News: MLS owners approve fall-spring calendar and season format changes: Sources

Will the vote be on all three (calendar, table and playoffs) topics, or just the calendar moves with the other issues being a separate ongoing discussion?

 

I sound like a broken record as I've said this in multiple other threads, but a winter switch would be complete disaster for my club without a serious change in how much ownership invests. 20 years of garbage ownership demonstrates that no such investment change will be coming. That leaves us with facilities completely inadequate to deal with the weather, attendance that will nosedive, and even greater irrelevance in the local spots landscape because they're competing with more teams.

I don't think we're the only one with those problems either, but we're one of the worst off.

Either the Rapids end up folding or they get sold off. Those are really the only two realistic outcomes.

 

Teams that can play in winter, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, San Jose, LAFC, LA Galaxy, San Diego, Miami, Orlando, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Nashville and teams that can play 2 or 3 games during winter in domed stadium, Minnesota, St. Louis, Montreal, the rest can schedule games but if the conditions aren’t right there’ll be rescheduled with a bigger gap for postponement, one of the benefits for MLS is that they can sell more winter gea

 

To touch on the division piece, not sure who you'd group in the "Southeast" and "Midwest" without losing a lot of rivalries...I assume they'd go DC for the Southeast and San Diego for Midwest?

 

Is not flipping, is adding, during summer MLS teams can play leagues cup, preseason friendlies against Europe, Asia, Latin America teams to filled those dates

 

I'm pretty sure that player contracts have a certain amount of time off for the off-season.
I remember years back they pushed up the start of the regular season and the MLS Cup teams started training 2 or 3 days later than everyone else because of the required break.

 

Everyone is being a bit dramatic and I get it as this is one of their passions. Anticipating this move I had already canceled the auto renewal for AppleTV MLS. I watch MLS from after the NCAA Final Foul (first weekend in April) until the start of the College Football season (Labor Day weekend). This is like a 4-5 month stretch. I feel like I'm being forced out as a fan. But its life.

 

"The plan is to move the league to a single-table format, but that also includes five divisions..."

Who wants to tell these people that they don't know what a single-table is? Like, by this logic, the American League is a single-table format.

 

The playoffs last year ran through November and culminated in MLS Cup on December 7th, one week shy of when a Fall-Summer schedule would start its winter break. Your Rapids played their first official match at Dick's on February 18th, a week or two later than when the suggested Fall-Summer schedule would resume regular league play. Does that extra week in December and that extra week or two in February spell doom for the Rapids? The new schedule is actually not all that drastically different from the current schedule -- just maybe swapping some sweltering July games for colder Dec and Feb games.

 

If USL super league can do it, why MLS couldn’t do it ?

 

Wouldn't you prefer to have the late season stretch and playoffs fall into your window, rather than boring regular season games that don't matter to you because you don't watch the stretch or the playoffs

 

These changes will make MLS a fully proper league. What’s not to like?

 

I cancelled Fire season tickets because too many games were already happening when the weather sucks in the early part of the season because Leagues Cup gutted the summer schedule (and the later games were all moving to Bridgeview). The calendar change just means that there will be like...5 home games all season in Chicago where it's actually nice out.

 

It was 6 degrees fahrenheit at kickoff and less than 2,000 people attended that game. Literally no one looks at a match day like that and says "More of this, please!"

Let's play devils advocate and say that it was an MLS game instead of CCC, and its a Saturday fixture instead of Tuesday, you're still getting fewer than 10k showing up. Possibly a lot fewer.

Yeah, I think it does. Attendance will materially drop because you just gave everyone another reason to not go to games. You also remove the one annual fixture that has consistently been a sellout (July 4) with no replacement. Only the hardcore fans will still show up, and thats just diminishing returns since ownership does nothing to cultivate that segment because they provide such a consistently terrible product. They need those more casual fans to stay afloat.

Also, where does the team train? Our facilities are already poor by MLS standards, and they are even worse if cold/snowy weather becomes a more consistent part of the equation. They'd have to spend money either building facilities, or renting out space somewhere else.

Costs go up. Revenue goes down. The owner is already a cheapskate. He's not going to look at a situation like this and want to spend more money. It'll be the opposite.

The outcome is our team either folds or is relocated. The only way they'd survive and stay in Colorado is if some angel investor buys the club (from an owner that typically doesn't sell their stuff).

If its not that different, why change it?

 

They’ll become an Arsenal farm team.

 

The schedule change also exacerbates an issue that I've had with MLS forever, which is that the teams don't play for long enough.

The big Euro leagues run for 9 months, from August to May with 3 months off. This calendar also has that length overall, but with playoffs taking up all of May and with December and January completely off, you're looking at a league where a big chunk of teams only play for 7 months a year (currently about 8). That's not ideal for player development, and also sets players back who are set to play internationally in the summer because they'll have up to 2 full months off before summer tournaments kick off in earnest.

So you'll have the problem that a lot of CWC players did this summer, where they need to ramp down from the season, ramp up for the tournament season, ramp down, then ramp up again for the next league campaign. You're asking for injuries with that.

With this schedule, the playoffs need to be very short. Like, start May 15 and end May 31 sort of short.

 

Also what I noticed about Chicago in this season was, why they scheduled 2 games in March but they scheduled 4 consecutive away games in late May and early June, why not flipping those?

 

Maybe you should look into why GMs have been asking for the change.

 

So basically we turn into a modern equivalent of an bottom dwelling team from the old NASL. The ones that would draw 4k or 5k on average and then fold after a year or two...except we'd be kept alive because Single Entity™.

What is good for LA and Miami isn't necessarily good for Colorado. Also, our GM is a certified glue-eater, so his opinion on anything can be safely discarded.