When MLS announced its 2024 playoff format — a best-of-three Round 1 series with no aggregate score tracking followed by single-game knockouts to the Cup — many fans cried foul.
The point of the playoffs has always been that anything can happen during a one-game knockout; by pushing the first round to three games, MLS handed a meaningful advantage to the league’s deepest squads. The new playoff structure felt like a clear ploy to ensure marketable headliner teams stayed in the tournament for as long as possible.
Flash forward to now, however, and that ploy appears to have backfired. The Columbus Crew, MLS’s defending champion, was eliminated by the seventh-seeded New York Red Bulls in a shocking two-game sweep.
But Columbus is far from the only top team facing an early departure from the playoffs. Inter Miami and Los Angeles FC, the top teams in the East and West, lost the second games of their respective series in dramatic fashion. Both take the field for Game 3 this weekend; if either team loses, it will be eliminated from MLS Cup contention, and its season will be over.
