In an interview on ESPN during halftime of the 2010 MLS Cup championship game Sunday from BMO Field in Toronto, Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber announced preliminary changes to the 2011 season format, including a change in the playoff format.
For 2011, the league will finally play a balancec schedule with 18 teams, nine in each conference; creating a 34-game regular season, which could begin the second week of March.
The league will then not be balanced again until 2014 after two more teams are added beforehand -- the Montreal Impact in 2012 and a yet-to-be-placed 20th team in 2013.
Garber also unveiled a planned ten-team playoff format for 2011 that will eliminate the possibility of teams in a natural conference competing in an unnatural conference to balance the playoff brackets -- a system that caused two Western Conference teams (the San Jose Earthquakes and the 2010 MLS Cup champion Colorado Rapids) to play for the Eastern Conference championship.
Four of the ten eligible teams would compete in a play-off round to vie for the final two spots in the current eight-team field, but Garber said the league's Competition Committee would first have to decide if the four teams that would be involved would be the fourth and fifth seeded teams from each conference or the seventh through tenth place teams, regardless of conference affiliation, and whether these play-in games would be single elimination or two-game, aggregate score matchups.
Garber said he has asked the committee to report back to him with their decisions within 30 days.
A plan with a much longer timeline before ever being implemented, a change is the overall schedule of MLS, is also being discussed, according to Garber.
The move, which would finally put the league in line with other professional soccer leagues around the world, is based on Scandanavia's top league, which begins its season in late summer, breaks in early winet, returns to play in February and finishes in late spring.
Finally, Garber also said the league is considering awarding some perks to the team that wins the Supporters Shield each year for having the best record in the league.
He said the perks "could be (earning) more allocation money, could be where they are seeded (in the playoffs), it could be what to do with our draft, (or) we coild simulate promotion/relegation."
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