Purists be damned: why title-deciding playoffs make soccer sing | MLS

There’s a TV commercial that’s been running on Apple TV during MLS games for Lowe’s hardware stores. Lionel Messi carefully places a soccer ball on a field, ready to take a free kick. He is flanked by Lionel Messi and Lionel Messi. On the sideline, manager Lionel Messi, assisted by Lionel Messi, gesticulates. Lionel Messi lays off the ball for Lionel Messi, who crosses it to Lionel Messi. Lionel Messi chests and volleys it into the net and is mobbed by another half dozen Lionel Messis (or is it Lionels Messi?).

Facing Inter Miami in the ongoing MLS playoffs must feel more or less like living inside this ad. Before Saturday’s Eastern Conference final against New York City FC, Messi had either scored or assisted on all 12 goals Miami had scored in the postseason. Messi has smashed up the league this year, but he has saved the real savagery for the playoffs.

On Saturday, Inter finally got over their own case of Messipendencia – the Argentinian contributed just one assist in a rollicking 5-1 win over NYC FC.

They are so much fun, this Miami team. Seeing Messi in his pomp, chasing yet another trophy and dragging his club along until it developed enough velocity of its own, has been fun. These MLS playoffs, even as favorites have excelled, have been fun.

There have only been four upsets – and just one among teams seeded more than one place apart, when fifth-seeded NYC FC beat top-seeded Philadelphia – but the bracket has been packed with drama and reversals in fortune and cinematic climaxes.

Would a few more rounds of regular season games have extracted the same performances from Messi, or ignited the fireworks we’ve seen in MLS over the last few weeks? There is no placebo group here, but it’s doubtful.

The Vancouver Whitecaps-LAFC Western Conference semi-final was an epic, a ding-dong affair tied up with a 95th-minute Heung-min Son free kick.

The Whitecaps finished extra-time down to nine men because of a red card to defender Tristan Blackmon and an injury. But they survived LAFC hitting both posts and the crossbar on a single sequence and prevailed on penalties.

Playoffs!

They are fun, and they care not about the genre of soccer being played. Over in the NWSL, Gotham FC upset the Washington Spirit in the Championship final, courtesy of a splendid Rose Lavelle finish from the edge of the box. That was only after Juan Carlos Amorós’s side had already upset the No 1 and No 4 seeds. Gotham were the lowest-seeded team (No 8) to ever win the title, breaking their own record from two years ago, when they were seeded sixth.

You could quibble that Gotham being seeded so low was fluky, given their continental title in the Concacaf W Champions Cup just six months earlier, injuries to key players, and a four-game winless run to close out the regular season that sent them tumbling down the standings. But then, in the dying seconds of extra-time in the quarter-final, they squeaked by a Kansas City Current team that had pulverised the league during the regular season. Gotham, a team who won just nine of their 26 regular season matches beat the club that set a record points total. And then they only went and knocked out the defending champion Orlando Pride with a 97th-minute winner on their only shot on goal in the whole game, advancing to the championship game.

Playoffs!

Was all of this, or any of it, fair? Of course not.

But highly entertaining? So long as you aren’t partial to any of the other teams, yeah, absolutely.

And in the end, the point of pro sports is entertainment; fairness comes second to that.

In dissecting what, exactly, makes sporting competition attractive, the Twenty First Group consultancy once identified “quality, jeopardy and connection” as the key ingredients to appealing contests. Pound for pound, playoff games will deliver more of those than a regular season game will. This is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. As Gotham demonstrated, the league table can start to feel like a pass-fail entry exam into the real thing, reducing most of the season to a qualifying event. But this achieves a service to all but the hardcore fan: it concentrates the action – the jeopardy – into far fewer games. Into better games.

Purists recoil at the erosion of the straight league table – the type used to determine the champions of most of the best soccer leagues in the world since they were founded.

But there’s something of an inconsistency that is overlooked here: some of the most popular competitions in soccer – the World Cup; the Uefa Champions League and its lesser step-siblings the Europa League and the Conference League; the Euros; Copa América – derive much of their appeal from the fact that they, too, are mostly playoffs. In the games that matter they are, at any rate. That’s where all the good stuff happens, the theater and the elation and the anguish.

After Vancouver’s 3-1 win over 10-man San Diego in Saturday’s other conference final, we’ll get a Thomas Müller-Lionel Messi final to redeem this sordid year of our lord, 2025.

Playoffs forever.

• Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out in the spring of 2026. You can preorder it here. He teaches at Marist University.