties would then be used to decide a second draw.
Ideally for me, the Semifinals of the MLS Cup tournament would be scheduled the weekend following the season’s completion.
Now you might say, “So what if the Supporter’s Shield Winner is in the Semifinals?” That team would be removed from the playoffs (since they would be automatically in the Championship Game), and would be replaced by the team with the highest final point total not left in the brackets. It wouldn’t absolutely ensure the 2nd best team in the Semifinals; in fact, a team who had earned the Supporters Shield early could theoretically tank their match to try to keep a rival out. This gives a great incentive for every team to give their all.
From there, you have your Semifinals, and Finals, all within two weeks of the end of the season. The winner of the MLS Cup would advance to the Ultimate MLS Championship Game to face the Supporter’s Shield holder. That match would then determine the ultimate victor, preferably on a neutral field.
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Obviously, one ramification of this would be that Conferences wouldn’t be necessary. Personally, I don’t think the league is large enough for conferences to be that effective. Look at the current state, with a proliferation of higher-quality teams in the Western Conference. I just think that there aren’t enough benefits of Conference designations at this point. You hate the teams nearest you, because you can easily travel to their venue and tell them how much you dislike them.
What would be the downside? In my mind, one thing would be the inherent ability of a Cup-style competition to produce a less-than-deserving champion. Birmingham City in last season’s Carling Cup is a perfect example. The counterargument would come from the fact that many of the top teams sat their best players in early rounds, thus cheapening the tournament. In the case of my suggested MLS Cup, there would be no reason for a top team to blow it off, even if they were doing well in the Supporter’s Shield competition. If you get knocked out of that Cup, your season is over (unless you are top of the table).
Another downpoint could be that it makes the final few weeks of the season pointless for a lot of teams. But wouldn’t you say that the last 2 weeks have been pretty meaningless for LA? How about Vancouver? New England? Even in the current state there are issues of games being afterthoughts or lacking drama.
The other thing that would be troublesome would be an already stuffed season fixture list. Between the CONCACAF Champions League, US Open Cup, and midsummer friendlies, it’s tough to work out the logistics perfectly. The “MLS Cup” portion would be held at the same time as the CCL, and that would make for some dicey moments, especially if you had 2nd legs.
I’d like to hear your ideas. Yes, I’m sure there are plenty of places for criticism. The point of this isn’t to state that I think this is perfect; what I hope is that this may allow some to consider alternatives. I don’t think that Major League Soccer considers the current format the end of the road. As long as we continue to strive for the best method, we’ll hopefully edge closer.
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Sorry, too complicated. What needs to happen is bigger emphasis on
US Open Cup, coupled with increased exposure of the CCL. The reason
Europe doesn’t have playoffs, or need playoffs, is because of, for
example, Englands best teams play in FA Cup (our open cup),
Europa/Champions league (CCL), Carling Cup (another USOC), and
regular season. With that amount of competition and that amount of
games played, only the best teams can compete for the top spot in
the regular season and therefore cannot “back into” a title, as you
put it and the winner usually is the best team. First thing the MLS
needs is time to build its own legends. It’s such a new league but
already there are pieces in place that suggest this is happening.
We know that the Sounders and Fire bring their a-game to the USOC,
while RBNY and others blow it off. Teams are starting to have
identities in such a way that these competitions are gaining
respect and viewership. Look at RSL in the CCL earlier and the
prospect of what LA, Sounders and Toronto could do over the coming
months. With these competitions gaining importance, the regular
season, I think will also gain importance and meaning, as well as
the CCL berth baring USOC and MLS Cup competitions. If these four
competitions become equally important than a “true champion” will
become apparent without complicated and (sorry) logistically
nightmarish additional tournament. You’d be better off just having
the Supporters Shield winner play the USOC winner and avoid that
extra tourny, while ditching the MLS Cup. However, I kind of like
the American system for the MLS Cup and would rather see it stay.
Keep the system as is and continue to emphasize the importance of
the CCL and we should see a true champion crowned at the end of
each regular season.
Get rid of the stupid playoffs. Regular season champion is the MLS
Champion. End of story. Get rid of the stupid stupid conferences.
TV ratings and attendance in playoffs and “MLS Cup” plummet every
year. Wake up. Do not make MLS into another zombie-like
professional sports league like MLB, NFL, etc. ,the leagues where
the big sponsors tell you when to cheer, what to cheer, when to
take a commercial break! Wake up, people. Americanizing and
zombifying the beautiful game in this country will only lead to
indifference and questions as to why US loses to “superpowers” like
Panama. Time for Don to go; he has reached his capacity as
commissioner of the league. A football person must take over, not
another NFL clone.
Except for Colorado, all those stadiums were quite full, and I’ve
never watched better group of games since the early champions
league last year. Americanizing the game is why there are
substitutions.
I don’t know what Brazil and Argentina do but it seems Mexico has
some sort of playoffs system to to decide who is the winner, the
first eight teams at the end of the year play in a tournament from
what I understand : see
http://www.soccerway.com/national/mexico/primera-division/2011-2012/apertura/
So, this is not totally just an “American thing”. Mexico’s league
is pretty good I think and if they do this, I don’t see why we
should style ourselves after Europe, after all, the EPL has
basically two Cups they play for, the Carling League Cup and the FA
Cup, these are still in a sense, playoffs. League Cup just for the
teams in the league. The NFL definitely would not be the same
without the playoffs, that one weekend with 4 playoff games is
excellent, those must be the semi-finals.
In Mexico, playoffs were initiated to finance lower divisions along
with giving extra revenue for smaller clubs. It also makes sense in
Mexico to have playoffs because they play short season tournaments
of 17 games. The problem with MLS is it keeps changing the format
and how the champion is crowned.
This year or next year is the last season in a small window that
started in 2009 in the league’s history that the schedule will be
balanced or very nearly balanced. When the number of teams in the
league forces the end of this, the supporters shield should be
meaningless. Apart from your other negatives, doesn’t this also
pretty much kill the regular season for a team once that team is
out of the running for best record? For too many teams, this would
be too early in the season and I don’t think the system would be
conducive for a pair of nations trying to grow the game. This
season, it should have been top 8 in playoffs, straight seeding, 2
legged first round (the Don wants every playoff team to get a home
game), single game afterward. After this year, it really depends on
the schedule.
this doesnt really have much in common with this thread but i think
we should give a champions league spot to the supporters shield
runner up. chances are they will be a better team than the mls cup
runners up. ok? ok.
I am not at all against playoffs but my big problem with them is
that they make absolutely no sense if we have a balanced regular
season schedule. Until the number of clubs forces the schedule to
go unbalanced (which I think should not happen under 24 clubs), I
think we should split the regular and the post seasons into
distinct competitions: We would have the MLS Championship (current
regular season) and a League Cup right afterward (post season). The
10 or 12 best teams would qualify for the League Cup. I already
hear you think: “But that’s exactly what is going on right now.
Your changes are just semantics!” Well, it’s quite true. But it is
a simple way to have the Supporter’s Shield officially recognized
as the MLS Champion, which would make the MLS much more credible to
the rest of the World, and keep a post season at the same time. The
top two teams in the MLS Championship would qualify for the CCL, as
well as the winner of the League Cup.
i’ve said this a million times. Call the supporters shield winner
the MLS Champions. Then have a post season tournament called the
MLS Cup. Americans get what they want and the purists get what they
want too. You can then have a Community Shield between the two next
season. MLS Champions need a LOT more bonus for finishing end of
the season with highest points. It’s the single hardest thing to do
and you get no reward for it
Good God. Why do soccer fans in the US so often feel the need to
create insanely complicated formats that the most diehard MLS fans
cannot understand, much less the average American sports viewer?
Here’s a simple suggestion – follow the incredibly successful
league South of the Border (minus Apertura and Clausura). Drop the
name MLS Cup. Just call it the MLS Finals or the MLS Championship.
Single table. Top 8 teams qualify. Teams seeded #1-#8. Two-legged
all the way through the final. Higher seeded team gets second leg
at home. No away goals rule. Tied on aggregate at end of second
leg, you go to two 15-minute extra time periods, followed by PKs as
per World Cup. A week or so later have the US Open Cup Final at a
neutral venue as the big season ending neutral site sponsorfest MLS
wants the MLS Cup to be.
I don’t think it’s all that complicated, but I probably used too many words to describe it. Basically it’s similar to splitting the regular season and the MLS Cup into two different events, then playing off the winners of both events. The only thing that would make it slightly complicated would be dropping the Supporter’s Shield winner at the semis and replacing with the best team outside the semi’s.
But honestly, aside from having an “endgame scenario” that fairly decides a champion, the main factor in MLS’s decision on the endgame is financial. And that’s understandable, this league can’t sustain without attendance and viewership. I do think that the Lamar Hunt USOC remains a very untapped resource for US Soccer/MLS.
I agree that the endgame is financial, but in order for any format
MLS has to be a financial success, it has to be simple enough that
both soccer fans and sports fans at large can understand it. It has
to make sense to them as a way to determine a champion. I do not
think your proposal meets that test. I believe that an 8-team
format with two legs all the way through would allow for 14 playoff
matches in total. The current 10-team format only has 13. And I
tend to think that the MLS Cup Final would be a much more
profitable and entertaining venture if it was played as a
home-and-away two-legged final. If there is anything the explosion
of growth in popularity for the World Cup should have taught us, it
is that Americans will watch a knockout soccer tournament on
television. The regular season has to have some meaning, but we
don’t take it as determinative of the champion in American sports
and they don’t in Mexico, either. The Supporter’s Shield is a fine
reward for most points in the regular season. We don’t have a
secondary domestic cup, so winning the SS, the MLS Cup, and the
Open Cup is a fine way to win a Treble. MLS has hit a plateau now
that most of the teams public money for stadium construction is at
a premium and expansion opportunities have slowed. They have to do
something at some point to put the league on more permanent
footing.
I like where your idea is heading. I totally agree that the playoff
system has it’s own unique intrigue, especially because it is a
richly American system. At the same time a single table champion
needs to be given higher honor. A hybrid of the two is the perfect
solution, maybe Garber will read this and give it some thought.
Earl, I like the idea and where your head is at but i’m still a
huge fan of how Mexico handles its playoffs. I think there are too
many spinning plates for MLS right now and it needs to focus on
getting butts in the seats and eyeballs watching TVs. The USOC is
probably the coolest tournament in the United States and MLS could
bank on the fact that amateurs could potentially win the cup. MLS
could work with ESPN on doing a few 30 minute shows on amateur
clubs who are going to compete in USOC. Hollywood the shit out of
those guys. Imagine Yankees being beat out by a beer league team?!
That’s how cool the USOC is.
What if MLS Champions (Supporters Shield) gain automatic entry into
MLS Cup Finals? Single table with 2-9 qualifying for the playoffs.
This will give fans of MLS Champions a month to buy
tickets/flights/hotels to the Cup Final.
Too long a break for the players, though. Just have a MLS Cup
Champions and League Champions every year (and you can still have
Open Cup as well). Different patches and different color game ball
for the following season. You can still have this when the schedule
goes slightly unbalanced next year. And have a special patch and
game ball color that is rewarded in those rare years when a team
wins both the MLS Shield and Cup.
Supporters Sheild will be dead in 5 years.Just be done with it now
MLS. Guys will whine and cry, guys may even drop, you will survive.
Unbalanced schedule next year already. Three years ago Columbus won
it by a couple of points, with an easier schedule than the
Sounders. That is just stupid.
The MLS playoffs are an absurd bit of “engineering excitement”
through scheduling in lieu of quality or need. It just adds to the
contrived nature of the league. MLB and the NFL grew into their
current playoff formats. Wildcards were unknown before these
leagues hit 30 or so teams (28 teams in the NFL in 1978, 30 in MLB
in 1995) divided into six divisions rather than four. MLS barely
has two divisions. Just play east champ versus west winner in a
home and away and have done with it until the structure of the
league dictates a more complex playoff. Or, if you must have a
post-season, emulate NBA and NHL playoffs. Just seed 8 teams (given
MLS’s size) and let them have at it.
As nice as it would be to keep it, the balanced schedule is going
away starting next year. It is really hard to move 19 or 20 + teams
around the US for a balanced schedule and is probably not
economically viable for quite a while until the mls popularity
picks up a quite a bit more. I think your idea is decent, but I
also think it congests the schedule too much at the end of the
season. It also kinda cheapens the regular season games to some
extent because teams would start tanking those games pretty early
and focus only on the tournament games. Also with the unbalanced
schedule coming up, I don’t think this format works either because
the teams are not playing on the same scales and thus you cannot
use the point system to determine fairly who is the supporters
shield winner. I once thought that you could do a double “ladder”
system. I will go ahead and explain, but I do recognize that even
this system fails now because it would only work with balanced
schedules for the seeding. If there were an appropriate seeding
system, I would still like the playoff system it provides. This
system works by having 2 ladders, east and west (could be modified
for a single ladder variation as well if everything was a single
table). You are seeded on this ladder based on where you finish in
your conference. How this system works is the team lowest in the
ladder plays the next highest player in the same ladder. So lets
take this year as an example. If we take the eastern conference it
would look like this: 1) SKC 2) Hou 3) Phi 4) Colum 5) NY 6) Chi 7)
D.C. 8) Tor 9) N.E. New England would play Toronto. The winner of
that match plays D.C. the winner of that match plays chicago. The
winner of that match plays columbus. This continues until the
kansas city game. The same thing occurs on the other ladder for the
western conference. Lastly, the eastern and western ladder winners
play for the cup (the championship game). Essentially, a lower seed
can win, but they have to win a lot more times to prove they are
worthy of being champions. Two of the major faults of this system
is that it needs an appropriate seeding system to work, and you do
not necessarily garauntee the two best teams meet at the top of the
ladders. The top teams will most likely be the two current best
teams, not necessarily best teams from the season. Another fault is
being able to do this over a short period of time without making it
impossible for a low seeded team to really climb up the ladder.
Anyways, if anyone has any thoughts on this, I would not mind
hearing them.
Troll comment of the week…………………………… Ding
dong, the witch is dead, the boring witch is
dead…………………………….Kill The SS and Long Live
Garber: “We are looking at creating a format that could take
advantage of what we think are a number of key rivalries and
understanding that it will be difficult to be balanced, meaning it
will be difficult to have every team play each other once
throughout the year. It’s probably too early for me to comment on
any of the details.”……………………………. Unbalance
schedule, more regional games next year. Next step make the
playoffs epic instead of a small after
thought……………….The NBA has like 5 months of playoffs !!!
Now I am a noob to all this soccer business, I only started
watching during the World Cup. However, in my opinion, MLS is not
big enough for an Elaborate playoff with lots of teams in it. I
could do without Conferences for any league that has less than 24
teams. My noobie suggestion is this: Single Table, Team with the
Best Overall Record gets Supporter’s Shield. (rename it the MLS
Shield). MLS Shield Winner gets an automatic berth in the MLS
Championship game. They don’t have to play in the Playoffs at all.
the other berth is determined by the MLS Cup. Top 6 non MLS Shield
Teams(maybe 8) in playoffs. Best of 3 series each round. Better
Record = Home field Advantage= 2 Home Games in the Best of 3.
alternatively, Knockout Round style for the MLS Cup. MLS Cup Winner
vs MLS Shield Winner in the Championship. Best of 3, MLS Shield
gets Home Field Advantage. Winner is MLS Champions.
JMad4 The problem is that the league does not currently have the
capability of maintaining a balanced schedule unless MLS franchises
were to drastically boost up their profitability. By the time that
happens, a conference set up with playoffs will most likely be
considered a norm here and the outcry for a balanced schedule and
single table will most likely be a lot less than now. Without a
balanced schedule (which the league has already said would not be
used for much longer), the use of a single table is meaningless.
This is because teams are not being evenly compared since some
teams play other teams more often (that could be weaker or
stronger) and you do not play everyone home and away when you do
play other teams. This means the supporters shield becomes biased
to a strong team that plays weaker teams around them constantly.
So, the supporters shield will become meaningless if (when) the
league goes to an unbalanced schedule.