With the announcement of an unbalanced schedule this year, the Eastern and Western conferences will play more purposeful roles than they have in past seasons. MLS seems to be moving away from the idea of a single table format this season. League expansion, season length, and the geographical size of the league have all been sited as reasons that a conference system is better for MLS. With that being said, what possibilities does the league have to develop towards? The league could, and probably will, stay in the East/West format that it is in currently in, but how many teams can be added before we run into season length issues again? The league could split the conferences into 2 divisions as more teams are added, but this will require the league to grow fairly large, maybe to a size that isn't sustainable. Instead, the more interesting option for league may be creating a 3 conference system.
The league would be broken up into Eastern, Western and Northern conferences. With the addition of Montreal Impact this season, Canada's potential to add more teams in the future, the northern conference would cater to building and sustaining rivalries between the Canadian clubs. If Canada were able to produce another 4-6 clubs, the Northern conference could be made up entirely of Canadian teams. Beacuse of the addition of these clubs Canada would most likely earn another birth for CONCACAF Champions League (CCL). With this additional birth, Canada would need another form of competition in addition to their domestic cup to use as another qualification method for the CCL. The champion of the Northern Conference playoffs would be a good candidate to award the other qualification spot to. The ability to qualify for a Champions league birth through the conference playoffs would place greater importance on the games for the clubs, and for the Canadian fans.
If MLS continues to grow at its current pace, a system like this could be feasible to implement within the next 10 to 15 years. The league size would need to be near 30 with the East/West conferences each boasting between 9-12 teams, and Canada accounting for another 6-8. Each team would play every league opponent at least once, and conference teams in a home and away series. But the three conference system would present a new problem to the league, how to effectively run playoffs.
Playoffs would take place in two parts, first conference playoffs, then MLS playoffs. Individual conference playoffs are simple, top four teams are seeded according to standings and playoff. Winner is crowned champion and moves to the MLS playoffs. Second place teams are also sent to MLS playoffs. Simple enough to this point. The MLS playoffs work best with 8 teams, but only 6 qualify using this method, so two more teams must be added. The final two slots would be given to the teams with the highest amount of points from the regular season. These two teams would play each other in the first round, and the conference champions would each play a runner-up from a different conference. The playoffs would then continue in standard format.
It's fun to speculate about the future of the league, and to imagine what the perfect system would be. I know many people dream of a system with promotion/relegation, while others would be fine with a single table format. I think this would be an interesting direction to take the league, but what do you think would be best?
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