MLS Finally Recalls Roots
Major League Soccer reinvented itself Wednesday.
Not entirely and perhaps not as much as some fans might have liked, but enough at least to give the league a significantly new look when its fifth season begins next spring.
Commissioner Don Garber, the former NFL executive brought in three months ago to shake up a circuit that had grown stagnant, announced a series of changes intended to bring the league more in line with the way the rest of the world plays and views soccer. That, he said, is the key to attracting more fans and better television ratings.
As a result, the shootout is history after Sunday’s MLS Cup ’99 championship match between the Galaxy and Washington D.C. United at Foxboro, Mass.
Gone, too, is the two-conference format that has been in place since the inaugural season in 1996. From now on, there will be three conferences, with the Galaxy playing in the Western Conference with the San Jose Earthquakes, Colorado Rapids and Kansas City Wizards.
The league’s television presence and impact will be boosted by the introduction of “Soccer Saturday,” a featured game shown each Saturday night on ABC, ESPN or ESPN2, and by a weekly highlight show each Monday night on ESPN2.
Negotiations are ongoing with Univision, the Spanish-language network that has shown a game of the week each Sunday in past seasons and will probably continue doing so.
The length of the season has been cut by as many as five weeks and will run from mid-March to early or mid-October. The schedule for 2000 could be released Friday.
Abolishing the shootout was a priority. The tiebreaker was disliked by players and coaches from the start and scoffed at by fans, who drifted from MLS games as MLS drifted from the way the game is played elsewhere in the world.
“I don’t think anyone would argue that shootouts weren’t exciting,” Garber said. “The problem is, so are foul shots to conclude NBA games, and I don’t think that’s something they would do.
“What we’re trying to do is make our games as exciting as we can, and having a short overtime period [sudden death in two five-minute periods] is what we’re going to work with. If we find in time that’s not achieving what we want to achieve, then we’ll continue to evolve.”
Realignment, Garber said, “will create more compelling races throughout the regular season.”
The Chicago Fire, Dallas Burn, Columbus Crew and Tampa Bay Mutiny will be in the Central Conference; and D.C. United, the New York/New Jersey MetroStars, New England Revolution and Miami Fusion will make up the Eastern Conference.
“We’ve talked about future expansion and this [alignment] would allow us to be able to support future expansion in a way we believe is logical,” Garber said.
Discussions still are underway over the number of games in the regular season. It might remain at the current 32 or drop to 28. In addition, the playoffs might switch to a home-and-home, total-goals series instead of the current best-of-three format.
One complaint among soccer fans has been the inconsistency of television coverage, with MLS games popping up at odd hours and on different days each week. That has been at least partially addressed by the new TV packages.
“Soccer Saturday” will run between March 25 and Aug. 19 and will include nine doubleheaders for a total of 28 games.
The Monday night highlights show will run for 12 consecutive weeks between June 19 and Sept. 4.
The willingness to finally accept ties as a legitimate result and other minor changes, such as giving the referee sole control of the clock, reflect the league’s awareness that it had been mistaken in trying to reinvent the sport by tacking on such contrivances as the shootout.
“The concept of reconfiguring the rules was based on the original thought that American soccer fans had different tastes than soccer fans outside the United States,” Garber said.
“I think what we’ve found through research and through the fervor and furor that was raised with this [shootout] issue, is that there are millions, if not tens of millions, of soccer fans in this country who have played the game and who watch international soccer on a regular basis.
“This league bypassed that market and underestimated it in thinking that our future was based on [cultivating new] fans here in America.
“Our strategy, as I think it should be, is to go back and shore up our [relationship] with the core soccer fan. . . . It took a couple of years to realize that.”
Average attendance at MLS games has hovered just above 14,000 for the past three seasons after a high of 17,406 in the league’s first season.
Wednesday’s changes are intended to recapture that lost audience and build on it.
“I think that there’s a skepticism and a negativity that’s been buzzing out there among the hardest of our hard-core fans that reached a momentum that we needed to address,” Garber said.
“We do know from our research that there are approximately 60 million people in this country . . . who consider themselves soccer fans. And we don’t have 60 million people who are paying attention to our league, going to our games and watching them on television.”
Garber said MLS also is working closely with U.S. Soccer to coordinate calendars and minimize conflicts over the release of MLS players to the national teams for the Olympic and World Cup 2002 qualifying matches that will take place in 2000, as well as for the Sydney Games themselves.
“We’re making some real hard compromises so that we’re not competing at the gate and we’re also not competing for players,” Garber said.
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The Galaxy picked up its third Major League Soccer award of the season Wednesday when Robin Fraser was named the league’s defender of the year for 1999.
Earlier, MLS had named Sigi Schmid coach of the year and Kevin Hartman goalkeeper of the year.
Fraser, one of five players who have been with the Galaxy since its founding in 1996, is the team captain and anchors a back line that became the first in league history to allow less than a goal a game (0.91 average) during the regular season.
Fraser, 32, edged out Washington D.C. United’s Jeff Agoos as well as last year’s winner, Lubos Kubik of the Chicago Fire.
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The New, Old Way
A look at the changes announced Wednesday by Major League Soccer for its 2000 season:
* The shootout has been eliminated. Games that are tied after 90 minutes will feature a sudden-death overtime split into two five-minute periods, after which a tie will be allowed to stand.
* Teams will be given three points for a victory, one for a tie, none for a loss.
* The league will be realigned from two conferences of six teams each to three conferences of four teams each.
* The three conference champions and the five teams with the next-best records regardless of conference will advance to the playoffs.
* The season will be shortened by five weeks and will last from mid-March to mid-October.
* MLS will have a weekly “Soccer Saturday” televised game of the week and also a weekly one-hour highlight show Monday nights.
* The official time will be kept by the referee on the field and the stadium game clock will count upward to 90 minutes rather than down from 90.
* The MLS regular-season champion and the MLS Cup winner will be awarded the United States’ two berths in the annual TFC Champions Cup, the championship for teams from Central and North America and the Caribbean.
