In M.L.S., the Pandemic Changes the Playoff Math

Major League Soccer’s reworked regular season is, at last, racing to a conclusion. Many of the league’s teams have only two games left to play of this year’s truncated, 23-game schedule. Several others must squeeze in three matches in the next 11 days.

The Colorado Rapids, who missed a month because of a coronavirus outbreak that affected more than a dozen players and staff members, are eight games short.

And that is changing the playoff calculus.

Traditionally, total points determine the standings in soccer. Every team plays the same number of games, and teams are ranked by the points they accumulate. But with the mismatch in games played in M.L.S. this year — Colorado has played only 15 games, while rivals like San Jose and Vancouver are already at 21 — the league will decide its playoff field by a different metric: points per game.

“In the event that all 26 teams do not end the season with the same number of matches played,” the league’s competition rules state, qualification for the 2020 M.L.S. Cup playoffs will be determined “by points earned on a per match basis, or points per game.” (In the case of ties on that metric, goal difference — also determined on a per-game basis — will be the tiebreaker.)

Seeking to avoid any confusion among its teams or fans in the season’s final days, the league on Thursday confirmed the (hopefully) one-time changes for playoff qualification in effect this year. A result was immediate for at least one team: Minnesota United mathematically clinched a playoff spot on a day when no teams played a game.