Flaws on Display in Playoffs
After 10 years, it is time that Major League Soccer realized that its playoff system is an abject failure, that it does nothing but make a mockery of the regular season that precedes it.
If further evidence were needed, last weekend’s four first-round playoff matches provided more than enough to indicate that the entire system needs to be abolished, or at least completely overhauled.
Every one of the four games showed the flaws in the current arrangement.
The playoffs, in theory, are supposed to be the peak of the season, the time when the best teams in the league play the most meaningful games of the year, and excited fans turn out in record numbers.
So why did only 11,493 show up Friday night at Soldier Field in Chicago?
The Fire was not only up against defending champion D.C. United but was also playing what probably was its final game at the stadium before moving to its new $70-million home in suburban Bridgeview next season.
But precious few people cared, more than 4,000 fewer, in fact, than Chicago’s all-time playoff average of 15,934.
The game ended 0-0, the soccer-haters’ favorite score. In fact, the first three playoff games of the weekend produced exactly one goal -- not the sort of offensive fireworks that have television moguls leaping to cover next year’s playoffs.
The only spark of interest in the Fire-United series, in fact, was the whining earlier in the week by United’s Freddy Adu, who claimed Coach Peter Nowak had ruined his chances of going to the 2006 World Cup by not giving him enough minutes this season.
Message to Adu: You are 16 years old. You have done virtually nothing to live up to the “phenom” tag that MLS and its marketing types have unfairly saddled you with. You were never, not in a million years, in the running for a place on Bruce Arena’s World Cup team.
Just clam up and play. That way perhaps by 2010 you might have an opportunity.
There is, of course, always the chance that D.C. United will unload Adu, and a team such as PSV Eindhoven in the Netherlands might be the perfect fit. It has a history of developing young players, and at Eindhoven Adu could watch fellow American DaMarcus Beasley and realize that he has a long, long way to go to match Beasley in talent.
The Colorado Rapids-FC Dallas series also opened with a 0-0 tie, this one at Denver in front of a measly 9,625 fans.
Few of those fans will be rushing out for season tickets next year, especially considering that Dallas opted to defend and then defend some more.
“It’s playoff soccer,” Coach Colin Clarke told the Denver Post. “That’s what it is.”
If so, get rid of it.
Dallas has Carlos Ruiz on its roster, at least occasionally. The temperamental Guatemalan, the league’s most valuable player in 2002, has a habit of disappearing for long stretches at a time. He blew off the MLS All-Star game this season and, after Guatemala had failed to qualify for the World Cup, he did not to return for Dallas’ regular-season finale.
To punish Adu, Nowak benched him for the Chicago game. To punish Ruiz, Clarke played him for only the final 25 minutes.
Just what MLS needs in the playoffs: Its marquee players glued to the wood.
Message to Ruiz: You are 26 years old. You have had one of the brightest careers of any foreign player brought into the league. The reason you have not parlayed those skills into a place on a big-name club in Europe, with a fat contract to match, is precisely because of your AWOL antics.
Grow up, or join Adu in the corner and sulk.
The MetroStars-New England Revolution series at least opened with a goal, even if the game at Giants Stadium attracted virtually no fans, in part because of a driving rain.
Attendance was announced at 10,003, but as the New York Times pointed out, “that figure seemed high by about 9,000.”
The man who grabbed the goal was MetroStar midfielder Amado Guevara, last season’s league MVP, who warmed MLS Commissioner Don Garber’s heart afterward by refusing to speak to English-speaking reporters.
Apparently, the Honduran was angry at criticism leveled at him the previous week for his goal-scoring but nonetheless inept performance in the Metro-
Stars’ playoff-clinching victory over Chivas USA at the Home Depot Center.
Message to Guevara: You are 29 years old. You have a few years left to make a halfway decent salary in MLS. Media criticism comes with the territory. Would you really prefer to go back to Tegucigalpa?
Finally, there was Sunday’s Galaxy-San Jose Earthquake game in Carson. This one at least produced some goals, even if only 17,466 were at the Home Depot Center to see the Galaxy win, 3-1.
That crowd was almost 10,000 below the “27,000 sellout” that the Galaxy takes pride in announcing even on those nights when empty seats are everywhere.
Selling tickets to corporations and people who never had any intention of attending might pad the financial stats, but it does nothing to grow the sport. But then, does AEG really care about that or is it only the bottom line that matters?
Regardless, the first four MLS playoff games of 2005 drew a pitiful total of 48,587 fans, or an average of 12,146, and produced five goals.
Worse than that, they left the league’s two best teams this season, the Earthquakes and the Revolution, on the brink of elimination. The two-game playoff series gives virtually no advantage to the teams with the better regular-season records.
It is Lamar Hunt, owner of the Columbus Crew, FC Dallas and the Kansas City Wizards, who favors the playoff format. Correct in so much else, Hunt is wrong in this.
Message to MLS: You are 10 years old. Arrange the schedule so that it produces a regular-season champion, a team that has proved itself against all the other teams over the course of six months, not the fortunate winner of a sparsely attended game or two at the end of a long year.
The accompanying table shows the final standings. It is how MLS could have and should have ended its 2005 season.
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A singular look
How the 2005 standings would have looked if the MLS were a single-division league:
*--* Team W L T GF GA Pts San Jose 18 4 10 53 31 64 New England 17 7 8 55 37 59 DC United 16 10 6 58 37 54 Chicago 15 13 4 49 50 49 Dallas 13 10 9 52 44 48 MetroStars 12 9 11 53 49 47 Kansas City 11 9 12 52 44 45 Colorado 13 13 6 40 37 45 Galaxy 13 13 6 44 45 45 Columbus 11 16 5 34 45 38 Salt Lake 5 22 5 30 65 20 Chivas USA 4 22 6 31 67 18
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