Since the beginning, Major League Soccer has proven its commitment to making the journey for the MLS Cup more complicated than it should be. Commissioner Don Garber once again confirmed the league’s dedication to an abstruse format when he recently announced that the 2011 MLS playoff field would be expanded from eight to ten clubs while retaining the conference structure, despite the fact that they would preserve their balanced schedule for the regular season.

Garber’s announcement was yet another disappointment for die hard soccer fans in the United States.  Just when it was starting to feel like the they were catching on to its niche audience, league officials prove, once again, that they don’t quite get it. 

Reproducing a format that is largely accepted in the American sports culture, MLS has, from its genesis, divided teams into geographical conferences.  These conferences theoretically encourage rivalries, and like the NBA and MLB, would feed into a Eastern and Western bracketed post-season tournament.  Their intention was to unite existing soccer fans who already understood the sport with casual sports fans through a conference and playoff system familiar to all Americans.

However, MLS’ insistence on playoffs is a blatant attempt to appeal to the typical American sports fan.  Fans of the game abroad are generally unaccustomed to a post-season tournament crowning a league champion.  In the international game, the team with the most points accumulated at the end of the regular season is the accepted champion, while the teams with the fewest points are relegated to a lower league. 

Compounding the unfamiliarity of the playoffs, MLS’ identity crisis was advanced by changes from the international game that would baffle soccer purists throughout the world.  Penalty shootouts instead of ties, best of three games playoff legs, and an ever-changing conference dichotomy highlight some of the most bizarre decisions made by Major League Soccer.  The average sports fan lost interest with the goofy league while soccer purists in the country continued to stay away. 

Confronted with declining attendance, MLS made their first real attempt to plead their case to soccer fans who had not yet latched on to the game in America.  They removed the gut-wrenching penalty shoot-outs, reinstated ties, and threw away three-legged playoff series for the more internationally accepted home and away, two game format.

MLS is once again at a major turning point. The league is expanding, some teams have successfully built a strong fan culture, the Beckham experiment has proved its worth, a new generation of American sports fans are on the cusp of paying attention, and international interest is growing as well. However, MLS continues to struggle with its obsessive devotion to conference-based playoffs, and it risks once again losing all that it has built in the last decade.  The absurdity of two western teams playing each other in the Eastern Conference Finals and the 44% drop in viewership for this year’s MLS Cup finals shows the world just how thin of a rope the league balances on. 

Now is the time for MLS to end its destructive love affair with conferences.

The Conference Strategy: Divide and Confuse

Due to expansion and contraction, the league has juggled their conferences almost continuously since its inception, with reduced playoff integrity being the unfortunate result.

They tried two, three, then back to two conferences.  They qualified teams for the playoffs based on records within conferences as well as by single table ranking.  No matter which combination of alignment and playoff system the league tried, MLS continued to struggle to find the correct balance. 

Increasing criticisms that playoff-worthy teams were being left out due to the conference qualification restrictions had MLS once again scrambling to change their format.  The result, through 2007-2010, had a dramatic change in playoff qualification and seeding format.  In an attempt to appease fans clamoring for a single table, MLS experimented by limiting the number of guaranteed conference based playoff births, while giving the remaining spots to the teams with the highest total points, regardless of conference.  

For the 2007 season, the number of guaranteed conference births began at two, increased to three for 2008, went back down to two for 2009, and was reduced to only one for the 2010 season.  Also new in 2010 was the debut of the European-style balanced schedule where each team would play everyone twice; once at home and once away.

Throughout its first fifteen years of existence, Major League Soccer faced six expansion seasons, one contraction season, eight conference changes and eight different playoff qualification or seeding formats.  If any average American sports or international soccer fans were left after these many head-spinning realignments, it is certainly in spite of MLS’ self-inflicted disorganization.  Frustrating for fans of both groups are the recent playoff anomalies which have been setting back the integrity of the league for the past few seasons.

Playoff abnormalities

In 2007, despite finishing fifth in the Eastern Conference, Kansas City was seeded as the fourth team in the Western Conference bracket.  Thus began the threat that a conference final could eventually be won by a team from the other conference.

MLS’ worries materialized in 2008, when the New York Red Bulls joined the Western Conference bracket due to five teams from the East qualifying for the playoffs.  They ended up being the first team to win the opposite conference’s final. 

Fans saw more of the same the following season, when Real Salt Lake was placed in the Eastern bracket in 2009, won the Eastern Conference Finals and eventually went on to lift the MLS Cup.

Embarrassingly for the league in 2010, an unprecedented two teams from the West, Colorado and San Jose (the last two to qualify), were seeded in the Eastern Conference bracket, and took down their two Eastern opponents in the process.  This ensured that, yet again, a team would win a conference title that it didn’t belong to.  Colorado ended up winning the MLS Cup as the Eastern Conference representatives.

Despite Garber’s comments that the phenomenon in 2010 was an anomaly, this was, in fact, becoming common place under the modern MLS playoff qualification and seeding process.

Since the return of the two conferences in 2002, the Supporter’s Shield winner only won the MLS Cup twice, while the second place team won it once.

The MLS Cup Champion’s regular season ranking breakdown from 2002 onward looks as follows:

1st- 2 wins
2nd- 1 win
3rd- 2 wins
4th-
5th- 1 win
6th-
7th- 1 win
8th- 1 win
9th- 1 win

Enhancing the microscope to the 2005-2010 expansion era shows an even more alarming trend.  One Supporter’s Shield winner went on to win the MLS Cup and only one second place regular season team even made the championship game.  Everyone loves a Cinderella story, but if this trend continues, there will be no pressure for MLS clubs to win the regular season.  Instead, teams will be happy to simply qualify and rest up for the playoffs tournament; therefore watering down the quality and intensity of the regular season.  Surely, this is not what Major League Soccer wants, as it could threaten the legitimacy of its entire league.

What Works for One, May Not Work For The Other

The conference set-up, which commissioner Don Garber insists is essential to the growth of the sport, has gone through just about any kind of change you can think of.  The apparent compromise to retain the conferences for the average sports fan, while making an attempt to resemble single table qualification to appease international soccer fans has left the league with egg on its face.  Garber contests that the conference system is a necessary characteristic of American sports that creates “moments,” as he puts it, where fans can see their home team hoist a trophy on their way to the MLS Cup finals.  This logic, however, has its faults.

The NFL’s conference system was embedded into the fabric of the sport out of need.  When the NFL merged with the AFL in 1970, the league put the old NFL teams into the NFC while creating the AFC for the AFL clubs.  This was not done out of geographical convenience, but was created for a specific competitive reason; to see which conference could field the best team to defeat the other conference’s representative in the Super Bowl.  Both sides wanted to prove to the nation that their brand of unique football was superior to the other, making the Super Bowl a fiercely competitive spectacle.  They have retained this integrity and rivalry through today, even in the face of expansion and realignment.

Major League Soccer, on the other hand, is trying to have their cake and eat it too.  On one had, they want to create rivalries through their two conferences, yet on the other hand they want to have a respected international balanced schedule.  Having a balanced schedule renders the conferences completely useless, as there is nothing but mere geographic association differentiating the two sets of teams, yet the winners of the each conference get a guaranteed #1 slot in the playoffs. 

Balanced Schedule = Single Table

Sticking to the East/West dichotomy with balanced schedules only messes up playoff seeding and embarrasses the league when a Western team hoists an Eastern trophy.  Under Garber’s system, conference rivalries are not being nurtured and the inconsistencies of the playoffs have hurt the league’s integrity. 

When the winner of each conference is guaranteed a spot into the playoffs, it has the potential to throw off the conference brackets, as witnessed in the last three seasons.  This season, Real Salt Lake was the #2 overall team, yet because they finished three points behind Los Angeles in the West, was placed in the #2 Western slot, where they lost a two-game series to the #4 overall team, FC Dallas.  If MLS utilized a true single table format, they would have played the #7 overall team, the Colorado Rapids.  This, of course, leads us to another problem with MLS’ current format.

Since the East was relatively weak this season, with only New York and Columbus being its representatives in the playoffs, the two lowest teams from the Western Conference, San Jose and Colorado, were given an advantage of being seeded in the easier Eastern bracket.  This, in turn, punished the higher seeded Western teams, such as Los Angeles, Salt Lake, Dallas, and Seattle, who would end up taking each other out in the hard-fought Conference Semi Finals.  Both San Jose and Colorado made it to the Eastern Conference Finals, while higher ranked Seattle and Salt Lake watched from their couches. 

Fleeting Moments

Garber’s insistence that keeping conferences allows for special “moments” where home fans can witness their team hoist a trophy, is not guaranteed.  Over the past three seasons, only 50% of the Conference Finals were won by the home team. The parity in the league combined with the ever-changing seeding process makes it nearly a coin toss to predict who will win the Conference Finals. 

While having another piece of silverware to put in your team’s trophy case is nice, most fans understand that it is an empty award compared to MLS Cup.  Do fans really need to be patronized when they know there is still work to be done?  Does hoisting the Western Conference trophy in Los Angeles ease the pain that FC Dallas fans are feeling this week?  Hardly.

K.I.S.S

Next season marks the sixth straight year of expansion when Major League Soccer welcomes west coast teams, Vancouver and Portland into the league, and, with it, the promises of another conference realignment and playoff restructuring.  The conferences will be altered for a mind-boggling ninth time as Garber will, almost certainly, place the two Cascadian teams in the Western Conference while bumping two long time western teams to the East.  How can MLS expect to generate conference rivalries whilst in a constant state of flux?

There is a very simple solution to avoiding all of this confusion and abnormality: eliminate the conferences altogether and implement a single table where the #1 overall team faces #8, #2 faces #7, and so on.   This is the most fair, and least convoluted system.  Ensuring that the top two teams have fair paths to the Conference Finals may even increase the chance of a home crowd enjoying the “moment” of their team advancing to the MLS Cup. 

If the league feels the need to award a trophy, simply make two new ones, put sponsorship names on them, and give them to the two teams headed to the finals.  Forcing teams into a clunky East/West dichotomy makes no sense when a team from one conference can lift the trophy of the others.  Why the league insists on making the playoffs so complex while at the same time ignoring a majority of the fans’ suggestions, in this case, is contrary to logic. 

Attempting to reach out to both typical American sports fans and international soccer fans, when it comes to conference and playoff alignment, is simply counter-productive and serves to keep both sets of fans from fully embracing the league.  How can one expect the average fan to get on board when the ever-changing conference structure and playoff seeding are too difficult for the most hard-core fans to explain?  The MLS needs to simplify the process instead to make it easier for everyone to understand what to expect year in and year out.  Switching to a single table will solve this problem and perhaps the league will even discover that both sets of fans aren’t as diametrically opposed as they had originally thought.

Reflecting upon history, everything in Major League Soccer from the number of games played per round, to the seeding of the teams has been altered throughout the years.  Ironically, however, the one thing that hasn’t changed in the league’s fifteen seasons -only eight teams qualifying for the playoffs- is being changed for the worse next season. 

Stay tuned for The Problem with Playoffs: part 2…