Thread: Major League Soccer/Payoffs in US Sports

Posted this elsewhere.

There are a few main problems with soccer in America.

1) No significant stats to follow.

Americans LOVE their stats. Look at football. You got your third-down conversion percentages, your passer ratings, etc. Check out basketball, with your assists, rebounds, blocks, free throw percentages, etc. And hell, look at baseball. There are stats for how good a player's hitting percentage is against left-handed pitchers at Yankee stadium on Tuesdays when the sun is shining.

In soccer, the game is much more free-flowing. Stats are, for the most part, nonexistant. You have your top goal scorers, maybe your assists, yellow/red cards, and your wins/losses. A defender's brilliant play to stop a 2-on-1 will go unmarked in the record books. A midfielder's beautiful cross won't get a mark in the books. It's much more difficult for new watchers to get a handle on the sport, because they have no numbers to understand the game better.

2) Subtle gameplay.

There are subtleties in any sport. I watched (really watched) baseball for the first time this season, always with hardcore baseball fans. They explained so much about it that I gained a deeper appreciation of the sport. It relied heavily on stats, but the strategies of using different pitches and pitchers against different batters, where the fielders should stand, and everything were absolutely fascinating to me. In football, there's an art to choosing the plays that create holes in the defense. In basketball, team defense is a fantastic example of unity and team tactics.

Soccer's much the same way! All that "boring" stuff in the midfield? Subtle jockeying for position. Moving the defense where you want them before a big cross to the other side of the field to the open man. Organizing an offsides trap to catch unsuspecting players. Passing backwards to open up a long pass forwards. People who are new to the game just can't pick up on the subtle nuances of soccer, especially when there are no stats to go off of.

In baseball, for instance, those crazy stats come in very handy for a newcomer. When you can see that a person has a low percentage hitting low-and-outside breaking balls, you can tell why a pitcher may be changed for someone very good at those particular pitches. Soccer's subtleties, however, are very hard to pinpoint, and involve looking away from the ball, something which is difficult for some fans (and players) to do. To see why a long, over the top pass is kicked, you need to be watching the striker sneaking in behind the defense. That pass backwards? Look downfield. The "basic" subtleties of soccer are lost on newcomers, and are simply not explained by commentators. American soccer commentators are still just trying to explain the basic rules of the game.

3) No commercial breaks.

There are no time-outs in soccer. No big breaks when there's a change in possession. Really, no chance for commercials during a half. Now, this may not matter to sports fans, but you can bet it matters to the sports networks. How do you fulfill your ad quota when you can only really have commercials running during a ten-minute stretch for the entire 90 minutes (at halftime)? Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I really think that one reason soccer hasn't been popular in America is that there's no big incentive to show it on TV.
There's another reason a lack of breaks hurts American interest in soccer. When you have time-outs and breaks with possession changes, you have opportunities to explain the game. Where would football be without Madden's pen? At each break, the instant replays come flying out of the woodwork. Commentators can analyze and reflect on each and every play that happens. They can show all the subtleties of the game that viewers would miss while the game is still being played. In soccer, the flow of the game is taken as fact. Yes, you can analyze a play that results in a goal, and occasionally get a quick replay in when the ball goes out of bounds, but no real in-depth commentary as to why things are happening the way they are. This keeps people in the dark, and people generally don't like sports they can't understand. While a game's playing, all American commentators can really do is explain the rules, and who is passing to whom. "Boring," most people say, simply because nobody explains the subtle things that make the game beautiful.

Interesting. Stats are becoming more prominent these days in football. They're just not really put on the television. You get shown things like 'distance run', 'passes made' and 'passes completed' showing up these days but the truth is that football isn't really a game that you can decide by statistics. Which I think is a very, very good thing.

I think my question was more to do with the league set up in MLS though and how it compares to most other places. Like, is it possible in the NFL, NBA or MLB for a team to finish the regular season with more losses than wins, yet still win the playoffs and therefore be crowned champions?

Also, what sort of punishment do you get for finishing bottom of the league? In the UK we have a fantastic multi-teared league system consisting of somewhere around 20 levels and different leagues. It's possible to go from playing in a park on a Sunday morning to playing in the Premier League (theoretically) and the threat of relegation and the bonus of promotion makes league football very exciting. Why is it different in the USA you think?

First off....I know NOTHING about rules/regulations/guy stuff, so feel free to bash me for this post. Second, I just want to say something here since I feel slightly connected to Real Salt Lake since the stadium is literally a few blocks from my house. I'm happy they won, just because they're from my city. I don't actually pay any attention at all to the sport. I've only been to one game. Haha.

Do you think it has anything to do with how small the league is? Isn't it a total of 13 teams (not in the mood to look it up right now...)? The league itself seems fairly new, which would seem to play a part. But then again, I could be completely wrong.

depends on what sport: baseball only the top teams from each division make it along with the wild card who is the best record team out of the 3 divisions they all face off for that leagues title before playing the other leagues winner for the world championship.

um footballs nfl is the same way except that the two teams with the best record from each league have one less game to play and get a bye or week off while the lower teams play each other.

hockey is a 8 team with each bracket where the teams are seeded so ya you could be a crappy team and still win the title..for each confrence just like basketball east and west so a total of 16teams for the playoffs

basketball is the same as hockey unless its changed in the last 10 years cause i stopped following it

soccer is to hard to watch theres almost no build up or climax to a game for most americans and theres not alot of scoring which is what americans like.. the and its hard to measure skill.. levels i mean like a bad team vs a good team whats the score going to be 3-0? if a bad team plays a good team in any other american sport its going to be more of a blow out then 3-0

I was almost certain that this thread was going to be about Jack Warner and "payoffs."

But the short answer is that playoffs are what make the world of American sports go 'round. It's a shame because a league table rewards teams that are able to succeed over the long term against a variety of opponents, but the plain fact is that people like to watch playoffs, myself included. The highlight of my 2009 sports year -- other than watching Illinois somehow manage to win a football game -- was watching the NHL playoff series between Detroit and Chicago. Exciting stuff through and through.

This is somewhat less of a problem for sports that do best-of-7 rounds, because one bad game won't necessarily sink a team. You still run the risk of a mediocre team suddenly going on fire at the right time, but by and large, one expects the better team to go through.

The real problem with doing single-match soccer playoffs is that the random events inherent in the game -- say, a shot that smacks off the post instead of sneaking into the side of the net, or even a goalkeeper guessing wrong on penalties at the end -- aren't given the chance to even out over time like they do during the regular season. I'm sure the games are still exciting, but it still affords teams that may not be of the same caliber as their opponents the opportunity to win a trophy. Which, of course, is why playoffs are so popular in the first place. Sports are more interesting to fans in general when a team has a title shot.

Well, that's why we have cup competitions. I much prefer the system where we have a 4-tier main league system with hundreds of teams playing below that level and then we have two national cup competitions, one for the teams in the top four leagues and one with all the country's teams. So what we often get is a team of part-time players somehow getting to play against teams like Manchester United and Everton which is absolutely fantastic. I really can't stomach the idea of a team winning the championship when they've not performed over a season.

League's are just so much more interesting in my opinion. The league table is constantly shifting and every game is important. Who cares about losing a few games if you can still win the title after finishing 7th?

Why not just have a league and a cup competition???

There is actually a cup competition -- the US Open Cup.

The one problematic aspect of the league system commonly used throughout the world is promotion and relegation. It simply wouldn't work here because relegation from MLS would very possibly mean the death of a franchise. From an economic standpoint, it would be suicide for American soccer.

But in general, I agree -- I think there ought to be a single league table and champion, and then perhaps an MLS-specific cup to be awarded through tournament-style play.