No league wants its playoffs to be described as interminable, but that's the best word to describe the Major League Soccer playoffs. The 12-team competition takes more than 1½ months to complete. What should be the focused, dramatic centerpiece of the league season is instead a slog. The league needs to do something to shorten it.
The main problem is the two-match, aggregate-score format of the conference semifinals and finals. While this type of playoff has a long history in soccer — it's used in the knockout rounds of the European Champions League, for instance — it often results in dull games, especially because MLS stubbornly insists on using "away goals" as the tiebreaker.
The Seattle-Vancouver semifinal this year was a perfect example. Vancouver, playing at home in the first leg, decided its best chance on winning the series was on the away-goals tiebreaker. This led to an immensely boring 0-0 draw in the first leg, with Seattle only creating some life in the second leg with a pair of second-half goals. The Whitecaps ended the series with exactly one shot on target in two games. It was a terrible matchup.
Just eliminating the two-legged setup of these matches would go a long way toward shortening the slog. Having a single-elimination playoff tournament hasn't exactly killed interest in the World Cup or the FA Cup. And it would make the regular-season battle for playoff seeds even more important, with playoff home-field advantage on the line.
Anything that makes the MLS regular season more important is a good thing, and given the difficulties of playing on the road in MLS, home playoff games would be very valuable. Even more important, it would eliminate the ludicrous away-goals tiebreaker and guarantee that every winner-take-all playoff match is a must-watch game.
It doesn't help that FIFA schedules a mid-November international break every year, putting a two-week dent into the playoff schedule as top players head off to play for their countries. The pause means that this year the MLS Cup Final isn't until Dec. 9, nearly seven weeks after the end of the regular season.
This kind of drawn-out playoff is problematic enough for a league like the NBA or NHL, in which teams are playing 20 to 25 playoff games in a two-month span. In MLS, teams are packing only five or six games into that seven weeks — not enough to keep the interest level high.
Eliminating the two-legged matchups would make the playoffs, at most, four weeks long, and give the league the option of either completing the tournament before the break or saving the conference semifinals and beyond for after the break.
