An Indictment of the MLS Playoff Structure, Part 3: Making the Best of a Bad Situation

Note: This the third and final post in a several part series that I have written about MLS's playoff structure and how it penalizes successful teams.

In my first two posts in this series I highlighted the effects of letting too many teams into the MLS playoffs and the resultant penalty good teams pay in the playoffs by playing a greater number of games during the regular season via domestic and international competitions.  In this post I will focus on solutions to these problems.  I use the byline "Making the Best of a Bad Situation" in this blog post's title because we all know that Don Garber and MLS will not ditch a playoff format - they are (mistakenly) wedded to the idea that US soccer fans want a league that is eventually the size of the NFL and requires a playoff format to determine its champion.  So, after listing my ideal solution, I will spend time exploring how the 2011 playoffs could be formatted to make the best of the already announced 10 team playoff field.  I will then move on to how future seasons might benefit from a reduced number of playoff teams and modified formats.

The Ideal Solution

Before I delve into making the best of the poor hand dealt to us by MLS, I would like to lay out what I envision would be the ideal format for determining MLS championships.

1. Limit MLS to 20 teams: This preserves the ability to run a balanced schedule.  Perhaps I am writing from a bit of personal interest, but a balanced home-and-away schedule is the most fair to the teams and is great at providing statistical insight.  Each team gets to play every other one twice, and home pitch advantage is effectively wiped out.  Such a format is critical in delivering my second recommendation.
2. Play a top-of-the-table championship format: After 38 matches, we would truly understand who was the best overall team throughout the season.  No upsets allowing eighth seeded teams to knock out the number one seed.  No poor form for half to two-thirds of season that is bailed out by a hot run at the end of the season.  There's a reason the rest of the world runs such a  format - it provides stability to the teams and supporters and justly rewards good long term performance.
3. Reform CCL qualification: If (2) is realized, the US Open Cup then becomes the major domestic knock-out tournament just like most other national tournaments.  Make the US Open Cup championship worth something - make it the automatically qualifier for CCL group play along with the MLS top-of-the-table champions.  To add drama and competition to the MLS single table format, make the second place team the play-in for CCL.  Overall, this would provide greater incentive for winning the US Open Cup and ensure our CCL teams truly are the best MLS has to offer.
4. Implement promotion and relegation: This system works in nearly every other soccer nation.  For those who worry about the health of MLS and soccer in the US, they should realize that attendance at matches in the US rival those found in top leagues outside of England, Germany, and Spain.  What is holding back growth in the US is MLS's obscene franchise system and associated fees.  Such high barriers to entry stifle the development of the lower tiers of the US soccer pyramid, and are not found in other parts of the world.  When soccer rich cities like St. Louis can't field a second tier professional team and the entire second tier is at risk of losing its sanction because of financial difficulties, it's clear something has to change.  Simply put, the closed market, single entity concept is holding back the development of the professional game and our national team.  It's a hurdle not found in other countries, where teams who work their butts off at lower levels earn the just reward of promotion without having to pay the cartel and extra entry fee.

I am not delusional.  As I said at the outset, I think this proposal would never be implemented.  The main reason is that it runs counter to every fiber of American professional sports, which are all about the league and guaranteed revenue and not the team.  Team success (both on the field and financially) is only allowed in so much as it builds the league's product.  The league redistributes the earnings from team merchandise, stadium revenue, and TV revenue - more so than they do in soccer leagues in places like Europe.  If the league doesn't like the deal one of its owners is getting in a town, they support uprooting the team and moving them to another state or a completely different section of the country - we're talking a much bigger relocation than Tottenham's potential move to the Olympic Stadium (and resultant supporter resistance).  In the United Stats it's about moving a basketball team from Seattle to Oklahoma City or a soccer team from San Jose to Houston.  As is often the case, such moves are condoned by the league because local tax payers are unwilling to be held hostage to build a new stadium that the teams are unwilling to finance themselves (precisely because the stadium is more expensive than the team can justify paying for themselves).  Moving towards a promotion/relegation single table format that rewarded consistent performance would encourage reasonable growth at multiple levels of the professional game, improve the quality of our national team by developing more talent, and avoid the boom bust cycles of the original NASL and first decade of MLS's

So if the ideal solution is not a realistic one, how can we make the best of a bad single entity playoff solution?  How can a full season's effort be rewarded come playoff time?  The answer is two fold - one solution for the 2011 season that will see 10 playoff teams, and another for subsequent seasons where the number of playoff teams is still undetermined.

Recommendations for 2011

Given that MLS has indicated they will break 10 of the 19 teams to the playoffs for the 2011 season, how can the as-yet-undefined format be defined so as to reward regular season play and not make it an afterthought as it currently is regarded?  Here are a few suggestions.

1. Give the top six finishers a bye:  If we want to encourage teams to compete for playoff position from top to bottom, we need to give them a just reward for their successful efforts.  Currently, there is no real advantage to being a top seed.  Giving seeds 1 through 6 a bye, which would effectively give them two weeks between their final regular season match and their first playoff match, would give them much needed rest after a grueling regular season, US Open Cup, and CCL group play.
2. Make seeds 7 through 10 play a two-leg first round: Making the lower seeds play two extra games will help level the playing field when it comes to game differential.  Such an approach would have moved 5 of the 12 series from 2003-2010 that had a game differential of four or more to series with a game differential of three or less - crossing to the right side of the magical four game differential I highlighted in my last post in this series.  I'd also make them play it on a weekend/weekday swing, which would essentially make the winner of the series play three games in seven days when the second round match was factored in.  Meanwhile, the team they faced would be coming off two weeks rest.
3. Make away goals count for more than home goals in the first round: Nearly every other two-leg knockout round competition uses this rule.  For some unexplainable reason, MLS does not.  Such a change would reward risk taking by away sides, and recognize the inherent difficulty in scoring goals away from home.  It would also likely help minimize the number of opening round matches that went to overtime and PK's in the second match.
4. Re-seed after every round: Implicit in this suggestion is the request to forget about conferences once the playoffs start.  The reward for finishing with the best overall point total (or tie breaker) should be that that the highest seeded team host the "weakest" team each round.  Higher seeded teams shouldn't be forced to travel or endure any hardships come playoff time if they've worked their rears off for 34+ matches.  This will also help to eliminate MLS's current crossover system that has the propensity to hurt top performers.  Case in point: in 2010 the Western Conference took six of the available eight playoff spots, yet the bottom two teams crossed over to play the two Eastern Conference teams, both of which had lower point totals than the top two teams in the Western Conference
5. Take advantage of MLS's superior home field advantage:  As Scorecasting has shown, MLS teams have the greatest home field advantage of any US sports league or major soccer league world wide.  Let's put that to good use and provide greater rewards to superior regular season performance.  MLS should not only re-seed the matchups every round, but they should also have the higher of the two MLS Cup participants host the championship match.  Therefore, there truly is a benefit to winning the Supporters' Shield - controlling one's own destiny as to where matches are played all the way through the playoffs.

Announcement of the 2011 playoff format is expected any day now.  We'll see if any of the changes conform to the suggestions above.

A New Playoff Format for 2012 and Beyond

By 2012 MLS will have its 19th franchise (Montreal), unbalanced conferences, and possibly an unbalanced schedule again.  Everyone fully expects the league to expand further, not stopping at the 20 teams found in most other domestic leagues.  How should their playoff format change to match these changes and improve the quality of the playoffs?

1. Run a single table, and break only the top six teams to the playoffs: With Montreal in the league, there will be no way to balance the conferences.  This would be a perfect opportunity for the league to convert to a single table.  Limiting the playoffs to the top six will also greatly improve the quality of teams that make it in.  The regression equations developed in the first post in this series indicate a team in the top six would need to earn 51.5% of the available points and have a goal differential of nearly 8 - both are massive improvements over the numbers required since 2005.  It would also lower the percentage of teams that make the playoffs to 31%, making it the second lowest percentage of the US professional leagues profiled in my first post.
2. Use the same suggested play-in format from 2011 for seeds 3 through 6:  Again, it will cut down on game differential in the second round, provide greater incentive for finishing in the top two via an extra week of rest, and will ensure away goals count for more.
3. Re-seed for the semifinals just like 2011, and have the higher seed host MLS Cup: Give good teams every advantage they deserve for sustained quality throughout the regular season.
4. Reform CCL qualification along the lines of (3) in the "Ideal Solution" section of this post.

We're at least a year away from Commissioner Garber announcing anything about the 2012 playoff format.  I suspect he will resist any attempt to go to a single table, especially when such a format becomes difficult to maintain given the geographic reality of the league and his continued desire to expand beyond twenty teams.  Nonetheless, following the rest of my suggestions would greatly improve the quality of teams that make the playoffs.

Conclusions

It's clear that MLS is intent on keeping a playoff format to determine their champion, as they mistakenly believe that US soccer fans and fans of other sports that they are trying to attract want an Americanized version of the world's game.  If this is the case, there is a right way and a wrong way to implement a playoff system.  Right now, MLS is going about it the wrong way.  They are letting way too many teams into the playoffs, and the resultant chaos turns fans off as there seems to be absolutely zero reward for an entire season of hard work.  The wide open playoff format, combined with commitments outside of MLS, has produced little predictability from one season to the next.  If MLS is to insist on having a playoff format, it is my hope that they adopt a number of the proposals made above.  Restricting the number of overall participants, and forcing lower seeds to play more games in the playoffs, will improve the chances of higher seeds making it through to the MLS Cup and hopefully provide some predictability to the current chaos that is the MLS Playoffs.