A look at how USL can tweak their structure to maximize its value.

USL Championship has, in many respects, the most compelling competition structure in American soccer. The balanced schedule, with each conference self-contained and providing the home-away round robin structure familiar to fans of foreign soccer leagues, is as fair as a league competition can be. Each team gets the same chance as every other team to prove their quality and compete for a Regular Season Conference Championship. The pursuit though becomes less about finishing first and more about gaining favorable seeding for the playoffs. Phoenix found out in the cruelest way that the current structure does not favor a team that goes for broke every single match of the 34 game season or the best team but rather levels the playing field in order to have a traditional postseason.

Is this the best way to do business? We’ll take a look at some changes that Seriously Loco members discussed at the end of last season and see how that would impact the competition as it exists now.

The Real Championship Games

A 34 game season in Germany is enough to crown the Bundesliga champions, decide European qualification, and decide who goes down a division. Why then, does USL require playoffs to crown a league champion? And how does USL capitalize on matchups between its best teams? With 2 conferences, the League obviously needs a Final to decide the Champion but what if the 2 best teams were guaranteed to meet?

That’s right, a Grand Final, set across two legs, between the Western and Eastern Conference Regular Season Champions.

This is the only true way to decide who the best team in the USL Championship is and it guarantees the League a marquee matchup between the two teams who were the best in their respective divisions. This event also has the potential to improve on last year's Final which attracted somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000 viewers. The 1st Leg acts as a primer, with the 2nd Leg the main event.

The current format is rigorous enough to show us who the best teams are, but we allow the playoffs to muddy the waters and in some cases overshadow what would otherwise be an incredible season. We allow disappointment to be the prevailing emotion in the case that a Conference Champion crashes out in a single elimination tournament. Let the prevailing emotion be played out in the two matches as the best teams get a shot at the League Title.

This way, you reward the dominant teams, like Phoenix Rising was this year out West, while also raising the stakes in a dramatic title race, as it was out East. That Mark Forrest goal for the Riverhounds in Birmingham last year in the 90th minute in the final game of the season would have been amplified by 1000x if it meant Pittsburgh was going to the Final. The jubilation, the heartbreak, the pure emotion on that final day would be incredible.

Any USL fan who says they would have swerved a two-leg Final between Phoenix and Pittsburgh last season is lying to themselves.

Some people might be upset that the playoffs no longer crown the League Champion but the reality is that the title should be the result of being the best team over the course of the season, not the team that gets the hottest over the final four games.

Give us the big end of season event that the league deserves, and the Champion can feel vindicated knowing they truly are the best team in the league.

PLAYOFFS!?

I can hear everyone screaming by the end of that paragraph for playoffs and they aren’t gone in my USL restructure. The current playoff seeding format works well as a way of seeding teams for what I’m calling the USL Championship League Cup (working title). This single-elimination tournament is set up exactly like the current playoff format but at the end, the trophy is the USL Championship League Cup. This ensures that the chasing pack still has something to play for during the regular season and most of the teams in the League still get a postseason trophy opportunity.

The 2nd leg of the Final could be the 2nd Saturday after the last game of the regular season, with the play-in games for the League Cup acting as a lead in to the main event of the Final. Then the following Saturday is the first round of the League Cup proper. This way the season ends around the same time the USL Championship Final did this year.

It does all this while not cheapening the accomplishments of the Conference Champions, who after proving they were the best teams in a grueling regular season, deserve the chance to vie for the League separate from any postseason Cup competition. If you want to get really squirrely, you could seed the League Cup with every team by points, rather than separating by Conference. This creates some pretty fun matchups and provides the opportunity for interconference play before the Final. This bigger format would create some potential scheduling headaches and take longer than the current playoffs which may not be feasible.

Raising the Curtain

There are a lot of discussions each year about the best way to kick off the USL season. Should it be a marquee matchup, expansion team, or should the League treat the season opening day as a big event? Well, in this new format, there is an even easier way to raise the curtain on a new season. The USL Super Cup. This event would be between the winner of the USL Championship and the winner of the USL Championship League Cup. Many leagues or federations have this sort of matchup at the beginning of a new season and its an easy way to generate interest around the League without really having to do anything extra. It's just one game the week before the season actually starts. This also serves as an opportunity for interconference play without messing with the balanced conference schedule.

This new structure enhances the current regular season format, rewards the Conference Champions, and still provides a postseason trophy opportunity to the rest of the League. Playoffs can be compelling, and I certainly don’t believe they should be eliminated, but they simply should not crown the League champion in a League that already has a compelling regular season. Use the best parts of the USL Championship to make it even better.