By J Hutcherson - WASHINGTON, DC (Jan 6, 2012) US Soccer Players -- During its glory years in the late 1970's, the original North American Soccer League expanded from 18 to 24 teams, increasing the regular season schedule from 26 games to 30. By 1980, those 24 teams were playing 32 games. The number of regular season games stayed the same through 1982, even as the number of clubs dwindled to 14.
For most of the 1970's, the NASL was over by the 1st of September. With a regular season that normally started in early April, this meant that at its height the league was out of season from September through March. Yes, there was the NASL indoor league that some teams participated in along with international tours for the higher profile clubs, but as an outdoor league the NASL went dark for seven months of the year.
We all know what happened to the NASL, and by the end they had pushed the championship into October. The final original NASL championship, no longer the Soccer Bowl but a two-leg series, was played on October 3rd, 1984. I'm not arguing schedule creep was even in the top ten of what led to the demise of the NASL, but it's worth considering how important scheduling was when the league was at its peak.
That NASL schedule avoided a major problem. The National Football League season that started the first Sunday in September. There was a pragmatic understanding of the NASL schedule that steered the league away from direct competition with the NFL as well as Major League Baseball's playoffs. Though the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League had already pushed their finals into late May and early June by the late 70's, that wasn't the same direct outdoor sport comparison for professional soccer. The NASL season ran from spring through summer, sharing a start with baseball but exiting early in the glory years.
Aside from stadium issues when more teams were using NFL stadiums, Major League Soccer hasn't shared the NASL's concern over head-to-head competition with professional football or baseball. From the first season, October was a soccer month in the MLS model. DC United won the '96 MLS Cup on October 20th in a game played at an NFL stadium the same day of the opening game of the 1996 World Series and with the NFL playing its Sunday schedule.
Drawing 34,646 to watch professional soccer in the rain was a significant accomplishment, then and now. Beating that attendance with 57,431 showing up the next year at RFK to watch the home team while Washington's NFL team was playing Baltimore at home the same day? It might be overlooked now, but think about that for a league in its second season.
Major League Soccer has never been shy. They've pushed the product against the kind of avoidance mentality in play with the NASL, and it worked well enough early on to set a standard. Aside from those stadium conflicts where soccer wasn't the primary tenant, MLS would be scheduled on its terms. The rise of soccer-specificity spoke to that, with the League and its clubs deciding when they would allow themselves to be inconvenienced by other teams and events renting their stadiums.
With that in mind, Thursday's 2012 schedule announcement is business as usual. We get more MLS this year, a regular season that runs from March 10th until the end of October and a championship game on December 1st. It's still not the English ideal upheld by those arguing that MLS players need more games from a longer schedule, but it is a longer schedule. Significantly so, and with less teams involved if you consider that NASL example.
There's also something else worth considering, the English ideal. In contemporary soccer, it wasn't the ideal of FIFA, who forced the Premier League to reduce the number of clubs from 22 to 20. The plan was a second reduction and potentially a third. FIFA had a model of 16-club leagues in Europe that would allow for easier - and they would argue better - scheduling of international soccer friendlies and tournaments. A few teams took that 18-club step with some seeing that it wasn't going to catch on and returning to 20, but FIFA had a point.
Consider the last couple of weeks in English soccer. Sure, we can play up the tradition of multiple games across the holiday season, but there's also an argument that this is a historic anomaly. Most of Europe now takes a winter break, avoiding the potential for the kind of fixture congestion that comes when weather decides a game won't be played. The Premier League opts for what feels like as many games as possible.
We've seen what can happen, with Britain showing up as a blanket of ice in weather photos and all games called off. Some continue to push for a winter break, but the Premier League setting it up to regularly inconvenience clubs appears to be part of the challenge of that league.
Had FIFA's plan worked, MLS being in season for 267 days in 2012 would probably have compared nicely. You don't need an August through May schedule to play 30 games in a 16-club European league. Fixture congestion, the club vs country controversies, and other hallmarks of the game especially as it's applied to the Premier League are all lessened considerably if not done away with altogether.
There's little hope for a revival of FIFA's plan. The clubs in the elite leagues of Europe would like to stay there, and the threat of traditional relegation is enough without revisiting that nightmare Premier League season of 1994-95 when four teams were relegated and only two promoted to get the topflight down to 20 teams. Then again, whenever the rest of us are privy to serious discussions of a potential breakaway European Super League, the number of super clubs involved is normally less than 20, at times considerably so.
It's as if there's a secondary conversation going on in Europe where the realities of their lengthy schedules go hand-in-hand with a pragmatic look at the calendar. With the tradition of home-and-away league formats in place, their answer is less teams. For MLS, it's recognizing that playing through the winter months might not be soccer-specific in North America, but they can still fill a significant portion of the year with professional soccer.
Comments, questions, solutions to problems that have yet to present themselves. Please, tell me all about it.
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