As Cosmos runs away with NASL fall season, the league’s format is put to the test

I’ve seen the debate on this site. You see entire message-board debates devoted to it.

Should a North American soccer league have playoffs? Or should the format more reflect the league-winner-take-all format that’s common across Europe?

Well, we have as close as a test case as we are going to get in North America. And that’s in the North American Soccer League, where the winner of the spring and fall seasons meet each other in the Soccer Bowl. It’s not quite single table, but there’s no post-season outside of a championship game.

In mid-September, the NASL looked to have a dream on its hands. The top seven teams in an eight-team league were all within three points of each other. The league could boast that every game had meaning, that every game would impact the Soccer Bowl race.

But things have changed radically since then.

Sure, for most of the league, parity is still the key word. As we head into the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend, the gap between seventh place and second place is three points. Four teams are tied for second place, with 14 points each.

Alas, the New York Cosmos have been red-hot; and, in a league where draws are the norm, the Cosmos has been able to put together a series of wins and distance itself from the pack. The gap between first and those four second-place teams is at seven points.

Seven points, with four games left on each team’s schedule.

Unless there’s an epic collapse, the Cosmos will meet spring-season champion Atlanta for the Soccer Bowl. And, unless there’s a radical change in the Cosmos’s form, we’ll have two to three lame-duck weeks of soccer to finish up the NASL regular season.

The eighth-place San Antonio Scorpions have already been eliminated. FC Edmonton, only three points out of second, avoided elimination with a win over Carolina on Sunday. But the Eddies could already be eliminated by the time they take the field this Sunday in San Antonio, depending on Saturday’s results.

The Cosmos hosts Carolina, one of the team’s tied for second, this weekend. A Cosmos win and the RailHawks are eliminated.

Think about it. With a month to go in the regular season, we’re already talking about a second-place team being eliminated from the race. That’s how lopsided the NASL fall-season, ahem, “race” has become.

It’s really the nightmare scenario for NASL. And the attendances the teams get in the final month of the season will show just how interested the North American sports fan is in a league that, for all intents and purposes, has been decided.

And, it’s not like the league can go back on the system after just one year, either. The format for next season has already been confirmed. To accommodate the World Cup, the NASL won’t play games during the Mundial. And, to do that, each team will play a 10-game sprint of spring season and a 20-game fall campaign. And, just like 2013, the spring and fall season winners will meet in the soccer bowl.

People can argue that, from the outset of every season, the Premiership tends to be a race between only three or four teams. So, the fact the EPL churns along as the world’s most popular sports league is proof that you don’t need parity in order to keep attendances strong. But that’s not true. Fans of leagues in the rest of the world, including England, do have playoff races; the teams at the bottom of the tables battle against relegation. There are Champions League and Europa League spots, Copa Libertadores and Copa Sudamericana slots, AFC Cup places.

In essence, because we don’t have promotion-relegation in North America, and will never have it until our sports business practices change to deny franchises exclusive territorial rights, the playoffs are our replacement for those Cup-spot and relegation battles. If major European leagues ever caved in to the wishes of some powerful owners and either limited relegation or eliminated it altogether, they’d get playoffs, too.

But the NASL system is different because there are no CONCACAF Champions League spots on the line. There are no prizes for finishing second or third. There is no relegation. The only way a lower-division club can qualify for the CCL is through the U.S. Open Cup or the Amway Canadian Championship. Being in second has no meaning.

Had NASL had a playoff system, look how differently FC Edmonton would be covered in the fall season. Right now, we’d all agree on this phrasing: “FC Edmonton is 10 points behind first-place New York, and in second-last overall.” But, if there was hope for the second- or third- or fourth-place team, the Eddies could market themselves this way: “We’re only three points out of second place. One win. That’s it.”

With playoffs, we’re talking about how three points separates spots two through seven in the NASL standings. We’re talking about huge games this weekend. Without playoffs, we’re talking about, well, the Cosmos. Or something else. MLS. European leagues. Our kids’ karate lessons. Who we’re having over for Thanksgiving dinner.

From a financial perspective, it’s easy to understand and even defend the NASL’s no-playoff system. Teams were losing huge money on playoff games. A road trip can cost a team up to $20,000. Home teams have little time to market playoff games. And, with no U.S. national TV deal, there is nothing to backstop the investment needed to have playoff games.

But, in a lot of businesses, you choose the path where you’ll stand to gain the most, or lose the least. Commissioner Bill Peterson and his Board of Governors need to look closely at the interest level in a pretty-well-decided NASL in early October. What could lose the league more money, a month of indifference or having to stage a playoff? Because, if it happened in fall of 2013, it could happen again in fall of 2014, when a 20-game schedule could allow for a first-place team to pull away with as much as six weeks left in the season.