No one will ever accuse Major League Soccer of being a slave to tradition.
The league expands more often than a hot-air balloon and has changed its playoff format three times in the last six seasons. In MLS, the only constant is change.
Change, however, isn’t always progress. Take the league’s newest playoff format.
No, really … take it. Please.
After the longest season in MLS history, the league has returned this fall to the three-game first-round playoff schedule it rightly rejected after the 2002 season. And the (very) early results suggest the fans aren’t buying it, with several thousand empty seats watching both LAFC and the Philadelphia Union roll to convincing wins in the first games of their postseason series.
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The lack of interest is understandable because the first game of a three-game series doesn’t decide anything. Rather than building interest, it sucks the urgency out of the match.
“Does that belong in our sport? Best-of-three? Best-of-five? Best-of-seven?” LAFC goalkeeper Maxime Crepeau asked. “Home-away games, I totally understand it. We’ve seen it for years. But to start to add on and add on and add on, does that really translate to our sport? I don’t know.”
But wait, it gets worse. Under the new format, games cannot end in a draw, going directly to penalty kicks instead. Goal differential doesn’t matter either so LAFC’s 5-2 win over Vancouver on Saturday on two goals each from Denis Bouanga and Ryan Hollingshead counts the same as a 1-0 win on an own goal. Whichever team wins two games advances to the conference semifinals, where the playoffs revert back to single-elimination games leading to the MLS Cup final.
And with a FIFA international break sandwiched in between the first and second rounds, teams may go more than three weeks between games after averaging a match every five days during the regular season. That, too, figures to rob the playoffs of momentum and interest.
“Yeah, it’s weird,” Hollingshead said. “We’ve never experienced this before. The MLS is always mixing it up, trying something new.”
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The league defends the three-game first…