Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest day on the American sporting calendar, and arguably the biggest on the sporting calendar of the world. The game commands a level of interest that every other league aspires to, including Major League Soccer, which from the start has held a playoff for its MLS Cup championship and ignored the traditional soccer model in which the league winner is the team with the best regular-season record.
MLS includes too many teams in its playoffs, but it's undeniable that the MLS Cup gives American soccer its own version of the Super Bowl. The game serves as the culmination and celebration of the season as a whole. Playoffs have been suggested for other leagues, to get that exciting final-game vibe.
But few have implemented them, amid concern that it would kill the fairness of the current system.
England's version of this showpiece is the FA Cup Final, traditionally the final game of the English season. As the Premier League has grown in importance, though, the single-elimination, take-all-comers FA Cup seems more and more quaint and less like English soccer's biggest game.
In the past few years, the final game of the second-division promotion playoffs, which allow the winning team an entry into the vast riches of the Premier League, has drawn almost as much attention as the FA Cup Final. If the Premier League had a similar title-deciding game, it likely would be the biggest single event in the world.
That said, it's hard to argue for playoffs in a league in which every team plays every other team twice — once home, once away. This setup does have the advantage of throwing up a playoff-type atmosphere almost every week. Chelsea and Arsenal, playing Saturday morning, will garner huge attention precisely because there is no end-of-season playoff. Rather than serve as a battle for playoff seeding, games like this have the potential to decide the title at the end of the year.
Ultimately, this should take precedent over any hope for a Super Bowl-style, end-of-season extravaganza. Leagues such as the Premier League reward excellence over the entire year, not just one end-of-season burst. Leicester City lost twice to second-place Arsenal in 2015-16, but was far better than Arsenal over the other 36 matches of the season. Surely that performance is more deserving of a league title.
In MLS, though, a playoff will continue to make sense. The 22-team league's unwieldy size and far-flung geographic distribution mean that a balanced schedule is a pipe dream. The league's regular season never will be fair. The playoffs, though they should be much smaller, still serve as a Super Bowl-style centerpiece for fans (and broadcasters and advertisers) to focus on. Shrink them, but keep them. And someday, perhaps MLS Cup Sunday will start to feel a little more like Super Bowl Sunday.
