Ben Olsen’s side finished fourth in the Eastern Conference but one poor performance means it got just one more game this year than the bottom team in the East, Chicago.

MLS’s playoff structure involves a single-elimination game just a few days after the regular season wraps up. The games feel hurried and crushed into the schedule and, becasue they are held on weekday nights, often draw lower attendance than regular season encounters. The format appears little more than a way to keep the playoff field at an inclusive 12 but quickly get it down to a more manageable number — but that isn’t the only problem with soccer’s postseason.

To put it bluntly, while the playoffs bring the most exciting soccer of the MLS season, they still don’t push the sport into the mainstream North American sports conversation.

AD

AD

When 12 of 20 teams in the league enter the playoffs, there isn’t enough pressure during the regular season. And the format — single-game elimination followed by home-and-away conference semifinals and finals and then a single-game final — does not do enough to ensure that the champions are the undisputed best team in the league.

You might be expecting this British writer to expound upon the merits of the “single table” system, which dispenses with playoffs and simply crowns as champion the best-performing team over the course of a season. But you would be wrong. Several years of covering thrilling NBA and NFL postseasons has made me a convert.

How could you not enjoy the drama of overtime in a Game 7? Or the thrill and suspense of a team coming back from near elimination to win a series? The rivalries that develops over the course of a best-of-seven series are the stuff of books and movie scripts.

AD

AD

The problem with MLS playoffs is there aren’t really any series.

Two-legged contests decided on aggregate goals, a system imported from European club competitions, aren’t in really sense a series and there is something dissatisfying about a contest being decided on away goals.

Not only is there less chance for the public’s imagination to be captured by a two-legged contest but there is also almost no advantage for the higher seed in such a structure, which reduces the impact of the regular season.

The championship itself is then decided over one game, the MLS Cup, held at the home of the highest seed — an excessive advantage at the stage when seeding should matter least.

AD

Various tweaks have been proposed but the radical solution is to make the MLS playoffs more American.

Soccer is not the NFL, where every additional game carries a massive physical toll, but nor is it baseball, where you can play nearly every day. A best-of-seven or best-of-five series for soccer seems excessive, but two-legged games aren’t really a series. The answer, then, best-of-three series played throughout a classic two-conference, eight-team bracket.

AD

Given that format would leave no room for ties — every game would have to have an outcome, a problem easily solved by using the established mechanism of extra time and, if necessary, penalties.

AD

Soccer purists might not like that, but the mainstream sports fans who need to be attracted to television sets would surely prefer to see the drama of a shootout than a tie and discussion about away-goals scenarios ahead of the second leg.

The higher-seeded team would host the first and, if needed, third games of the series. That awards an advantage for finishing higher in the regular season standings while offering fairness and realistic opportunity. The higher-seeded team needs to win two home games to advance. The lower seed needs to win one home game and one away game — tough but far from impossible.

AD

When it comes down to the final, both clubs would get to host a game — great for the fans and the club’s reach in their communities. It would spread out the focus on the league’s championship series, creating a week of attention and excitement around the two or three games.

AD

And in the end, the format should deliver a winner with the status of a true champion. To triumph in the MLS Cup you would need to win six out of a maximum of nine games. There isn’t much way to fluke that.

The playoffs would be longer but that is an advantage for a league still seeking attention and which struggles to make its regular season noticed. The need for extra games and sufficient rest could be offset by reducing the length of the regular season, adding more intensity to the qualification process for the playoffs.

It would be a unique format but one which would marry the need for drama and excitement in the postseason with the demand for a fair format that rewards regular season performance.