The new season begins on Saturday, Feb. 25 and yet again there will be a new playoff format, according to the Athletic. The road to MLS Cup will now include a play in round between the eighth and ninth place teams in each conference. This round will only be one game with the winner facing the top seed in the conference. The addition of this game means a total of 18 teams make the playoffs out of the 29 teams in the league as a whole.
Another change is that the first round would now be a best of three series, which allows each team to get a home game. Those games can’t end in ties and the first team to win two games will advance to the conference semifinal which goes back to a one and done format. The higher seed will host those matches and in the best of three series the higher seed will host the first and third game (if needed) with the lower seed hosting the second game.
Shifting to a three game format with each match needing to produce a winner means that a team losing the first match has more opportunity to stage a comeback. Last season, the new format would’ve seen the Columbus Crew, Charlotte FC, Portland Timbers and Vancouver Whitecaps make the playoffs. In the case of the Crew and Whitecaps, it would have rewarded active summer transfer windows as Cucho Hernandez and Andreas Cubas were both revolutionary in turning their respective team’s fortunes around.
This format, with its homefield advantage, still gives the top seed a good chance at advancing even with losing the first-round bye week that they used to have. And, thinking ahead, if an in-demand, megawatt free agent were to happen to join a team like Inter Miami during the summer with them below the playoff line, that could be enough to propel them to MLS Cup when in years past, it wouldn’t have gotten the job done. This is, of course, an entirely hypothetical situation which in no way actually relates to the future of Lionel Messi.
The playoff change does add in-season excitement due to teams lower in the table having meaningful games and the concerns about the best of three series being flat can be alleviated by them not being based on goal differential. It does add more games to an already taxing MLS season, but with the depth in the league growing by the day, teams are now able to cope with these matches better than they ever have in years past.