Giorgio Chiellini has played in two European Championship finals, two World Cups, an Olympic bronze-medal game and more than 425 matches in Italy’s first division. But he never had played in a league playoff match until last season, his first with LAFC.
In much of the soccer world, the team that finishes the league schedule atop the table is the champion. In MLS, however, that team gets the Supporters’ Shield and the No. 1 seed in a six-week playoff tournament that determines the MLS Cup champion — aka the real league champion.
And Chiellini loves it.
“It’s something challenging, something new that gives energy to the league,” he said. “You have to play until the end.”
LAFC won both the Shield and the Cup last year, just the second team in 11 seasons to do so. It did that by winning the most exciting MLS Cup final in history on penalty kicks, concluding arguably the best postseason tournament ever.
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LAFC (14-10-10) will open defense of that title Saturday at BMO Stadium against the Vancouver Whitecaps (12-10-12), a team it played to a 1-1 draw in the regular-season finale last weekend.
But, because this is MLS, the journey to this year’s championship game will be different. The league, which has a penchant for trying to fix things that aren’t broken, has redone its playoff format, introducing a best-of-three conference quarterfinal round, followed by single games for the conference semifinals, finals and MLS Cup championship.
It’s a schedule that universally has been panned.
“Personally, I’m not a fan of the best of three,” LAFC goalkeeper Maxime Crepeau said. “Why exactly? Soon we’ll play a best of seven and the season’s going to end Dec. 31 and then we’ll come [back] Jan. 5. But we have to deal with the new format.”
The expanded postseason follows an expanded regular season, in which LAFC played a franchise-record 48 games in five competitions — the U.S. Open Cup, CONCACAF Champions League, Campeones Cup and Leagues Cup in addition to 34 MLS games. It was an exhausting schedule, averaging a game every five days.
However, if LAFC goes the distance in the playoffs, it will play just six times in 49 days, with an international break pausing…