MLS Supporters’ Shield: the real glory?
Columbus adds MLS Cup to the 2008 Supporters' Shield
From the outside, the football world looks upon Major League Soccer with a degree of suspicion and mistrust. Traditional American sporting models, we claim, don’t apply to football. Central ownership and the draft system are entirely foreign concepts. Pundits criticise salary capping in MLS one minute and bemoan the overpaid prima-donnas of Europe the next.
The idea of a post-season is one with which European footballites are naturally uncomfortable, but it also poses a question for MLS and American football itself.
Despite the ultimate title of Champions being afforded to the team which triumphs after a short knockout tournament between eight qualifying clubs, it’s only natural for the team finishing top of the table to take a lot of pride in their achievement. After all, football the world over is about finishing at the summit after a long, arduous and rollercoaster-like season. In the playoffs extra factors come into play, such as end-of-season momentum and luck. The “league winners” can rightly feel aggrieved at having to further prove their mettle. The real glory comes from winning the final of MLS Cup – but should that be the case?
The American system
There is no escaping the fact that Major League Soccer follows an unusual format, some of it made necessary by the league’s development and expansion. The league’s fifteen sides are divided into two conferences, Eastern and Western, and they each play each other twice. That adds up to 28 matches each, made up to 30 by an extra two by what Wikipedia refers to as “intra-conference matches”. Each team plays 15 games at home and 15 away – nothing out of the ordinary there.
But after those 30 matches, the post-season begins. Eight teams qualify for the playoffs: the top two in each conference qualify automatically, followed by the next four teams on points. This can bring in the relative strength of each conference. The final of the post-season mini-tournament is a one-off match known as MLS Cup, and is the pinnacle of club football in the United States.
But there is another accolade available to MLS teams, one more familiar to the European brain. The Supporters’ Shield goes to the club finishing the regular season with the most points on the board. It may not hold the prestige of MLS Cup but it is rightly given a certain amount of recognition.
MLS Cup
The importance of having an American system for an American league should not be underestimated. It’s not small time or protectionist, it’s a simple case of familiarity and trying to build a future in a competitive sporting market which is, to a certain extent, set in its ways. While many football fans in the US have readily adopted Major League Soccer and the outsider status that comes from being a soccer fan, the league needs to succeed more widely. That means attracting existing football fans – supporters of overseas leagues who are more familiar with a straight league system – or fans of other sports.
Given Don Garber’s comments this year indicating that the league wants to target existing football supporters, perhaps scrapping the playoffs would be a step in the right direction. But the American sporting mindset must come into consideration, particularly as those of a sporting bent will already have tied their colours to the established masts of gridiron, baseball and basketball franchises.
Furthermore, the 15 clubs in Major League Soccer begin the season knowing exactly what the situation is. It’s not as if Garber informs the league champions at the end of the season that they must play another handful of games to secure the title. They all know that it is not necessarily wise to go all-out for the top of the table. As we know from the Football League playoffs in England, the form team in the final throes of battle for promotion so often seem to be the one which snuck in at the end of the season – in other words, the team with momentum. Correctly timing momentum is a fine art.
MLS Cup also gives top-level US football a showpiece it is otherwise so sorely lacking. The US Open Cup isn’t held in the same regard as the rest of the domestic programme and so the league doesn’t have a prestigious final to help create history, romance and – perhaps most importantly to Major League Soccer’s busy suits – vital marketing possibilities. With the absence of a cup final to attract all comers, MLS Cup day is the day on which all eyes turn towards MLS. But is it the right way to earn victory? In 13 seasons only DC United (twice), Kansas City Wizards, Los Angeles Galaxy and Columbus Crew have won the Supporters’ Shield and gone on to win MLS Cup.
Supporters’ Shield
MLS Supporters’ Shield does possess a certain sheen, and is correctly seen as a source of great pride for the winners. The tendency for European fans might be to see the winners of the Supporters’ Shield as Major League Soccer’s true champions, but that is simply because the league system is so naturally familiar. Although we need to be careful not to impose some kind of footballing imperialism on the USA, there is an argument for standardising league football. William McGregor, the genius behind the Football League, certainly wouldn’t have approved of the playoffs, but then times have changed.
The Premier League’s recent run-in with supporters over Game 39 – its ludicrous proposal to force every club play a 39th regular season match overseas in order to expand the league’s brand in developing football markets – highlighted something we’d all taken for granted for more than 100 years: the integrity of symmetrical league football. Each club plays the others a fair number of times, equally divided between home and away, and the winner is the team which sits at the top of the pile when the process is complete. When that came under threat, we suddenly became protective of it, and on reflection we were probably right to do so.
But, as I’ve already mentioned, Major League Soccer’s gradual development makes it a special case. The league programme is not strictly symmetrical anyway, so is a Supporters’ Shield win “pure” in the same way as victory in La Liga or Serie A? Maybe MLS Cup’s greatest contribution to American football is that it gives the league one final shake to even out the creases of an uneven fixture list. Perhaps that justifies its position at the top of the honours ladder.
European football thinking should not be allowed to run roughshod over the will of a burgeoning league but the league system is the way it is for a reason: fairness and equality over a season. Perhaps a better domestic knockout cup would provide US soccer with a showpiece event and in five or ten years’ time allow Major League Soccer to revert to a pure league system and scrap the playoffs. But by that time MLS Cup will be a longstanding tradition in its own right, and if there’s one thing that’s able to convert football’s steady rise in the USA it might just be a sense of history.
Chris Nee writes at twofootedtackle and co-hosts the twofootedtackle podcast.
What’s important to keep in mind about the Supporters’ Shield is that it was originated by the supporters themselves on-line.
Originally, there were no provisions by the league to recognize the team with the best “regular season” record, so the supporters took matters into their own hands.
A good jumping off point for a discussion about the merits of the playoff system would be to examine the Arizona Cardinal’s road to the Super Bowl in American Football this past year. They were a team that struggled all year trying to find consistency and defense, but were blessed with a very weak league and thus obtained a berth in the playoffs with an overall record that was much worse than teams in stronger divisions (i.e. the New England Patriots). However, in the playoffs they found their defensive formula and for about a month they were really one of the best teams in the league that was 100% deserving of being in the post-season.
Now, detractors of the playoff system could certainly point to this as a good example of why playoff systems are wrong. They made it into the playoffs by sheer luck and happenstance. They were barely a top 10 team before the postseason. But to deny them a shot would have made the post-season much less special. American’s love an underdog and to watch the Cardinals scrap and fight their way through to the Super Bowl was extremely fun and entertaining, especially for those of us who support a team that didn’t make the playoffs. By the way, this super bowl was one of the most enjoyable I’ve seen in a very long time and I’m sure I’m not alone in this sentiment.
The playoffs are magical. Anything can happen. That’s precisely the reason why American’s love it. It’s true that you can be an amazing team, probably even the best team, for an entire season only to watch it slip away in the dying seconds of a final or a semifinal etc, but the emotions and hype that surround those games far exceed anything you see during a regular season outside of rivalries. It’s as hard for me to imagine one of the popular American sports without playoffs as it is for the rest of the world to imagine Football with playoffs I imagine.
Virtually every major American sports league is close to 30 clubs and divided into regional divisions that serve the same purpose in essence as the 8 groups in the World Cup,providing a means for the top clubs to advance to the “knockout rounds.”
Since no team plays the exact same schedule,even within its own division, strength of varying opponents does remain a factor as to who advances, much like a group of death can eliminate a favorite, but it is universally agreed in North America that playoffs are great and upsets are part of the triumph and tragedy of the sports.
The one negative of playoff systems is that most often TOO MANY clubs are allowed to get thru to the postseason tournaments, thus diminishing the importance of each regular season game or match, and allowing the possibility for lesser or unworthy clubs to ride the lightning to a title.
Baseball is best in the ratio, only allowing 8 out of 30 teams to advance, gridiron is at 12 from 32, but four top clubs get a first round bye into the single-elimination tourney as reward for regular season excellence . Pro basketball and hockey, on the other hand, let half the teams advance, with four rounds of best of seven matchups to follow,and it is common for clubs with losing records to sqeek in and fill the brackets. Usually these weak sisters get bounced quickly by the second round.
MLS has always allowed for 8 clubs to play in its playoffs, and the current field is 8 out of 15. There have been occasions where a bad regular season club had gotten hot and went all the way, and fans of the league have always debated the weaknesses of the system, especially in regards to the Supporter’s Shield, which has definately gotten short shrift from the media, fans and players a like as really not a “championship.”
However, the league is expanding rapidly, and by 2011 it will have 18 teams, making the playoff percentage much more palatable, with 8 out of 22 clubs down the line a real possibility and one that will make the MLS playoffs much more a tournament featuring all elite clubs.
I think that there’s a better system that preserves or introduces a feature that every football fan in America enjoys about league structure. My proposal:
* moves the MLS onto the international calendar (or a close approximation thereof)
* allows for a split season (a la the South American leagues)
* creates a Supporters Shield that’s determined in the same way and manner as other league titles
* preserves the MLS Cup’s primacy
How can all of these features be implemented?
I will first address the calendar. The MLS Cup, the conclusion of the football year, would be played on roughly the second Wednesday in July, in prime time. Why? Because that is the single deadest day of the American sports calendar: it’s the one day from April through September where there’s nothing baseball related on, thanks to the All-Star Game being the day before. By that evening, after all the All-Star hoopla has passed through the news cycle, there’s a gaping hole in the sports news that needs to be filled. Being the only sporting event on American TV that night will attract a certain amount of interest, not least from degenerate gamblers and guarantee coverage in newspapers, TV, and radio the next day.
Falling as it does in the midst of the overseas friendly season, we could also have a more interesting replacement for the MLS All-Star Game: have the MLS Cup final be one of the semifinals of a tournament, with the other semifinal (played, perhaps on Tuesday night in the same city) featuring a major European power vs. a major South American power. Last year, I would have tried to cut a sponsorship deal with AIG to call it the American International Cup, but I suspect that’s a nonstarter. Have the final for that cup, MLS Champions vs. a top club in the world, be on the subsequent weekend (in the same city that hosts MLS Cup).
Working back, you’d keep the 8 club MLS Cup playoff format running through June and early July. On Memorial Day, you’d have the MLS “clausura” end. The clausura would have MLS divided into Eastern and Western Leagues with no interleague play, just home and away with every club in your conference (so a 20-club MLS would have an 18 game clausura)… the clausura would start in late February or early March, before which there would be a winter break for December, January, and February.
The “apertura” would run from August through to right before Thanksgiving. For this, MLS splits into two or more nationwide divisions, with clubs being promoted and relegated based on their performance the previous year. Each division plays a global-standard home and away schedule, and the Supporters Shield is awarded to the winner of the MLS Premier Division.
Some further wrinkles that might be controversial:
* for determining MLS Cup qualification, apertura points are added to the clausura points (if the divisions in the apertura are of unequal size, then clubs from smaller divisions would have 1 point per missing game added to their tally to even things out)
* in the hierarchy of honors, for the purpose of CONCACAF Champions League qualification, the order is:
– MLS Cup winner
– Supporters Shield winner
– (2) Conference winners
– US Open Cup winner
– MLS Cup runner-up
– 2nd in Premier Division
– 2nd in Conference that won MLS Cup
– 2nd in other Conference
By giving the MLS Cup primacy over the Supporters Shield, you reduce the temptation of a club that wins the Shield to phone it in for the rest of the season
* Promotion and relegation are as follows:
– winners of each lower division at the end of the apertura are automatically promoted
– bottom of each higher division at the end of the apertura are automatically relegated
– another club is promoted from each lower division based on apertura+clausura points
– another club is relegated from each higher division based on apertura+clausura points
* SuperLiga qualification is based on the apertura results: the four best clubs in the Premier Division that are not eligible for the CONCACAF Champions League as of the conclusion of the first round of the MLS Cup playoffs go to the SuperLiga.
* In dividing MLS into divisions for the apertura, the maximum division size is 10 clubs and the minimum is 6. Additionally, each division should be at least of equal size as the one below it (this allows for greater seasonal variation in scheduling for the lower divisions, since a lower-division game in unfavorable weather is unlikely to draw a crowd!). For a 16-club MLS, I would prefer 10-6; for 18, 10-8; for 20: 10-10; for 22: 10-6-6; for 24: 10-8-6; for 26: 10-8-8; for 28: 10-6-6-6, etc.
This structure has the added benefit of potentially allowing MLS to expand far beyond the 32 club limit (though expansion beyond 26 might require splitting into three or more leagues for the clausura). This would obviously allow MLS to create derbies in more cities or expand to markets that are otherwise not served by the NBA/NHL/MLB/NFL. There’s some evidence historically that being the first league to establish in a given territory helps a sport establish itself in that territory’s sports fans: being the league in which Hartford gets to battle New York and Boston brings mindshare among Connecticut fans, for example.
My preferred MLS solution is, once there are a few more teams, go to a single-table, play everyone once home and once away season format. Award the Shield as usual, and send the winner off to the Champions’ League. Then, top six make the playoffs, top two get byes to the semifinal and home field advantage, home and away for the quarterfinal.