Didn't you know? The whole world over is just BEGGING for MLS action in their backyard. Begging, I tell you.
But is there a single league in there, which uses discp. record, that counts the number of total fouls in that disciplinary record calculation? That tacks on points for suspensions given after the fact on fouls missed during the game?
I love the discipline points tie breaker, we're bound to see a huge increase in phantom DisCo decisions to make sure New York and LA win all their tie breakers!
Feel free to go through the method for calculation for fair play points for each league if you have such specific questions.. They all do it it differently. Regardless of how it is done, we are far from the only league that uses some form of discipline as a tie breaker and it might be more if you take away neutral playoff as the last tiebreaker for many leagues.
They award Europa League places to teams who finish top in the Fair Play tables (at least in England), though I guess the "points for after the fact fouls" might not come in to play, though i'm not sure what formula they use.
Just looked it up, it's even worse then a DisCo Yellow and red cards: If no cards are shown the score will be 10. Every yellow card will deduct this total by 1. A red card will cost a team 3 points in the ranking. If the red card is the result of a second yellow card the deductions of the second yellow card will be ignored. But if a player gets a direct red card after he got a yellow card earlier, the yellow card will be counted as a deduction. This score could become negative Positive play: e.g. attacking tactics, acceleration of the game, efforts to gain time, and continued pursuit of goals. A team can score a maximum of 10 points and a minimum of 1 point Respect to the opponent: e.g. returning the ball to the opponent at a throw-in, helping an injured opponent: maximum 5 points, minimum 1 point Respect to the referee: maximum 5 points, minimum 1 point Behaviour of the team officials: maximum 5 points, minimum 1 point Behaviour of the fans: maximum 5 points, minimum 1 point NB: this criterion is ignored when the number of fans is negligible e.g. if there are no fans at all or because of penalty that was given by the UEFA
If MLS is Mickey Mouse for the terrible crime of announcing tiebreaker rules during the season than what does that make U.S. Track and Field who didn't even have a tiebreaker when two runners tied for an Olympic spot? http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/25/sports/la-sp-0625-oly-hersh-track-20120625 Then they had to scramble and make stuff up on the fly and hoped for a run-off. They messed up an Olympic spot and ruined someone's dream! Millions of dollars are pumped into U.S. Track & Field. In the grand scheme of things, MLS is actually pretty damn well run.
Its also better than the tiebreaker they used at the Olympics in gymnastics. The girl that feel off the beam gets the medal because her beam score was lower than the girl she tied with in determining the all-around best gymnasts...WTF?
Good research, and I do feel slightly better about our process than the Europa League's, sheesh. I guess the part that bothers me most is that the total number of fouls are included in the calculation, because there are often fouls that are completely incidental and have no "fair play" implications. And there's the point I made earlier about how these refs do not call the game uniformly or consistently across the board, so it becomes just about as subjective as Europa's "positive play" points.
At first I was going to point out that in past years imbalance, you were guaranteed at least a H-A with every team, and I think this is the first imbalanced schedule without that. But that overlooks the fact that all of the teams that actually need tie breaking for play-off seeding still get that H-A minimum. That leaves just the SS as potentially needing tie-breaking with a single match between the two, and H2H would be unfair if it is between an East and a West team. I'm guardedly optimistic about these rules. I would have preferred Goal Differential as the first one, but breaking ties usually is all about splitting hairs anyway.
Not in the East. You have some teams that play each other 3 times - others twice. So while "at least" is accurate, it means a different standard depending on the teams involved. It would also make a three way tie a mess.
Again, using discipline fair play is okay. However, it should be ranked very low. Right now, it's ranked above H2H which is not the case with any of the leagues in that list.
We had five way ties in 2009 for wildcards that could be settled on points per game average. I'm not sure why there's such an aversion to doing math, but I guess people like simplicity (read as: people suck at math).
Not to my knowledge, but England does use their system to send a team to the Europa Cup based on Fair Play. It's not without merit..
No, the math could be done, I just personally don't find it competitively fair when there are different number of games played among the participants. But I don't get a vote.
H2H is not used at all which seems to be your bigger concern as opposed to the fair play use. Regardless of where each item is in the stack, I am ok with the lack of H2H for the above reasons.
Head-to-head was mind-numbingly confusing, not what people were used to, and as mentioned earlier, working out the head-to-head tie-breakers sometimes required a lot of work. This is a move toward simplicity.
Preferring the simple to the complicated has nothing to do with an aversion to math. I've said in the past anyone looking at a basic table should be able to work out the tie-breakers with only minimal effort. The old tie-breakers didn't satisfy that criteria, these new ones come a lot closer.
If the schedules were balanced within each conference, head to head would certainly have merit. So would goal difference. Right now, the schedule in the Eastern Conference is the quintessential cluster********, and goals scored has just as much merit as any other non-random, non-displine based tiebreaker.