Major League Soccer has a unique way of running its table - different from the way traditional European football leagues do things. They use a conference-based system, combining it with a postseason playoff structure that ultimately decides who the league champion is going to be.
MLS is divided up into two main parts:
Teams compete mostly within their conference during the regular season, which means they get points for their wins (3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw)
One big difference from European soccer is that coming out on top in the standings doesn't automatically mean that's the team that's going to be league champions.
After the regular season:
Clubs like:
have all won the MLS Cup in recent years.
Playoff soccer in MLS tends to become a bit more tactical and a bit less open than the regular season, even though the league as a whole is averaging an impressive 3.14 goals per match.
In the MLS standings you can see a league with:
Because of how the league is structured:
In recent seasons you've had clubs like:
drawing in all sorts of international attention.
Players like Lionel Messi really elevate the prestige of the MLS Cup, and that means there's a lot more interest in the playoff races.
In MLS - what you do in the standings matters - but it's what happens in the playoffs that really defines a team's legacy.