Photo: Marjorie Elzey

We are all wondering how Major League Soccer might reconfigure the 2020 season. The only given is that it will not occur as originally announced. New thinking is required.

The current situation

Paul Tenorio’s Question & Answer session with Major League Soccer Players Association executive director Bob Foose published March 20 in The Athletic (behind a paywall, so no point in a link) crystallizes matters.

In response to Tenorio’s question, “Would the MLSPA be open to shortening the necessary five-week offseason, per CBA guidelines, if the season has to extend into mid- or late-December?” Foose replied,

“ … . I believe very strongly that players currently around the world are overworked significantly and it’s not healthy, so I’d be very, very hesitant off the cuff to put our guys in the situation where they don’t have the proper [between season] time to recover, particularly coming off a season where they are playing a lot of games in a shorter period of time. Which is probably what we’re looking at. We will have that conversation and work hard as a PA to be cognizant of the economic realities and calendar realities the league is facing while at the same time protecting the players’ health.”

Tenorio next asked, “Have you spoken to players about the prospect of playing two games a week for several months consecutively in order to fit in a 34-game schedule?” Foose responded,

“We haven’t yet because until you have a little bit more of a guess on when we’re starting it’s a bit of a fool’s errand to try to map out a schedule. In the best of circumstances it is very, very hard to put a schedule together. We also have a lot of uncertainty on U.S. Open Cup, what’s going to happen with CONCACAF Champions League. On the positive side we do have about five weeks to play with, on a one-year basis, if we want to move the playoffs back and maybe more (than five weeks) if you had to. There is a decent part of the season that players play those midweek games anyway. My hope is, and this is without diving into this stuff with great detail yet, my hope is if it’s possible to play the full season without adding too much risk on players’ health we would be amenable to trying to make that work because it matters economically. And it matters more to our league than other leagues because gameday revenue is so important to us. We are certainly conscious of that. We all want the same thing, we just have to balance different considerations. It’s different if we start June 1st or Aug. 1st. I don’t know that anybody knows really what that’s going to look like.”

“Outside the box,” to address player-recovery health concerns

Given a compressed 34-game season with midweek games normal not exceptional, one strategic principle could be to require greater use of reserves.

One such approach would designate some of the games to be played by them. Strict guidelines disqualifying usual starters would have to be hammered out from scratch and compliance enforced. There is time for willing minds to do such work.

An extreme but simple scheduling method to increase the use of reserves would be to condense all in-conference home-and-away sets onto single dates, matching first elevens against first elevens at one location and benches against benches at the other. It would cut the needed time for the intra-conference parts of the schedule in half, reducing needed game dates from 24 down to twelve. Home firsts-versus-firsts matches would have be distributed evenly to ensure revenue equity. Each team would need a fourth goalkeeper, through whatever means. And tape delay broadcasts of the matche would have to be guaranteed to each market.

An alternative strategic principle might build from the way in which  the Development Academy program  ensures its players get appropriate degrees of participation. USSDA uses its system to promote development as well as health, but its rules could be a useful starting point.

The disease itself will determine whether playing the full schedule is possible in any fashion.