—by Chris Rifer
Pending expected CONCACAF approval, the Portland Timbers have qualified for the CONCACAF Champions League.
Confirming a November 6th report by Prost Amerkia, the MLS website revealed Friday evening that a CCL berth will be awarded to the regular season conference winner that does not win the Supporters’ Shield, guaranteeing that each regular season conference champion will earn a berth to Champions League.
From the Portland perspective, this is – to make an initialism of one of Vice President Biden’s most precious open mic moments – a BFD.
Sure, there are the tangible benefits of qualifying for Champions League. In 2014, Portland will receive an unspecified, but reportedly handsome sum of allocation money to help buttress their already deep, young roster. Moreover, with so much youth in the club, the early group stage matches in the fall of 2014 will provide a valuable opportunity to galvanize their potential in the fires of competitive CCL play.
More important, however, is that the CCL berth very tangibly validates one simple fact about this team. The Portland Timbers are among the MLS elite. And they look set to stay there for some time.
As Merritt Paulson indicated on Twitter Friday evening, entry into CCL has been one of the Timbers’ primary goals in MLS. It was a goal that was whispered before the 2012 season, only to look like a joke by June. Before 2013, it was a thought that seemed utterly absurd considering the shape the club was in a year ago. But today, the Timbers’ CCL aspirations are seemingly a formality away from reality, which is nothing short of a tremendous accomplishment for the Timbers team and organization.
For MLS, the rule change is a significant step toward putting the proper emphasis on the 34-game regular season. Should the rule change be approved, U.S. Soccer’s four CCL berths will be awarded to the MLS Cup winner, the regular season conference champions, and the U.S. Open Cup champion.
Moreover, should a Canadian MLS team win MLS Cup or a conference regular season title, the vacant U.S. spot goes to the next best American MLS team based on regular season performance.
As it stood before the change, only the Supporters Shield winner earned a berth based on regular season accomplishments. So long as the MLS schedule was balanced, this didn’t pose any great inequity, as there could be little doubt about who the best team at the end of the season was. With an unbalanced schedule, however, conference imbalances can raise significant questions about whether the Supporters Shield winner was truly the league’s best team over the course of 34 games.
The 2013 regular season was a perfect example. While New York Red Bulls took home the Shield with 59 points, the Timbers won the West with 57. The Red Bulls, however, got to play 25 teams against a weaker Eastern Conference, including six fixtures against kick overs D.C. United and Toronto FC. Considering the Timbers played in the much deeper West, it’s not hard to make a colorable argument that Portland was MLS’s best team in 2013.
Giving a CCL berth to both conference champions eases any possible inequities in this respect and, more importantly, provides greater reward for regular season success. While the conference championship trophies remain in the playoffs, the true reward lies where it belongs – with the teams that prove their mettle over the course of seven months.
From a league perspective, the final point worth making is MLS made this move the right way. Although they couldn’t announce the change – likely because it had to be approved by multiple levels of bureaucracy – Paulson revealed that the owners voted on the change in preseason, mollifying any concerns that MLS was up to its midstream rule change tricks again.
In sum, MLS made a good sense rule change using appropriate procedures that resulted in the Timbers justifiably achieving a major franchise goal. To me, that sounds to me like a BFD.
Onward Rose City!
