Would.You.Please.Just.Stop.It ? Please, quit it. Quit starting threads with ridiculous concepts. Quit posting needlessly confusing and entirely speculative schedules. It does not help anyone.
OK. Throw in an extra "rivalry" game somewhere to get to an even number. Either way the structure I outlined is pretty solid. In all humbleness.
Yes, more trophies, more competitions means more interest! And with 28 clubs you need more competitions, more titles! The biggest problem is that 28 is a bad number. Because 1/4 of 28 is 7 a odd number. And I Don't like unheaven competitions. So, instead of playing inside conference during regular season, interconference games is the easiest and heaven way. With 28 teams, 2 conferences, will give 28 games. MEANING ALL CLUBS WILL PLAY THE SAME GAMES. Supporter's Shield winner becomes a fair winner. The MLS Playoff could be rebranded The Championship. With a shorter regular season you could create a second competition, the LEAGUE CUP. This make sense, because with the League Cup, all MLS clubs could get the same amount of games. How? The League Cup Group Stage with the MLS excluded from CONCACAF Champions League. This clubs will enter at a later stage (probably R16). Soccer Bowl (Like the Super Bowl) between The Championship Winner and the League Cup Winner - closing season game. Each title winner receive one berth at the CONCACAF Champions League. EACH SEASON 6 TITLES, 5 national titles and 1 international title: - Supporter's Shield - The Championship - The League Cup - Soccer Bowl - US Open Cup - CONCACAF Champions League
No. No need to rename Supporter's Shield. No need to rename MLS Playoffs. No need the create a second competition. Just stop with this crap. It is really, really annoying.
What? Renaming Supporter's Shield?!! Ok, I Stop. However until this moment I didn't read a valid suggestion. My suggestion is very simple, straight forward and clean. All I read here is a complete mess, with rivalry games, unheaven Schedule, unheaven confronts, etc. If you don't get it, maybe the problem isn't me...
For instance, let's take a trip to England: - Premier League=Supporter's Shield) - League Cup=League Cup (however with a Group Stage in US) - FA Cup=US Open Cup - FA Community Shield=Soccer Bowl - Europa League or Champions League=CONCACAF Champions League Add a Playoff to the Top Premier League clubs and you have the The Championship. WHAT A HUGE DIFFERENCE! Let's add the ribbon trophie in England! Oh, wait... I'm the problem for purposing strange things, that exists almost everywhere!
Most people who watch MLS already don't care about any trophy other than MLS Cup. "I know how to fix this... more trophies!"
Actually disappointed in Paulo. He has missed out having another tournament for teams knocked out of the league cup group stages. Boom. Another trophy right there.
We are not in England. These things are not equivalent at all. You are, once again, making crap up and conflating things that are not alike. The Premier League is NOT equal to the Supporter's Shield. The Premier League is THE championship. The Supporter's Shield is a trophy. There is a major difference. The Premier League is roughly equivalent to MLS Cup (as league champion). The League Cup is NOT equal to the "League Cup" as the second does not exist. The FA Cup is NOT equal to the US Open Cup. The FA Cup is 100x more prestigious. The FA Community Shield is NOT equal to the "Soccer Bowl" as the first is simply a vanity game and the second is a figment of your addled brain. The Europa League and/or Champions League are NOT equal to the CONCACAF Champions League, not by a long shot. Just because some things have similar names does not mean that they are equal. No, the biggest problem is that, like every single one of your ideas, this is stupid, complicated, unnecessary and annoying. Your "proposal" (Post 50 in this here thread) is unbelievably stupid, complicated, unnecessary and annoying. As @JasonMa points out, even the Mods have told you to cut it out.
i get where you are coming from...and i dont get all the hate this post got. i mean, to me, a you be the don forum is about throwing out ideas...not being overly realistic about everything. if you cut down the schdule to 28 games...then you gotta add something in there somehow...i feel you on your ideas even if they are far from perfect. how about if the MLS season was somehow split up....?...if there was a tourney with all the teams +maybe 4 minor league teams? and then a playff type tourney with the mls cup at the end of the year.? whatever the case i dont see how you make a schedule that works with 28 teams and only play like 34 games. everyone will be playing totally different schedules.
In 2016 every club had 19 opponents. Every club played 10 opponents once, 3 opponents twice, and 6 opponents three times. That's a mean of 1.79 games per opponent with a standard deviation of 0.89 games per opponent. With four divisions of 7, playing every club in your division and one club in another division twice and everybody else once to make 34 games would make a mean of 1.26 games per opponent with a standard deviation of 0.44 games per opponent. The standard deviation would be much lower. I don't think schedule inequality would be more of a problem with 28 clubs than with 20 clubs.
How about a 1st and 2nd division with 14 teams each. There may be a pro/rel discussion somewhere on this site.
At 28 teams (or more) I like 4 geographic conferences (not divisions). Play every conference opponent twice and as many of the other 21 teams as you can once. That would be 12 conference games and 22 non-conference if the league sticks with 34 games. Play one non-conference opponent twice. For the playoffs, the conference winners would get the top four seeds and byes into the quarterfinals. Open the other 8 spots up to wildcards, the next best point totals regardless of conference. Those would be seeded 5-12 overall and playoff to get the other 4 quarterfinal spots. That means that teams in the same conference would be playing pretty much the same schedule to try to win the conference and get that top 4 seed. But going with 4 conferences and league-wide wildcards means that you would have a much better chance of getting the top 2 teams into the Cup final instead of sticking with an East-West final every year. For the playoffs, I would like to see it be home-and-away throughout but play both games each week so the whole tournament would take 4 weeks.
That's pretty similar to my suggestion 4 divisions, each team plays it's in-conference rivals twice and every other team twice [I meant once]. Then the TV companies can make up some tradition Conference "rivalries" to increase the number of games to 34 or 36 (well old Sam Houston never did like them Vancouverites). As for my suggestion that "the TV companies can make up some [extra games) tradition Conference 'rivalries'" to add up to 34 or 36 games, this is practiced in the Anglo-French Rugby League Super League, where several extra games between rivals are played in neutral stadium back to back over a weekend (usually at the Etihad).
That's a bit harsh. I don't think he meant that the English and US/Canadian trophies are equivalent in terms of prestige but are the equivalent competitions. Actually I don't think adding MLS cup competition is a bad idea. In a 28 team league the teams playing in the CONCACAF Champions League teams could get a first round bye. I don't think a pre-season Supercoppa style charity game played in a temperate climate between conference winners is a bad idea either.
Perhaps it was a bit harsh, but he has come up with dozens of crackpot scenarios, that it has become a bit tedious. As for your other suggestions, we don't need a MLS Cup competition, we have the league and the US Open Cup. As for a Supercoppa-style charity game played in a temparate climate between conference winners sounds suspiciously like MLS Cup (except for the charity thing). That is why we have two conferences and the "winners" go to the finals. A charity game between the US Open Cup winner and MLS Cup winner might make sense....if anyone would give a crap about that game, which would almost never happen. @Paul Berry, I respect your point of view, but I am not getting sucked into this conversation again.
You have to start a tradition sometime. The 1926 Charity/Community Shield attracted 1.500 at Maine Road. Crowds of under 20,000 were common for the first 50 years.
I'd much rather go to single elimination in playoffs.. The home and away series format has pretty much negated the value of end of season rankings. I can't remember for sure (Matthew Doyle? Maybe?), but one of the soccer journos noted that only a handful of times had the higher seed scored more goals than the lower seed since the switch to H/A. More advanced thanks to tie breakers and pks, but it was still less than half.
But Yoshou, what's to keep the away team from playing negative soccer to grind out results, like Seattle did in the MLS Cup? I think a Wed/Sat home and away rhythm would work best. I think the numbers are proving that mid-week playoff games can earn decent ratings now, and would compress the playoff schedule into four weeks (which would also prove the need for bench depth to be able to sustain such a run).
Instead of one grindy game, we now get two grindy games. In the first leg the away team grinds out the game hoping to either get a 0-0 draw or a 1-0 loss. In the second leg, if the away team won their home game, they grind out the game hoping to protect their lead. In addition to having two grindy games instead of one, the two leg series also devalues the regular season because the whole point of a home/away series is to eliminate home field advantage which, allegedly, is one of the advantages of getting a higher position in the regular season.
Sorry, been out of this thread for a few weeks, but here's the basic logical concept I could see most people agreeing on. 4 divisions of 7 for 34 games. This (and I am going to reinforce this) essentially means no conferences and only divisions. Does MLS have the stones to accept that concept which mathematically makes sense at 28 teams, or will they keep the arbitrary eastern and western conferences?