MLS 2023 playoffs controversy explained: will there be a new format?

The 2023 Major League Soccer season kicks off on Saturday, Nashville SC hosting New York City FC in the campaign’s opening game - but even at this late stage, it’s yet to be confirmed what the league’s end-of-term playoffs will look like.

Best-of-three series in 2023 MLS playoffs?

Since 2019, the MLS playoffs have featured seven teams from each of the league’s two conferences, with each phase of the postseason - the first round, the conference semi-finals, the conference finals and the MLS Cup final - involving single-elimination ties.

However, MLS chiefs are reportedly looking at expanding the postseason to as many as 18 sides in 2023 - and are also said to be weighing up switching the format of first-round playoff clashes to best-of-three series.

“The biggest issue is how quickly it’s over”

In their current guise, the MLS playoffs feature a total of just 13 matches each year - far fewer than in other major US leagues such as basketball’s NBA, whose postseason includes a minimum of 63 games.

“From an MLS standpoint, I think the biggest issue with the current [playoff] structure is how quickly it’s over,” ESPN analyst Kyle Bonagura said in October. “There’s not much time to build momentum and get fans invested in a way that exists in other American sports. So, in theory, if it’s longer, that would solve that.”

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Play-in phase in 18-team MLS postseason?

The Athletic, which first reported MLS’ potential change to best-of-three ties in January, this month revealed that league bosses are considering opening up two more postseason spots in each conference by including a ‘play-in’ phase like that used in the NBA. Under this system, the eighth and ninth-ranked teams in the Eastern and Western Conferences would go head to head for the right to join their conference’s top seven sides in the playoffs proper.

Such a plan would see the minimum number of games in the MLS postseason rise to 25 - almost double the amount currently played.

Playoffs change in wake of Apple TV deal

Attempts to add more playoff matches - which tend to have a greater potential TV audience than regular-season fixtures - come after MLS signed a 10-year broadcast deal with Apple, which has paid $2.5bn to show every league game on its streaming service Apple TV.

Last year, it was also reported that MLS administrators were mulling over a switch to a World Cup-style postseason, involving a group stage and a knockout phase. Quoting an MLS source, however, the Athletic said in January that the best-of-three format is “more likely” to be implemented.

It would not be the first time that MLS has used such a system. In the first seven years of the league’s existence, playoff ties in the rounds before the MLS Cup final were a best-of-three series in which the first team to accrue five points would advance to the next stage.

Neville: “That’s not elite”

Whatever MLS opts to do with its playoffs, Inter Miami head coach Phil Neville isn’t impressed that, with days to go until the 2023 season begins, a final decision hasn’t yet been made. “We’re six days, seven days out from the first game of the season, we don’t know the playoff format,” Neville told an interview with the Athletic on Saturday. “I think that’s poor.

“When you’re talking about professionalism, and ‘elite’, I think when you’re seven days out from the start of the season - we’ve had talks here, and one of our players asked one of the MLS guys the other day ‘what’s the playoff system’ and they were like, ‘We don’t know.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s not elite.’”

Speaking last year, ESPN’s Jeff Carlisle also criticised MLS’ indecisiveness over a postseason format that has undergone several changes over the 27 years since the competition’s inception. “The league keeps going back and forth on what its preferred playoff format should be,” Carlisle said, “and it doesn’t seem to know what it wants.”