As MLS Sets New Scoreless Draws Record, Blame The Colorado Rapids

As Major League Soccer set a record for scoreless draws in a regular season with its 31st 0-0 affair played on Saturday night, it could be tempting to blame a number of factors: a new and more-forgiving playoff format, an overly crowded and conflicting schedule, and most obviously a much larger league that brings with it many more games than when MLS was launched with just 10 clubs in 1996.

And yes, the quantity of 31 doesn’t represent a percentage record during a campaign with the most regular season games in league history (although the 8.8% mark from 2011 remains in play). But it’s still alarming to hit such a high number in mid-July, with still roughly a third of the regular season left.

Maybe there’s a simpler skapegoat though: The Colorado Rapids.

The Rapids took part in the record-setting affair on Saturday night, a 0-0 tie at home against the Houston Dynamo that was their mind-numbing seventh scoreless affair of the season. That’s 22.6% of all the scoreless draws that have been played this year in a league that has 29 teams.

Put another way, Colorado by itself has played in more scoreless ties through 23 games than occurred in three entire previous MLS seasons. The 1996 season featured only six 0-0 results. There were only three in 1998, and four in 2002.

Even worse, all but one of those 0-0 affairs for the Rapids has come at home. If you’ve gone to Dick’s Sporting Goods Park to see the Rapids this season, there’s a 50% chance you haven’t seen a goal scored. If you’ve gone twice at random, there’s still a 25% percent you’ve yet to see the ball hit the net.

It’s probably no coincidence that when the previous record of 30 scoreless draws in a season was posted in 2021, there was also one team contributing an unusually large portion: It was Nashville SC in their second MLS season and first normal-ish campaign after trying to do expansion during the start of a pandemic.

But Nashville’s 0-0 draws were the byproduct of a strategy that did more good than bad, earning them a playoff spot, a record-tying 18 draws overall and an above-.500 mark in the table. When the Rapids aren’t tying, they’re almost always losing. They’ll enter the break 10 points adrift of the playoffs despite the introduction of the more forgiving 18-team format.

No fanbase deserves a team that is not only so bad but also so entirely uninteresting, and with no real obvious evidence that the front office is trying to solve the problem. The Rapids might not set historic marks for futility in terms of points earned. But they will go down as one of the least enjoyable MLS sides to watch.

So it may not be wise to ascribe the overall scoreless draw trend to some wider phenomenon across the league. But it also shouldn’t take MLS off the hook entirely. Major League Soccer created a competitive structure where a team like the Rapids can have such an obvious problem without scrambling to solve it at the risk of facing serious consequences if they don’t.

And if MLS wants to stop critics from suggesting the league needs to implement promotion and relegation (as occurs elsewhere in the soccer world), it needs to find another mechanism that ensures all its clubs act with urgency without it.

Instead, with long-term injuries to their 2022 top scorer and top assist man, and the summer transfer window opening 10 days ago, Colorado so far has acquired one attacking wingback in a trade and signed one striker on a loan. Compare that to their fellow last-place team in the Eastern Conference, which just signed the greatest living player on Earth.

The Rapids won’t play another MLS regular season match until August 20th, and thankfully for their poor fans, their next home game won’t come until the middle of September. By then, maybe they will have solved their scoring problems to some degree.

Or maybe they’ll be on the field again when we record the 45th draw of the season that guarantees another record: An all-time high of 9% of all MLS matches finishing without goals in 2023.