Single-table format? Fall starts? Not good ideas for MLS

First the news: MLS will adopt a 34-game season for 2011, an increase in four matches over today’s 30-game schedule. Yours truly was the first to tell you about the potential change. High five!

Also, the Russian federation has chosen to join up with fall-winter-spring sequence for is season, falling in line with most European leagues.

So, I certainly expect a fresh reappearance of this motley pair of arguments:

-- That Major League Soccer should align itself with these other leagues, beginning in the late summer and finishing in the spring.

-- That Major League Soccer should scrap the playoffs for a single-table format.

The proponents of these two arguments are one-part soccer snob (“Everything they do in Europe or South America is better than what we do here. Everything!”). And they are one part soccer’s answer to the “birthers,” folks who believe what they believe while conveniently ignoring contrary evidence and refusing to acknowledge a little thing I like to call “the real world.”

Read on for the arguments against:

This one I’ve covered before, so I won’t spend too much time chewing on the bones when I’ve already gobbled up the meat. It is a good idea in that it mitigates many of the club-vs.-country conflicts in our land. Not all of them, but most.

But it’s just not practical. Not right now, anyway.

If you’re going to play soccer in Chicago, New York, New England, Washington, D.C., Columbus and a few other places in December, January and February, you’d better have a good supply of orange soccer balls. And coats. Lots of warm, furry coats. Maybe even some of them fancy chemical hand warmers that hunters use.

Brrrr!

A lot of people just aren’t going to show up for these games. And do not tell me “the NFL does it.” I know the NFL does it. Major League Soccer IS NOT the NFL! People are paying $20,000 for PSLs at the new Giants Stadium. There are just eight homes games a year. So they are motivated to bundle up, put on their mittens and long johns and get on with it.

A regular season meeting on a cold, January night between Chivas USA and the Red Bulls? Uh, lots of folks are just gonna pass on that one.

Along the same lines, season tickets holders drive NFL attendance. Most MLS clubs still don’t have significant season ticket bases. (God bless you soccer crazies in Seattle and Toronto.) So, if you have already paid for your seat, you are far more likely to brave the elements. See how that works.

Outside of weather concerns, there’s also so much more competition for in the fall and winter for the fan dollar, the sponsorship dollar and for media attention. (Although that last one is changing due to soccer’s gradually increasing popularity and due to the evolving media world.)

When more people are so heavily invested in their MLS teams that they’ll visit the park come hell or high water, maybe we can visit about this one again.

As for the single table: Yes, the symmetry lines up nicely for next season. There will be 18 teams. Each team plays each other twice, once at home, once on the road. So the schedule is perfectly balanced. Hell, we haven’t seen such perfect lines since Piper Perabo.

But MLS will continue to grow; it won’t be an 18-team league for long. What then? You can’t have a single table with an unbalanced schedule.

Besides, what’s wrong with playoffs? I know it isn’t how they do it in the Old World. But I don’t care. Man, they don’t shower regularly in some places over there. Hit the Paris Metro in the summer. You’ll agree with me pretty quickly that just because they do it a certain way in Europe, that don’t make it right.

I think it’s great to incorporate some American elements into soccer tradition – when it comes to structural elements of the league. I wouldn’t want to tamper with the laws of the game itself, of course, but how you decide championships is fair game for evolution.

By the way, some European leagues have adopted the American playoff format for promotion matches, and the drama of these matches is not lost on the public or the press. They seem to fancy the playoff structure.

There’s nothing wrong with taking something great and adding an American twist. Hell, that’s how we have the pizza that you eat today. And who doesn’t like pizza?