Golly! I'm sure glad MLS plays from fall to spring!

You have a join date of 2000 ... How many examples of games do you think I can dig up of games being interrupted or postponed in July and August due to storms and lightning in that time? How many pictures do you think I can find of emptyish stadiums during 100 degree heat waves?

It's a big continent and you just can't guarantee perfect weather for everyone all the time unless you go down to 28 games or less. Showing pictures of one extreme example is not really useful to the discussion. We all know what the worst case scenarios are.

Also you're using a horrible example. That game could of been played in Backe and Henry weren't such big pussies about it. The temperature was right around 32-34 so the pitch wasn't frozen. If the Costa Rica NT had the balls to get through that game in Denver when some of them had never seen snow before, I think 2 MLS teams could of handled that night in Harrison

 

Why are you extending the currently formatted season further into December? Who is proposing that? So you want to reformat the schedule so a few games (with a few teams) are possibly in nicer weather at the expense of all teams playing in shittier weather, fans sitting (or not showing up) in shittier weather, and a mid-season break that's as long as the current off-season? Fornicate that.

 

Personally I wouldn't recommend February for cold weather cities. At most I'd start play in late February with the first round in the warm cities. The cold cities wouldn't get their first games until early March.

It's still problematic in maybe Montreal and Toronto but the Northeast and Midwest is already average 40+ degrees by then so it's safe to assume that most years you'll get most of the games in. Will some games get postponed? Sure ... If baseball can do it, major tennis tournaments can do it, motor sports can do it and all the major soccer leagues of the world can do it ... so can MLS.

Some posters around here need to get over this mental hurdle of postponed games IMO ... Not nearly as catastrophic as some assume. A postponed games does less harm to league's image I think than having the team's marquee player away on NT duty a month at a time.

 

Everything I've seen from the league indicates to me that avoiding FIFA dates/tournaments is a priority for the league. Weather is also a priority. In the context of potential future changes which seem inevitable I'm not convinced that I've seen any comment or evidence from the league that weather concerns will trump the FIFA dates concerns.

I think some of you guys that think things are perfect now, should prepare that some day you may have to sacrifice some of your sensibilities to cold weather.

On the other hand the complaint against having a mid season break is valid regardless of which season it is. It's just not done in any other American league. But soccer is a different world with different challenges. We have to coexist with FIFA unfortunately which means either way you fix the schedule someone's going to be inconvenienced in some way.

 

Baseball postpones as a doubleheader that is played the next day, later in the season as a doubleheader when the team is back in town, or just doesn't play it if it has no result on the standings.
Major tennis tournaments and motor sports are traveling rodeos. (You should have thrown in golf too.) Everyone in the league is at the same locale. Easy to reschedule when everyone is on the same schedule.
Major soccer leagues are on postage stamp sized countries with all of the other teams a few hours down the road.

 

Then you have more midweek games if you want to avoid FIFA dates, not push into December where you have more sporting competition and competition from holiday hullabaloo.

LOL. You're talking to someone who also lives in Minneapolis, so don't tell me about cold weather sensibilities. Vikings fans are going to be begging to get back inside after a few years at TCF. BTW, did you go to the UMN women's soccer playoff match a few years ago when the field was surrounded by snow. It was a pretty stellar crowd. Good thing it was a playoff match being played and not a regular season match...

 

Cold.? It's only -13 in Lake Elmo tonight. It's a great night to play soccer!!

 

The new Vikings stadiums going to have the ETFE technology.

 

Reschedule them when? Mid-week? If we're accepting that then why not just stay on the same schedule and play mid-week games?

 

If MLS ever expands to Minnesota we'll have to shorten the season from May to September

I'm sure more Wednesday games is one of the variables on the table. Fixing the schedule is like whack a mole. You can eliminate one inconvenience, but another one pops up somewhere else.

Of course my starting point to fix schedule issues would be to get rid of All Star game and mid season friendlies and the extra week before MLS Cup. That right there buys you 2 weeks easy ... Then allocate those 2 weeks directly towards Gold Cup, World Cup, qualifiers or any other potential conflicts. Not holding my breath on any of those though

 

Sounds to me like the proper solution is investing more in player development so teams have more depth. This would have many other positive repercussions without any of the ridiculous drawbacks of a three month break.

 

And the high potential for said installation to have a live load collapse.

 

Which is funny, because your investment is inconsequential

 

Precisely. Too many questions yet too be answered. This is not a question of throwing money and getting results next year.

 

Part of me wants to be as nasty of a prick as Mr. Warmth, but I ain't in his league. But I will say that anyone who honestly thinks MLS should play a schedule roughly parallel to the NHL and NBA is an unabashed idiot.

How many posters here have actually attended live soccer games outdoors during the winter months? And how many of those places have winters comparable to the northern US? I used to go to games in Belgium and even though it was usually 40 degrees and drizzling, I would get pretty damn cold by the end of the day. It helps that seats are 95% under cover, which is definitely not the case anywhere in the US. In December I went to a Eintracht Frankfurt and it was a 3:30 kickoff. It was about 35 degrees and while ther's a roof, there was a decent breeze and occasional drizzle.

I had a great time, and I would definitely do it again, but as an occasional thing. I honestly don't know if I would want to do that every other week, even if it was "only March." And the fact of the matter is, MLS clubs get most of their revenue from ticket sales, and a lot of those ticket sales come from somewhat "casual" fans. How many "casuals" are going to show up when the weather is that miserable? Even the hottest, most humid days of the year are better for spectators than cold, rain, snow, ice, wind.

 

This is the greatest compliment that I can receive.

 

As is often repeated here, there is no break for the All-Star game. It has been on a mid-week date for the last several years with full league schedules on the preceding and following weekends. Getting rid of that game doesn't shorten the schedule at all. As far as mid-season friendlies those also do not shut down the entire league. There may be some individual teams lightening their schedules at various times in the summer but not enough to consider that a source of gaining an extra week in the schedule. Especially when you consider that with an odd number of teams there have to be some bye weeks in there for someone.

In the 2014 schedule this is the summer stretch of league games:

Week 14 (June 4-8) 11 games
Week 15 (June 11) - 3 games
World Cup Break
Week 16 (June 25-28) - 10 games

Week 17 (July 1-7) - 11 games
Week 18 (July 8-14) - 9 games
Week 19 (July 15-21) - 13 games
Week 20 (July 22-28) - 9 games
Week 21 (July 29 - Aug 4) - 13 games

Week 22 (Aug. 5-11) - 9 games + MLS All-Star game
Week 23 (Aug. 12-18) - 9 games
Week 24 (Aug. 19-25) - 11 games
Week 25 (Aug. 26-Sept. 1) - 9 games

I don't see too many breaks in there.

 

Well, that was kind of dumb. Of course there is the World Cup break in there this year.
Let me see if I can find the weekly schedule from last summer.

 

So Sunshine I hear you are the roofing expert around here. Why do you know so much about roofs?

 

2013 weekly breakdown of league games:

Week 15 (June 4-10) 5 games + WCQs
Week 16 (June 11-17) - 5 games + WCQs + USOC
Week 17 (June 18-24) - 12 games
Week 18 (June 25-31) - 8 games

Week 19 (July 2-8) - 16 games
Week 20 (July 9-15) - 8 games
Week 21 (July 16-22) - 10 games
Week 22 (July 23 - 29) - 9 games
Week 23 (July 10- Aug 5) - 9 games + MLS All-Star game

Week 24 (Aug. 6-12) - 9 games
Week 25 (Aug. 13-19) - 11 games
Week 26 (Aug. 20-26) - 11 games
Week 27 (Aug. 27-Sep. 3) - 9 games

Pretty full last year as well.

 

I'm not one of these people that's going to come on here and preach to folks that they need to just grin and bear bad weather.
But the answer to this question is the same answer to why do a shift at all - in order to have a league final that more than 1 million people will watch on television. There are other reasons why some MLS investor/operators are pushing this, but I think this is the main one. Playing the MLS Cup Final in bad weather during the height of NFL and collegiate football season is a no-win proposition. It will never grow out of the tiniest shadows in that setting.

 

I'm assuming this is partially directed to me since I'm the one that stirred the pot a little by being open to schedule switch.

I wan't really demanding that people radically change the weather they watch MLS in. All I'm really suggesting is an extra week in spring and an extra 2-3 weeks in December. I'm really only suggesting maybe 2 more cold season games per year than what fans already put up with today. We'll still have soccer in April, May, early-mid June, August, September, October and November ... just like before.

At least you get your playoff games into May-June which is the best weather of the year in much of the country ... and you get those games out from under the shadow of football.

 

Yeah the league has pretty much cut much of the waste out ... But even the All Star game being on a Wednesday, you could fit a few league games onto that Wednesday instead. As for the friendlies, the league doesn't shut down because the friendlies are scattered. But every MLS team that plays them loses one game night that could of been used for league. You add up all those individual game nights and you'd end up with one full round of games. And then there's the week before MLS Cup.

You add all that up and you have about 2 weeks of savings.

Of course this only makes sense from a schedule POV. The league makes money on the friendlies and all star games ... Although I'd argue that you could still have the All Star game and friendlies just not during the season ... Schedule those for either your summer break or winter break.

 

Your team has to make the playoffs for that to be true. Meanwhile, your team will be playing more regular season, ho-hum games at a time of the year when there is worse weather.

 

Or just schedule the mid-week regular season game a different week. It's not like there is a short supply of weekdays during the season.