Without waiting until the close-season was officially here Don Garber and MLS delivered the news that was not news at all today. Major League Soccer is moving to an unbalanced, conference focused schedule in 2012 – it seems to have unhinged a lot of people, Twitter has featured a rolling torrent of irate MLS fans it seems. I’m not sure why this this is such an emotive issue, especially in a nation where unbalanced schedules are the norm.
“But the rest of the world…” seems to be the counter argument from many people. It is ironic, given the scorn poured on the likes of Sporting Kansas City and Real Salt Lake in certain quarters for having “Europoser” names however this isn’t the rest of the World. It is the United States of America and MLS is still in its teenage years, its going to be a bit different from the leagues that are formed over 80 years ago.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved my balanced schedules. I like the idea that with 19 teams each team could play every other team home and away resulting in a 36 team regular season but that is about as much as I can imagine an MLS Regular Season schedule containing. Why? There are realities to running a professional soccer league in the USA that differ from the norm in England or Spain or Italy.
First and foremost – the damned geography. We have teams in places like Chicago, Toronto, and Colorado. These places tend to not be so warm in March and November, and early and late season attendances are not great, and historically haven’t been in other Midwestern cities. As much as we hate to admit it – when it gets cold and shitty outside, the casual soccer fans, the 60-70% of us that DO NOT go to every game do not show up. Stretching the length of the season to fit in extra games is really just not that much of an option, we don’t need a month or two of games with nobody showing up at either end of the season. It doesn’t serve the business of MLS very well.
If we cannot lengthen the season, then these games become midweek games. Throw in CONCACAF Champions League and USOC games, the odd money maker friendly, the FIFA International Dates MLS has finally started to honor and it gets to the point where there are simply too many games. Fixture congestion is an anathema to quality soccer. Tired players don’t play well, tired players get injured, and its all somewhat moot because the biggest hindrance to midweek soccer in the USA is once again the fans, who have proven for more than a decade and a half that they love soccer, but not enough to be tired on a Thursday at work to watch it. When the league focus is on improving the quality of the on field product actively cultivating an environment where fixture congestion is rampant would be counter productive to say the least especially when that quality also in itself drives ticket sales. Do so at times when fans don’t actually want games makes it doubly stupid.
Lengthening the season is out, and so is playing ever more games within it and so the alternative genuinely becomes does MLS stick with the balanced schedules of recent years or does it stop expanding? We all know that isn’t going to happen any time soon. What happens when we get to twenty one teams? Twenty two? Twenty five? Are we going to play a 48 game regular season? The unbalanced schedule might be unpopular in some quarters but it is also a reality if this league is going to expand and its better if MLS and MLS fans embrace that as a fact now rather than bemoaning what can and never will be if this league is going to continue to expand and prosper.
Who knows, maybe sometime in the distant future we’ll wind up with Eastern and Western conferences big enough to have balanced regular seasons within them, and wait for the big money East-West games in Cup and Playoff competitions until then we’ll just need to deal with it.