The International What?

This year, I was actually into the MLS playoffs. Maybe it was because I was feeling extra-American (“Hey, rest of the world! Check out what we do to the end of our soccer *cough* football season! It’s a special concoction we like to call a playoff, and it throws the regular season out the window. We got it from baseball – cool, huh?”) Pure sporting patriotism. Or maybe I was excited simply because the Portland Timbers were a part of it. Yes, definitely that’s why. What a fantastic season! Too bad it no longer matters, in a practical sense.

Yes, the playoffs seemed exciting. I dug the series’ randomness, how the edge is handed to the underdog, to the team that has its timing right, to the sheer luck of who’s injured now and who isn’t, who’s tired and who still has legs, and finally to the sense of the rules suddenly changing, the sense of occasion. Fantastic, I thought. I get it now.

The problem, I ventured, with the rest of the world’s soccer leagues is the monotony of a pure table. The narrative is only available in hindsight. The key moments are hidden as they happen: a win five games from the finale of a season, an extra goal scored or conceded that isn’t tallied until the end. Easy to gloss over, recapped out of necessity at the end. It’s like explanatory notes in movie credits. This subtlety can be enthralling, but it can also be a bit deadening, because in lieu of an obvious season narrative, the spectator generally gets a huge helping of hackneyed commentary. The stories are pulled from thin air by columnists on tight deadlines, constructed from cliché and quick-changing notions of who’s in form, and which locker room is in disarray.

The beauty of a playoff is the simplification, and amplification, of the season’s narrative. You MUST win these games to get your trophy! The trick is in sample size, as this declaration is actually identical to a league table format. It’s just that with a straight ahead table you point at the entire season (win ALL of them!) and you’re talking about thirty-odd games. With our playoffs, the teams have been whittled down, as have the fixtures. Here, we might say, is the undiluted good stuff. A great final fight. If a team misses out, it may be only because they’re unlucky, but hell, isn’t that a tenet of life? The talented don’t always make it through. You need luck. And for a spectator sport, you need focus. Hence, playoffs.

I wasn’t, I admit, completely convinced by this argument I was making to myself. No, I was far from convinced – I love the aggregate game, great season-long campaigns, wars of attrition and hard fought consistency. It would improve the drama of this paragraph if I wrote otherwise, but that would be a bit playoff-y. I was still in the rest of the world’s camp here.

And then the Timbers lost versus Real Salt Lake. Oy! Enough with these playoffs! Let me see the league table again – where are our points from the twin wins against Seattle? Who would be at the very top of the league now? You see, RSL only won one of their first two playoff games. The New York Red Bulls didn’t win at all. This argument – of getting league points for playoff games – is ludicrous I realize. But you know what is even more ludicrous? That there is now a two week international break (players on national teams will be off playing friendlies and the odd World Cup qualifying playoff). The second leg of the Timbers playoff isn’t until November 24th.

This really is crazy and unforgivable scheduling on MLS’s part. International breaks aren’t generally recognized by the MLS and teams simply have to make do without their stars. But here they’ve gone ahead and suspended their centerpiece tournament for two weeks. They’re breaking up the conference finals. The supposed value of finishing first in your conference table – playing at home on the second leg of these games – is greatly diminished, as the momentum of the fixtures pretty much evaporates.

If the great advantage of a playoff is the feeling of occasion, of gears suddenly and decisively shifted, then this year has quite the self-defeating setup. The games were played in such quick succession leading up to the break that the abrupt halt feels like whiplash. People not associated with the teams in the mix just won’t care as much as they would have if it had been intelligently constructed. It’s like tearing out the penultimate chapter in a thriller. Or, more precisely, it’s as if the penultimate chapter of the thriller consists of twenty blank pages.

It goes a ways to illustrating to how much sense and simple beauty there is in the traditional format. You play a season. When the season ends, whoever has the most points wins. The journey is spectacular, so there’s no need for contrived – and badly scheduled – fireworks at the end.