Aside from adding teams, what are they doing to make the league more exciting? Yes, I do think they are sitting on their hands. Like most of the fans are during the regular season.
Man, I just don't think you get it. A single-table is not going to do anything for this league, and I truly believe that it would be a disastrous move to attempt. It's obvious that that's what you are all about. 1) Relegation would never work in America. It's just not American. 2) Single tables are good for places like England (about the size of Alabama), Germany (about the size of Montana), Spain (about the size of Oregon & Washington), Holland (not even the size of Vermont & New Hampshire combined). You don't need to waste that much money on travel. With a single-table, coastal teams are going to spend tons of money being in the air. Like it or not, there need to be divisions and unbalanced schedules, so that teams don't have to spend that much money in flight, and when you get to the end, you get two teams that don't normally play each other, like in the Super Bowl. With the way the league is set up, the teams from different conferences would only meet every four years, unless they meet in the Super Bowl. In the NBA, a team faces a team from the other conference exactly twice a year, leaving a little mystery to the final game. And That is what playoffs are about. You don't HAVE to like it, as there are so many other leagues out there.
To be honest I don't find anything compelling about the NBA, NHL, or MLB reagular seasons. The only American sport that has a corner on regular season excitement is the NFL. They only have 16 games which makes every game ultra-important. My concern is that by the attendance numbers people didn't really find the MLS playoff games compelling. If you take away DC, the interest went down. I also excuse NE, because I imagine 99% of NE sports fans were hypnotized by the Red Sox. The way you make the regular season more compelling is to make the soccer on the field better. Even if we have 24 teams in the league with 8 playoff spots, the majority of the games will still be meaningless (i.e. baseball). The same with a single table structure (unless we get promotion/relegation in the future), where 1/2 of the teams and fans will know they won't make the playoffs after half of the season. So what do you do? You get the product on the field to be as exciting as possible. Better players, etc. Market like crazy. Hopefully more highlights on ESPN, etc. You have to get more people interested in the sport. MAKE THE SOCCER ITSELF MORE COMPELLING, not by using some trick with the tables, etc.
Not true. Not including the "new kid in town" first year, the league has had an average annualized long term growth trend of 1.2% per year. That's including the disaster that was Southlake and the Fire's forced move to Naperville. That's 9% in the last 7 years. Not growing by leaps and bounds, but slow steady growth.