Proposed MLS Divisional Alignment 2020

BKIslandersFan

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Sep 29, 2017
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If you're doing two conferences of 20 that don't play each other and only meet in a single (or even two legged) tie once a year, you're essentially talking about two separate leagues.
Nothing wrong with that, though. Its accepting geographical and population reality, we are far bigger than most countries in the world. I also think it would make inter coference US Open Cup matches more meaningful.

I think there is a room for 40 teams, if we include Canada, but if we keep Canada out aside from 3 existing ones:
Phoenix, San Antonio, Austin, Raleigh, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas, Bay Area 2, Cleveland, Detroit, Hampton Roads, Tampa Bay, St.Louis, San Diego. There is the 14 along with 23 plus 3 future teams.
 
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Gecklund

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Jul 17, 2012
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Nothing wrong with that, though. Its accepting geographical and population reality, we are far bigger than most countries in the world. I also think it would make inter coference US Open Cup matches more meaningful.

I think there is a room for 40 teams, if we include Canada, but if we keep Canada out aside from 3 existing ones:
Phoenix, San Antonio, Austin, Raleigh, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas, Bay Area 2, Cleveland, Detroit, Hampton Roads, Tampa Bay, St.Louis, San Diego. There is the 14 along with 23 plus 3 future teams.
There’s is not nearly enough popularity of the sport yet to have 40 teams.
 

BKIslandersFan

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There’s is not nearly enough popularity of the sport yet to have 40 teams.
I don't know, locals get pretty excited when MLS expansion team is awarded to their city. And the thing about MLS is kinda like hockey, city will only pay attention if they have a team, if they do not, no one (well, not a lot) will watch the games in TV.
 

HoseEmDown

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Mar 25, 2012
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I don't know, locals get pretty excited when MLS expansion team is awarded to their city. And the thing about MLS is kinda like hockey, city will only pay attention if they have a team, if they do not, no one (well, not a lot) will watch the games in TV.

You could probably get 40 cities that are big enough to support a team but the talent level would be so watered down the product would suck worse than it already does. That's one of the problems currently with the product as there aren't enough good American players to bring the skill level of the league up. The best young players are coming from South America and will probably be sold to Europe soon. I think the salary cap and salary structure in general isn't good, they need to get rid of that so they can pay for better talent. Offer guys in Mexico more money to play here than stay there, keep getting south Americans to come up and hopefully get younger Euro players if the money is better. The issue then with no cap is it could become like baseball where the big spenders are constantly on top and some teams are always a joke.
 

hatterson

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Apr 12, 2010
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IMO removing the salary cap while rapidly expanding would cause a ton of teams to end up folding. You'd have new owners coming in under pressure to perform well and spending huge sums to buy up talent in an unsustainable way and then suddenly having to sell/slash wages to not go broke when the revenue doesn't magically show up. Going from having a good team to having a garbage team would cause the fanbase to dry up fast since it wouldn't have any long term roots yet.
 

HoseEmDown

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Mar 25, 2012
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IMO removing the salary cap while rapidly expanding would cause a ton of teams to end up folding. You'd have new owners coming in under pressure to perform well and spending huge sums to buy up talent in an unsustainable way and then suddenly having to sell/slash wages to not go broke when the revenue doesn't magically show up. Going from having a good team to having a garbage team would cause the fanbase to dry up fast since it wouldn't have any long term roots yet.

I don't believe that. Why do these teams have to spend big all of a sudden because there's no cap? Yes some owners will spend a bit more but if they're smart they'll buy players that they could resell if needed. Plus if you have a 40 team league you are going to have some really bad teams no matter what. If they keep the league in the low 20's of teams you could keep it more competitive, revenue would be higher as it's less spread out.
 

sabremike

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Aug 30, 2010
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The playoffs bring so much money? Where? Lots of empty seats and very small tv ratings come november and december.

Too many teams in them also reduces the interest for the regular season, at the moment we have the worst system possible.
The vast majority of MLS playoff matches have stronger than normal crowds. The exceptions are the games played on odd weekdays for TV. And American sports HAVE to have playoffs. In Europe teams at the top are playing for CL and Europa League spots and teams at the bottom are playing not to be relegated. In MLS if you eliminated playoffs 95% of the teams would have nothing to play for and the result would be nothing but empty seats almost everywhere.
 

KevFu

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May 22, 2009
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Like hatterson said, this would be essentially two leagues. I was talking about the 40 teams where there is absolutely no way America could support that.

In America, every sport has playoffs. If you want to gain popularity you can’t just copy some other league. You have to appeal to your audience and Americans want playoffs.

IF they had 40 teams, two divisions and they never played, it would essentially be two leagues…

But there’s nothing wrong with that!

It worked for baseball for 100 years just fine. Most people want to go back towards that in the future. MLB wants to expand to ditch year-round interleague. I think they should go to four leagues of eight, and only have “interleague” where former NL teams play NL, and former AL teams play AL.


Football is two leagues. Obviously they can’t play everyone because the league is bigger than the schedule (Personally, why the NFL isn’t 34 teams in AFC/NFC and you play the 16 opponents in your league once is beyond me).

In college football, teams play 8 of 12 games against their league, crown a league champion and four of those play in the CFP (unless you’re undefeated UCF).


When talking soccer in USA/Canada, the goal is to make it “more like” the rest of the world, but it’s ALWAYS going to have unique aspects because we’re unique.
 

KevFu

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May 22, 2009
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IMO removing the salary cap while rapidly expanding would cause a ton of teams to end up folding.

Absolutely. What makes TONS OF MARKETS interested in MLS is that it’s a “Major League” product to sell to fans (as the top league in USA/Canada. But it comes with MINOR LEAGUE EXPENSES (because the salary cap is $4 million. Raising it slightly would be fine. But you drop the salary cap and MLS is going to have problems.


There’s is not nearly enough popularity of the sport yet to have 40 teams.

Because of that Major League status with Minor League expenses, there absolutely is the potential for MLS to have a ton of teams.

Italy has 60 million people and 109 teams in their top levels of pro soccer. The country is the square mileage of Arizona. Italy has 8 markets with 1 million people. The USA has 53, plus another 6 in Canada.

Of course soccer is No. 1 in Italy and not in the USA/Canada. But because of our population and the number of cities — which are spread out over a much larger land area - we’re big enough to have an MLS that total number of teams that the top two levels of SOCCER NATIONS that are smaller in size/population than us have.


I personally think that instead of expanding like MLB/NHL/NBA/NFL teams expand, they should have sold 20+ MLS-2 teams, and gradually expanded MLS via promotion over a 20-year period… (adding teams to MLS-2 too, or even forming MLS-3) before finally reaching a set capacity in MLS (24 teams) and having PRO/REL.

But the idea of a 40-team MLS split into two divisions, where you play 38 games against your league and then have some playoffs (Like W1 vs E4, E2 vs W3), is totally plausible for MLS.

In the event that MLS moves to a “World Calendar” and Capless transfers, THEN it would need to “shrink” by splitting in two financially and having PRO/REL.

But in a closed system with a cap, MLS could be enormous and be just fine under its current structure.

Comparing the number of teams to NHL or NBA is silly, because they’re playing less than half the number of games, so you need half the financial commitment of NHL/NBA teams - and the expenses right now are about 15 to 25 times smaller than NHL/NBA.
 

Dopenose

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Nov 11, 2013
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Having 40 or even 28+ teams + salary cap guarantees that the MLS will always be a second-rate league and that no MLS team will ever be able to compete globally.
The top leagues in Europe have only 20 teams sharing tv revenue (in those places where shared revenue even exists) + the better you do in the league the more money you receive, and no salary cap keeping the richest teams down.
 

Big Z Man 1990

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Jun 4, 2011
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Don't say anything at all
With Austin confirmed as expansion, I had an idea to put the next team in Phoenix, and two other teams based on what divisions don't have five teams yet

Eastern Conference:
Northeast Division:
Montreal Impact
New England Revolution
New York City FC
New York Red Bulls
Toronto FC

Southeast Division:
Atlanta United FC
D.C. United
Inter Miami CF
Orlando City SC
Philadelphia Union

Central Conference:
Midwest Division:
Chicago Fire
Columbus Crew SC
FC Cincinnati
Minnesota United FC
Sporting Kansas City

Gulf Division:
Austin FC
FC Dallas
Houston Dynamo
Nashville
(New Orleans or Little Rock?)

Western Conference:
Northwest Division:
Colorado Rapids
Portland Timbers
Real Salt Lake
Seattle Sounders FC
Vancouver Whitecaps FC

Pacific Division
LA Galaxy
Los Angeles FC
(Phoenix?)
San Jose Earthquakes
(Sacramento or San Diego?)
 

KevFu

Registered User
May 22, 2009
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Phoenix from Rochester via New Orleans
I'd say OKC or Tulsa would be more likely than Little Rock/New Orleans.

I also don't think the whole geographic small divisions are a big part of soccer culture to the point that they're necessary. They don't really need a grid alignment to make a schedule matrix. Soccer's always been a "big table" of teams. You divide into small scheduling groups for TV start times and travel.

But it's not like NBA/NHL/MLB where teams are playing every day of the week.
- MLS is playing 34 games over 35 weeks (Mar-Oct). There's international and all-star breaks; Open Cup & Champions League. But because of the length of the season, most MLS regular season games are on weekends.

- Afternoon weekend games are okay. You don't need to be maximizing time zone games when MLS has always been about avoiding head-to-head competition with the NFL/NBA/NHL. That's why they're on the summer schedule and not the world calendar. Playing Saturday/Sunday during right after the last morning broadcast of Premier League ends (March-May, Sept-Oct) is a really smart idea anyway.

Just do home/away with everyone in your conference, and mix in X number of non-conference games as needed to hit your desired season length number.
 

BKIslandersFan

F*** off
Sep 29, 2017
11,443
5,057
Brooklyn
With Austin confirmed as expansion, I had an idea to put the next team in Phoenix, and two other teams based on what divisions don't have five teams yet

Eastern Conference:
Northeast Division:
Montreal Impact
New England Revolution
New York City FC
New York Red Bulls
Toronto FC

Southeast Division:
Atlanta United FC
D.C. United
Inter Miami CF
Orlando City SC
Philadelphia Union

Central Conference:
Midwest Division:
Chicago Fire
Columbus Crew SC
FC Cincinnati
Minnesota United FC
Sporting Kansas City

Gulf Division:
Austin FC
FC Dallas
Houston Dynamo
Nashville
(New Orleans or Little Rock?)

Western Conference:
Northwest Division:
Colorado Rapids
Portland Timbers
Real Salt Lake
Seattle Sounders FC
Vancouver Whitecaps FC

Pacific Division
LA Galaxy
Los Angeles FC
(Phoenix?)
San Jose Earthquakes
(Sacramento or San Diego?)
Not bad. But I feel like Atlanta should be in the same division as Nashville.
 

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