MLS was founded to develop American players. There’s almost no way to say this without sounding incredibly jingoistic, but the basic math is that every foreign player on the roster is an American that isn’t. I don’t have a problem with the current foreign player allocation rules, and I don’t have a problem with teams putting young up-and-coming foreigners/established players on the rosters as a quick way to build team quality. But I don’t want to see foreign allocations increased, since it will impact the ability of teams to sign young American talent.

MLS isn’t perfect, and the best players shouldn’t stay there forever, but it’s a good way to build broad based support for American soccer. It’s great to see guys go abroad and succeed there, but I actually think that seeing Americans making a living playing in a domestic league will have a greater impact on convincing American athletes to play soccer and not other sports.

The expansion draft rules don’t let teams protect *all* of their best players, so there are usually a few gems out there for teams to pick up that let them get up to speed more quickly than they otherwise would. That’s important because this league likes teams to be competitive with each other.

I’m sure there are undiscovered gems in the lower divisions of US Soccer, but I’d say that by and large, the reason they’re playing there and not MLS is because they simply aren’t good enough to do so yet, or they’re just good enough that they’d command more money than an MLS club can afford to splash out on what is essentially a squad player.

We are effectively a third division.

LARS — have to disagree regarding buying up 2nd and 3rd level players from other countries. MLS needs to keep looking for the skilled foreign players that are just developing or have been overlooked. Two benefits–if successful, the entertainment value of MLS goes up and MLS makes mmoney off of selling rights to other more successful soccer leagues. Soccer in the US needs to be ENTERTAINING to continue to grow. Where soccer is part of the culture, heavy footed teams can survive based solely on local interest, especially where a talented premier league exists. MLS can’t.

Seriously though, it would take an extremely flukey season for the top two teams in a conference not to also be one of the best eight teams in the league and to qualify for the playoffs. Getting stuck in the semantics of the Conference terminology obscures the fact that the playoffs are fairly similar to other knock-out systems in the rest of the world, ours just happens after the season is done.

So if you must, think of Columbus as the league winners, and either LA or RSL as the play-off champions. Do people give the A-League this much crap for their playoff system?