I’m glancing at the almost-final standings of the tier-three Canadian Soccer League, and something quite glaring has caught my eye.
The much-maligned and oft-ignored league has played 179 games in its top division this season (TFC Academy still has three matches to play against non-playoff teams, while everyone else is done.)
Of all those games, just 30 have ended in draws. That’s 17%, if you’re scoring at home.
Major League Soccer, by contrast, has completed 283 matches as the sun comes up this morning. 101 have come up dead-even – 36% – more than double the draw rate in the CSL.
That is a large and unsatisfying number, and the gulf between the two leagues deserves some investigation.
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Draws, cumulatively, are a mathematical function of a lack of goals. The fewer goals scored in a league, the more draws you will see – in general – over the course of an entire season.
In those 179 matches, CSL first-division sides have rung up 602 goals – 3.36 tallies per tiff.
The MLS number is significantly lower – 730 goals in 283 games, just 2.58 goals per game.
If you’re seeking a solution, the solution is clear. Score more goals. But how would you go about legislating a thing like that?
The old North American Soccer League had a unique way of calculating its standings. Teams got six points for a win, three for a draw – and a bonus point for every goal scored, up to a maximum of three per game.
The incentive to score goals was clear. If you could max out, the value of a win was boosted by 50%.
Yes, the value of a draw could be doubled, but those lovely old teams which I still miss very much, thanks, weren’t spending a whole lot of time playing for draws. Drawn games ceased to be an issue completely in 1975, when the NASL abolished them, opting for a game-deciding shootout instead.
In 1974, the final season where drawn games were permitted, the NASL’s 15 teams played a grand total of 150 matches. The official standings report – unhelpfully – that 18.5 of those games ended in draws. That’s not possible, so I rounded down. Only 12% draws. The league averaged 3.25 goals a game, fewer than this year’s CSL, but pretty much three-quarters of a goal per game more than MLS ’11.
That system, of course, was ludicrously unfair. An NASL team could go out and win a gritty, deliberate 1-0 grind-fest against a top divisional foe, and still lose ground if another team blew out a bottom-feeder.
I don’t see any useful way that such a standings-based goal inititive would actually improve MLS.
Better, I think, to hope this year’s draw infestation is a one-year statistical fluke, brought on more by overall parity than by a lack of goals. Parity has eased somewhat in the three-DP universe, and can be further cured by letting more bad teams into the league. (I’m looking at you, Montreal!)
Just out of curiosity – and an early-morning touch of nostalgia – I’ve reworked this morning’s MSL standings using the old NASL system. Here’s how we look:
East:
Kansas City 180
New York 175
Philadelphia 169
Columbus 169
Houston 168
D.C. 158
Chicago 151
Toronto 125
New England 115
West:
Los Angeles 236
Seattle 217
Salt Lake 194
Colorado 175
Dallas 173
Portland 157
Chivas 148
San Jose 129
Vancouver 105
The big winners? New York Energy Drink! The Pop Cans vault from fourth place to second in the East, sitting smugly in an automatic playoff slot, instead of being jammed up in a multi-team wild-card-avoidance scramble.
… And do you think Philly, Columbus and Houston would be going all-out to score goals from here on in? … And do you think they’d all be trying to sign a Thierry Henry play-alike in the off-season?
The only switch out west is Colorado nudging ahead of Dallas for fourth place.
It still looks like the same ten teams in the playoffs, but the old system puts D.C. United significantly closer than their present plight.
None of this last part particularly proves anything. MLS ’11 is virtually the identical league under both systems.
What we’ll never know is how many more extra goals would have been scored in a universe where almost every net-nuzzler goes directly into the points column. No one’s catching L.A. and Seattle, but the entire north end of the East Division is up for grabs, and could look significantly different.
The old NASL points system had some glaring inefficiencies, and really wasn’t all that fair.
But a 36% draw rate can’t continue, either.
Thoughts?
Onward!