As MLS announces expansion franchises, the temptation to add more playoff teams needs to be curbed

Don Garber

I’ve always been a big believer of a playoff system that might exclude some good teams rather than one that includes mediocre teams.

I preferred it when Major League Baseball went straight to National League and American League Championship Series. Two division winners in each league was enough. Its playoffs were once about best vs. best, and were far more compelling in the ‘70s and ‘80s than they are now.

If the NFL could find a way to lower the number of playoff teams, that would be great. Personally, I’d love to get rid of the divisions, because the law of averages suggests that one of the eight groupings of four teams will be so collectively awful that a 9-7 or an 8-8 team will get into the post season. If it was up to me, top four teams in the AFC and top four teams in the NFC make the playoffs. That’s it.

The NHL continues to worry me, with rumours of adding more playoff teams in seasons to come.

I’m not anti-playoffs like some Euro soccer snobs. I grew up in North America. I’m fine with a league champ being determined after a post-season process. I just don’t think playoffs that are super inclusive are nearly as interesting as ones that are exclusive in nature.

Before the start of the NASL season, commissioner Bill Peterson declared that the league would not increase the number of teams that go to the post-season, even when (and if) the circuit gets to its goal of 18 franchises. The NASL will have four teams go to its “Championship” rounds this season, out of a 10-team league. Peterson vowed that the format would not change.

To me, it’s a great compromise. For the traditional soccer supporters, who believe nothing should be more important than league play, a four-team set-up makes for a very exclusive playoff process. The difficulty of getting into the Championship means that the regular-season games will matter, that there won’t be as many occasions where a team can take a week off. But there still we be a few playoff games satisfy the North American sports fan.

But, the playoff system in MLS is far more inclusive. Right now, 10 of 19 teams make post season, with the four and five seeds in both the Eastern and Western Conferences playing a midweek play-in game that do little to put bums in seats or earn TV ratings.

As MLS continues to add franchises, the questions of realignment and playoff formats will surely resurface. When New York City FC and Orlando City set to come into the circuit in the late winter of 2015 (barring any potential Collective Bargaining Agreement-related work stoppages), two Eastern time zone teams will be added, which would likely spur some kind of realignment, or at least potential moves of Houston, Sporting Kansas City or Chicago to the Western Conference. The addition of an Atlanta franchise in 2017 — announced earlier this week — will push MLS to 22 teams, and a Miami franchise will be blessed once (and if) a stadium is found.

If Miami goes well, that’s 23 teams, and there will no doubt be the temptation to add more playoff games — even though the current play-in games show that the public’s appetite for them isn’t exactly ravenous.

And it’s a temptation that MLS must resist. As expansion ramps up, critics will claim MLS is watering itself down. But this next period of expansion offers a perfect time to answer those critics, to make the playoffs more exclusive. Even by knocking it back to eight teams, it would allow MLS to claim that, by 2017, you’d have just one-third of the clubs making the post-season. And you would have a situation like NASL, where games matter right off the bat.

To be frank, in the current set-up, the first two months of the MLS season is a giant feeling out process. Websites and newspapers will be filled with analysis of what these early games mean, because they need the content. But, deep down, we all know it’s phooey. More than half the teams make the playoffs, so there is no urgency to games played in the spring. So what if your side loses a couple in a row? It’s too early to say that any loss is damaging to a season, unless your side loses a top player to injury in that game.

The only truly meaningful thing that can happen in the early part of the MLS season is if a team loses so much that it puts itself out of the race. But those kind of pre-2014 Toronto FC starts to a season are rare. (They just seem common to us in Canada because, well, they happened to Toronto FC a lot.)

Bigger playoffs are a great trade off. In exchange for making early-season games less important, the idea is that they’ll keep more teams in the chase as the season goes on. Trade early season indifference for bigger gates in the summer and fall.

What worries me about expansion is the temptation to make post-season play more attainable, so supporters of new MLS franchises, which will likely experience growing pains and lots of losses in their first few seasons, will remain interested later into their seasons. Sure, teams like the Chicago Fire and Seattle Sounders have proven that new MLS teams can be competitive right away, but the law of averages suggests that it’s more likely that supporters of new franchises will see more than their fair share of defeats. And a more inclusive playoff system, in theory, helps keep interest in a bad team alive well into the summer and fall.

But, soccer fans have grown up in a culture of exclusivity; a small, concentrated playoff that only rewards the best teams is the best compromise to keep North American leagues relevant. The season will remain important, yet there is the satisfaction of having a championship game at the end of the campaign.

Peterson gets that — and he also understands that, in North American soccer, when teams have just a week or less to sell seats to a playoff home date, that post-season matches can be money losers. There’s simply not enough time to hard-sell the tickets.

MLS Commissioner Don Garber, as the head of the bigger league, doesn’t have to worry as much about the viability of playoff games, but of the viability of the league as a whole. And as the league grows well past 20 teams, he’d do the league a great service by promising fans that the playoffs are as big as they are ever going to be. Using all of this expansion news would be great time to promise fans that the playoffs aren’t going to get any larger.

Please.