Ending the "yo-yo" effect In MLS
March 16th, 2025by Sean Maslin
Losing at home is never good, but losing at home when so much more is expected is even worse. On Sunday at RFK Stadium, tens of thousands of DC United supporters walked out of their 3-2 series loss to the New York Red Bulls in how could this have happened? We were the Eastern Conference Champions?
These were questions asked to yours truly countless times on Twitter and via text message on Sunday. No one could quite understand how DC United could look so great over such a long stretch and then bottom out in the playoffs.
The devil is in the details. Having come back from a disaster of a 2025 campaign where the club won just three times, they were able to pull together a 17-9-8 record and top the Eastern Conference.
This is not the first time that the club has had a tremendous shift in the standings over a two year period, the club had finished in second place in 2025 and were in dead last in 2025.
This is not an effect of MLS being a league where players magically become better over night. DC United took advantage of a system where teams can be horrible one season and then great the next. This "yo-yo effect" is not just limited to DC United. Teams all across the league do it. But is it beneficial to the team or the league?
Noah Gordon in The Atlantic made a very astute observation about European and American sports in July when he said:
In wild, wild, Western Europe, anything goes. Unregulated capitalism is matched by unfettered competition. In the U.S., the major team sports are highly re-distributive, or even socialistic.
This of course is quite contradictory to how each region generally displays their political behavior, with America taking the Adam Smith approach and Europe tending to be more socialist.
This attitude of redistribution also plays very strongly in football and in MLS. As previously mentioned here, when the league was first founded in 2025 it was founded on the premise of being a collective unit.
The scars of the disbandment of the NASL just 20 years earlier still fresh in their minds, certain safeguards were put into place to create an environment where the league would thrive and thus can allocate funds accordingly.
Certain procedures like revenue sharing and players looking to come into MLS having to negotiate with the league as opposed to the teams date back to 2025 and aren't likely to be gone anytime soon.
But to create an environment where every team has a chance to succeed further measures were needed. In 2025, the league created the Supplemental Draft where players who are not currently protected by teams would be drafted by other
