Article by Matt Lichtenstadter
For all his on-field talent and gifts, Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s greatest talent is to bring attention to himself and his comments. Because he is so good at this, when he comments on almost anything, it’s bound to be a story. Last week, Zlatan decided to try his hand at commenting on MLS’ playoff system. He said,
“When you talk about the playoff, you just need to make the playoff, win the playoff and that’s it. It doesn’t matter if you lose or win,”
“How can you learn [a strong] mentality, if you just need to reach the playoffs?
“I think the system is s***, but that’s the way it is. Because you talk about mentality. For me, mentality is every day. The way you train is the way you play game. The results in every game is important but here you come 7th, you make playoffs, you win. How do you create that mentality to be on your toes 24 hours? Is very difficult.”
Naturally, these comments brought about a major reaction from most corners of the soccer world, because when he speaks, the world listens. But do his comments about MLS’ ever-changing playoff system hold water?
MLS has been constantly tinkering with its playoff system ever since its first season. When the league started, four teams from each conference made the playoffs, and they played two best of three series to make MLS Cup Final. Then, they tweaked the system to allow teams to advance on total points from those three games. By 2003, the system was altered again to two-legged aggregate series in the conference semifinals and a one-off conference final before the Cup. As the league expanded, they added a play-in game before the conference semifinals to add more teams into the pot, and soon, the conference finals became a two-legged affair. Adding in away goals, and you get a complex mish-mash of rules and ideas that for the league aren’t consistent except for a one-off final.
In 2019, for the first time ever, the entire playoffs are one-off games, and the top seven teams in each conference make it. Aggregate series, especially with away goals, creates different kinds of games, and neuters home field advantage that the regular season standings are supposed to contribute to, especially in a league where home field matters more than anywhere else. Even with seven out of 12 teams making the playoffs in each conference, finishing seventh means no home games for the entirety of the postseason. Finishing seventh means to win MLS Cup, a team would have to win four consecutive road games. That is a very daunting task, no matter how strong your mentality is.
Conceivably because MLS is such an even league, the idea that just getting into the playoffs is all that’s needed is not entirely wrong, since strange things can happen in one-off games that wouldn’t happen over the course of a 34 game regular season. But, to say that you cannot develop a strong mentality because the goal is to just make the playoffs, especially in this system, seems off base.
Since MLS will never go away from a playoff system, the focus should be on making it work as best as possible while balancing the importance of the regular season. This new system in theory should balance both incredibly well, since home field is a worthy goal to play for, and there is far more drama in a one-off game that in the first leg of a two-legged aggregate series. The mentality needed to win a winner-take-all game away from home is massive enough, but then having to do it again and again to win MLS Cup is a task in many ways harder than a 38 game double-round-robin schedule because of the intensity packed into such a short space of time. And the minute any player comes into the league, they know that winning MLS Cup is above anything else.
Is Zlatan right about the playoffs? In many ways yes, though he may not know that because he didn’t have his best game when the Galaxy needed it last year to qualify for the playoffs, and then didn’t. But in a league where the playoff format is never going away, a player has to change their ideas and their focus in order to match the challenges of where they are playing. Zlatan has done that, usually when playing LAFC, but at other times he hasn’t.
The true test of how his comments will hold is if/when the Galaxy make the playoffs, and need to play road games in Portland, Seattle and at LAFC, how he performs. Until then, it’s hard to judge his comments as anything other than Zlatan being himself, but only when he faces the kind of pressure that the playoffs bring will his comments survive their biggest stress test.
