MLS Playoff Attendance Embarrassment

[Corner Kicks]

Eight games, 108,506 thousand spectators. BARELY more than a single college football game in Happy Valley. It’s much worse when you take out Houston’s sixth-best-ever attendance at Robertson Stadium of 30,053 in their 3-0 playoff exit on Sunday.

5,221 to see Chicago and New England on October 30th
11,578 in New York for their first Houston match
14,719 at spankin new Rio Tinto Stadium in Salt Lake for the Real v Chivas match
10,385 in Kansas City for their opener with the Crew.

Game-twos were better, most likely due to the extra week’s notice for ticket sales, as well as the fact the home teams’ fans have known for weeks their team would be in the post season.
17,312 in Chicago,
11,153 in Columbus,
19,265 in LA,
and the aforementioned 30,053 in Houston.

What’s the point really of having playoffs if the fans just don’t care enough to trek out to the stadium on short notice? And with teams finishing below .500 allowed in the post-season, aren’t the playoffs in MLS really only about the money anyway?

Here’s an idea – let’s name the team with the best overall regular season record MLS Cup Champions, and then have a post-season single elimination tournament between the eight teams with highest regular season attendance figures for the year, and call that winner the “Supporters Shield” Champion.

The league would get fewer games, but more attendance, more predictability of a first-round schedule, and a major incentive for fans to attend matches since they literally could effect whether or not their team made the “playoffs”.

Would something like this fly? It would be a gimmick for sure at first, but you never know.

To keep it serious, how about $1 from every ticket sold during the tournament went into a prize pool to be distributed solely to the winning team?

Another variation - maybe the top three teams in each division, and then two attendance-measured wildcards to keep things a little more fair?

One thing for sure is the league would finally be forced to report attendance numbers on a consistent basis – read ATTENDANCE, not SALES or TICKETS DISTRIBUTED.

Using an attendance-only format, this year’s playoff teams would have been, in order:
Los Angeles
Toronto
DC United (ironically, 3 teams that did NOT make the playoffs this year),
New England
Chicago
Houston
Salt Lake
New York

The team with the best record in the league – Columbus - would be sitting home, thinking really hard about how to get fans to care about their winning record.

What do you think?