An Assist for MLS: Split the Season, Baby!

(NOTE: This wound up being more off-the-cuff than I thought it would be. Still, I like the sound of the ideas well enough. On the other hand, criticism is both welcome and expected.)

A couple days back, I offered to pull together a proposal to revise Major League Soccer’s (MLS) regular season schedule with an eye to striking the best possible balance between the financial and competitive sides of the "product." I've been at the effort a couple days now - albeit with "life" intruding on my thinking - which has only improved my respect, not only for the league honchos, but also for Brian over on An American's View, whose wrote the post that inspired this effort. Basically, I'm finding that moving one piece here - whether it's how the schedule fits together to the number of teams competing in the league - requires that I move at least two others elsewhere.

In fact, it was the act of exploring those moving pieces that suggested tackling this project in two parts. The first part, which you're now reading, offers a "digest" version of some reforms I believe would improve the league’s rules of competition while simultaneously doing what I believe can be done to maximize the financial side. In a separate post, one I hope to get to over the weekend, I'll delve into the details, explaining how all the little pieces fit together. With that, however, I'm offering myself an out: because I know so little about how the proposed "Inter-liga" would work, I'm going to assume that questions like inter-league play with the Mexican Football League and the CONCACAF Champions Cup will work around what I've got below.

With all that duly noted, let's kick out the proposals, beginning with the Big One:

MOVE TO A SPLIT, SPRING/FALL CALENDAR
For the combined health of Major League Soccer and the U.S. Men's National Team (USMNT), I'm really, really hoping that the league adopts a split, spring/fall league schedule. This will not be easy. The difficulty begins with planning a schedule and ends somewhere near the conundrum of how to explain this format to your average American sports fan. After that, even the basic mechanics of a shift are flat-out deadly. How big a break? I'm working on it, but based on next summer's potential schedule - which will include Gold Cup and, if the U.S. Soccer Federation uses good sense, the Copa America - and in the interest of being consistent year-to-year, I'd have the break take up June and July.

Without going too deep into the details, the merits of this format begin with reducing the competition between club and country during the major international tournaments. After that, apart from synching up generally with the calendar for most the world - which ought to help some with player transfers - this also gets national-team players more time with their club teams. These players are the ones fans, especially the novices, most want to see; it lets clubs field their first team more often. A couple incidental advantages come into play as well: MLS clubs can continue to schedule money-spinning games against major foreign clubs without piling those on the regular season games. Another advantage just came to me today: having a two-month gap in the season not only leaves time to acquire and trade for new players, it gives them time to get them in tune with the squad. No less significantly, it allows time for the club's marketing arms to hype a second-half stretch run to the playoffs...which means, of course...

THE PLAYOFFS AREN'T GOING ANYWHERE
Sad, but true, but playoffs are too much a part of American sporting culture that I can't believe they'll go away. And, while I believe Brian would dissent from this view, I don't see many problems with retaining the eight-team qualifying pool. It’s true the league could temporarily reduce to six, or even four teams, but I find scaryice’s (of Climbing the Ladder renown) take on this compelling - e.g. why mess with a troublesome formula if the natural growth of the league will obviate the need to do so in the near-term? In the grand scheme, the expansion of the league means the chaff will separate from the wheat more readily.

One last thing: unless you're going to apply it throughout the post-season - either that or drastically reduce the length of the regular season - it's time to ditch the home-and-home playoff series. Schedule a one-off final on the top-seeded teams' home turf and call it good. After all, these teams have spent months deciding which is the better team, so why prove it again? And someone, somewhere suggested a week layoff between the end of the regular season to allow more time to promote the games: I'm down with that proposal as well.

That takes you to how the teams will qualify, and for that...

STICK WITH CONFERENCES, BABY
The main reason for sticking with conferences goes back to something as important as anything in all this: keeping a lid on the number of regular season games. Single table could work in 2007, when only 13 teams will compete; if all teams play a home-and-home series against all the other teams, that's a 26-game season, which seems a good balance point: it's long enough to allow teams that start poorly, or that suffer mid-season slumps, to pull together a run at the table. And, as already noted, struggling squads can add new acquisitions during this time, which might give them a new lease on life for the season's second half.

The thing is, the single-table equation changes once you reach the proposed 18-team league. A single table featuring home-and-home series would suddenly require 34 games - four more than the mildly tedious 2006 regular season that just wrapped up. So long as one assumes the playoffs will continue, that’s 34 games with a post-season added on; again, how many games does it really take to determine the better team?

Moreover, I'd recommend sticking with two conferences - an Eastern and Western, as they are today. It took trying to devise a formula to get eight teams out of three conferences to abandon the tidier arrangement of three, six-team conferences (this is what I mean by the assumptions building on one another) to move me in this direction. So, take the two-nine team conferences and have each team play the others in their conference home-and-home; that takes you to 16 games. Pad the overall schedule with one game each against the all the teams from the other conference, alternating yearly as they do in college football (at least I think they do that in college football) and you wind up with a 25-game regular season - a good length as I see it - and cap it off with a short, sharp post-season.

Well, that's my basic proposal. You may have noticed it deals primarily with the rules of competition, but it also brings in financial considerations. Naturally, there are many, many other factors in play - from the single-entity structure, through salary caps, through weird crap like the proposed Beckham Rule and so on. As already noted, I didn't mess with Inter-Liga and don't see the point in looking at that till we find out how many teams we can field, when play would take place, what impact that will have on CONCACAF's Champions Cup, etc. Those, as I see it, are other topics for other days - and that's despite the fact all of the above undeniably play a role on raising exposure for the league and the quality of play.

I'll work out the details over the weekend and hope to have it posted by Monday morning (no promises, by the way). Just playing with conferences and figuring dates for the break and the general league schedule reveals quite a bit about how all this does, and does not, fit together. Unless I miss my guess, at least one of these assumptions will blow up in my face before that effort is done...but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

Right. Have at it. I only ask that people begin responses against with, "This is the dumbest friggin' proposal I've ever seen and here’s why..." Comments in favor should only read, "Yes, master..." I've heard talk of this thing called "neutrality," but don't understand the concept...