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North American Pro Soccer 2018


Gothamite

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5 hours ago, dfwabel said:

The Athletic also mentioned that by pushing up the start, they would also try to have more Wednesday night games, if the Player's Association agrees.  Team costs would like increase due to chartering more planes*, but The Athletic was told that MLS games rate higher on weeknights.

 

*-There's generally a charter aircraft shortage in the spring, as the NCAA has found out. 

 

Makes sense with the midweek games, though I'd be concerned with fixture congestion. But at some point MLS needs to get its TV ratings woes and it seems like enough teams are at a point that midweek won't kill in-person attendance.

 

Single-elimination playoffs is interesting. On the one hand I feel like every playoff game will now be hosted in the big market, big spending teams and this might increase the inequality of MLS teams (that's already widening). On the other hand, this also leaves greater opportunities for a crap team to bunker their way to MLS Cup. So those are my two possible cynical scenarios, but on the whole I still suspect this is better than the wacky current system. Seems like positive changes all the way around.

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Once again, the home and home favors the lower seeded team: Atlanta got to blast NYRB at home and Portland's goals are worth more in the second leg.

 

I know MLS is switching to single elimination next year, but simply swapping the home/away games would have been a lot better.

1 hour ago, ShutUpLutz! said:

and the drunken doodoobags jumping off the tops of SUV's/vans/RV's onto tables because, oh yeah, they are drunken drug abusing doodoobags

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That would just introduce new issues, wouldn't it? I'd rather see the away goals rule dropped, for a two-legged final. Otherwise I think it makes sense to give the higher-seeded game the 2nd game, for home-field advantage in extra time and knowing just what you need to take care of.

 

I still worry about parking the bus in a single-elimination game but teams in Portland's position last night already see the advantage to that anyway.

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Dropping the away goal rule would help, yes.

 

But I think what we're really seeing is why other soccer leagues don't do playoffs to determine their champions. There's just way too much variance.

1 hour ago, ShutUpLutz! said:

and the drunken doodoobags jumping off the tops of SUV's/vans/RV's onto tables because, oh yeah, they are drunken drug abusing doodoobags

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1 hour ago, DG_Now said:

Dropping the away goal rule would help, yes.

 

But I think what we're really seeing is why other soccer leagues don't do playoffs to determine their champions. There's just way too much variance.

 

Functionally, the Champions League might as well be the "playoffs" of European football. The only difference is that, once you get to the quarterfinal stage of the knockout rounds, it's totally random who faces whom, and who gets the first leg at home and who gets the second. 

 

In any case, as I said before, it really should be a choice that teams have whether they play the first leg away or the second leg. And, yes, away goal tiebreakers are a vestige of a long-gone era that no longer needs to exist. It should be abolished on all levels by every federation. I hate the idea that the home team wins Leg 1 2-1, the home team wins Leg 2 1-0, and the home team from Leg 2 advances because away goal. It's all equal to me. I could just as easily argue that having a game where you score two goals and your opponent doesn't is just as impressive. We need to be more progressive in sports and not keeping halcyon rules that don't have a practical matter in 2018. 

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4 hours ago, crashcarson15 said:

Single elimination knockout soccer tournaments are awful and will only continue to decrease my overall interest in MLS.

So did you stop watching the World Cup after the group stage?

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10 hours ago, DG_Now said:

Dropping the away goal rule would help, yes.

 

But I think what we're really seeing is why other soccer leagues don't do playoffs to determine their champions. There's just way too much variance.

 

Honestly, I’d be just fine if MLS eliminated the playoffs entirely and just went to a table format for their league title. Make the US Open Cup the defacto “playoff” and call it a day. That would eliminate some of the absolute nonsense that goes on in the MLS playoffs (which I think totally kills it anyway) and would inject another level of life to what I think is a sadly lackluster tournament in the USOC. 

 

That probably won’t ever happen though because Murcia, but it would be nice. 

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On 11/19/2012 at 7:23 PM, oldschoolvikings said:
She’s still half convinced “Chris Creamer” is a porn site.)
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The US Open Cup is the equivalency of the FA Cup (or other similar domestic cups). Sometimes the best team in England wins the FA Cup, but the FA Cup winner is not necessarily the best team in England. 

 

So that doesn't work at all.

 

This would be way down the road and I don't think MLS would ever intend for it to get to this point, but the best system I can think of would be for each conference to have 20 teams, play a traditional 38-game home/away schedule, and the winner from each conference plays a two-legged championship, random draw for which team hosts which leg. That team would be the overall champion. I would really fancy something like that. 

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That really sounds good, but you can’t keep New York and DC isolated from LA and Portland.  And the alternative is an AL/NL-style split where local clubs never play.  Either way, it would be disastrous for the league. 

 

That system can work in a smaller country where you cap the number of clubs in the top league at 20.  It cannot work in a nation so heavily populated and geographically spread out as ours. 

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10 hours ago, 4_tattoos said:

So did you stop watching the World Cup after the group stage?

No, but the format of the World Cup hasn't been selected because it's the best way to crown the most deserving country, it's been selected because you have a month to figure out a winner and, well, this is pretty much the only way to do that.

 

Contrast that to club soccer, which has nine months to figure out which of (in this case) 24 teams is the best, and after eight months of a regular season, we have a good idea. If you go through eight months and at the end of the day, Montreal gets the chance to park the bus for 120 minutes and :censored:-house Atlanta out of a championship opportunity, why should I even bother watching the regular season? The quality of play isn't what draws me to MLS. 

 

Maybe club soccer was an important addition to my original statement in that vain.

 

13 hours ago, Gothamite said:

 

Honest question: what’s your level of interest now?

 

Passing interest -- I try to keep up because I genuinely enjoyed the league at one point, but it's one of the first things that went when I graduated and had much less free time to blow on sports.

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7 hours ago, Gothamite said:

No, it won’t happen because that’s not what the US Open Cup is.   And because crowning a champion based on the table only makes sense with a balanced home-and-road schedule, which can’t happen here. 

 

Ehh. Yeah I get it wouldn’t be ideal, but I don’t think a single table format would really be that difficult to pull off. You’d have to get creative with scheduling, but I think it would work. Even if they did it like baseball used to and have two tables where the winners meet in the MLS cup that would be fine with me. That’s sort of how the USL does it now in the regular season, minus playoffs. I also realize that it’s a pipe dream, for several reasons. Some of those very understandable. I just hate how inorganic the MLS playoffs feel. Soccer isn’t really traditionally designed for a post season playoff format and I think it’s actually kind of glaring based on some of the results we’ve seen. 

 

And sure the USOC is an open format that includes more than just MLS, but it’s basically always won by the big clubs in the end anyway. I think adding a higher level of weight to that tournament would do it some good. As it stands, a lot of teams don’t seem to take it seriously, and that’s sad to see considering it’s the oldest tournament in the country. 

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On 11/19/2012 at 7:23 PM, oldschoolvikings said:
She’s still half convinced “Chris Creamer” is a porn site.)
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59 minutes ago, Bucfan56 said:

 

Ehh. Yeah I get it wouldn’t be ideal, but I don’t think a single table format would really be that difficult to pull off. You’d have to get creative with scheduling, but I think it would work. Even if they did it like baseball used to and have two tables where the winners meet in the MLS cup that would be fine with me. That’s sort of how the USL does it now in the regular season, minus playoffs.

 

Yeah, but you can't "minus playoffs".  Playoffs are good for clubs, and good for the league.  Playoffs make more games relevant than a strict table-finish does.  Which is why the USL does it.

 

59 minutes ago, Bucfan56 said:

I just hate how inorganic the MLS playoffs feel.

 

Oh, that word.

 

If I could ban one word from soccer conversations everywhere, it would be that word.  Not only is it meaningless, it's often used as a cudgel against American soccer, as if every other league in the world sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus and never ran a focus group or ever changed its competition.

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No, but you would think US soccer could learn a thing or two from leagues that have been around for a century or more, right? I get that we always insist on being intentionally different, but ignoring the sports history and some of the growing pains those leagues went through seems foolish too, no? 

 

And you can dislike certain words and want to “ban” them all you want. But truth of the matter is, if you ever want to really gain a foothold in this market, you’ll have to at least acknowledge some of the (perfectly reasonable) issues that turn potential fans off from wanting to consume the product. 

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On 11/19/2012 at 7:23 PM, oldschoolvikings said:
She’s still half convinced “Chris Creamer” is a porn site.)
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American sports demand playoffs or tournaments. I think MLS mostly has it right given the state the league; I just think they have some improvements to make at the margins.

 

1 hour ago, ShutUpLutz! said:

and the drunken doodoobags jumping off the tops of SUV's/vans/RV's onto tables because, oh yeah, they are drunken drug abusing doodoobags

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3 hours ago, Bucfan56 said:

No, but you would think US soccer could learn a thing or two from leagues that have been around for a century or more, right? I get that we always insist on being intentionally different, but ignoring the sports history and some of the growing pains those leagues went through seems foolish too, no? 

 

Who's doing that?

 

Yes, MLS tried to re-invent the sport when they started up two decades ago.  And yes, that was really stupid.  But they've learned from it, and moved closer towards the rest of the world, while still making allowances for the unique situation in this country.

 

3 hours ago, Bucfan56 said:

And you can dislike certain words and want to “ban” them all you want. But truth of the matter is, if you ever want to really gain a foothold in this market, you’ll have to at least acknowledge some of the (perfectly reasonable) issues that turn potential fans off from wanting to consume the product. 

 

"Inorganic" is not a perfectly reasonable criticism.  Neither is pretending that the United States is the only country with a federation that experiments and changes its competition.  Unless one is willing to ignore, you know, the very existence of the Premier League.

 

(Note: I'm not saying you are arguing in bad faith.  Only that the word "inorganic" is often a very clear sign that someone is.)

 

If the existence of playoffs. or a 28-club league, or the summer calendar, or lack of pro/rel, is really "turn(ing) potential fans off", then I doubt they actually "(want) to consume the product".

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I’m simply arguing based on my own personal experiences based on some of the struggles we’ve had attracting casual fans and turning them into long-term fans. If that’s arguing based in “bad faith”, then so be it. 

 

And its it’s not like soccer is the only sport with these problems. Hockey suffers from some of the same issues. Finding a reasonable way to end games, for example, is problematic because the very nature of the sport makes that difficult when you’re in a post season tournament. It’s inorganic (IMO, of course) because there’s a fundamental shift in the game and how it’s played from regular season to post season. I get why they do it, but I also understand why that’s seen as a huge turn off for a lot of people. 

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On 11/19/2012 at 7:23 PM, oldschoolvikings said:
She’s still half convinced “Chris Creamer” is a porn site.)
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