Major League Soccer kicks off its 28th season this weekend, but questions about its playoff system remain unanswered at the highest levels.
“We’re six, seven days out from the first game of the season; we don’t know the playoff format,” Inter Miami coach Phil Neville told The Athletic. “If we want to be the best and be compared to the top leagues, this should’ve been decided two months ago. So that irks me a bit…we’ve planned the whole season and we actually don’t know when the season ends and how many games we’ve got.”
MLS follows a 14-team playoff system, with the top seven teams from the Eastern and Western conferences making the final cut. However, recent investment from media partner Apple has led the 29-team league to consider adding more matches to the process.
ESPN reported that Apple views the current playoff system as “far too short a time to develop storylines for the postseason.”
New proposals have included “pre-playoff” matches between the eighth- and ninth-placed teams in each conference and/or a World Cup-style “group stage” played by the top eight teams.
While many longtime MLS fans celebrate the league’s new big-money rights deal with Apple, rapid broadcast-driven changes to the competition run the risk of confusing new fans in expansion markets such as Austin and Charlotte.
In fact, Forbes is already predicting a decline in MLS attendance across the league this season, a phenomenon it expects to be driven by fixture pile-ups.
These proposed playoff changes would be MLS’s seventh format shift since its inception in 1996. The 2023 season kicks off Saturday with a match between Nashville and New York City FC, teams that made last season’s playoffs.
They’ll aim to repeat that achievement in 2023… as soon as MLS manages to tell them how.
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