In the past week discussion in England has sprung up regarding the right way to handle a reserve league. The current system is somewhat similar to what MLS currently has, where the reserve teams operate outside of the league pyramid. Andre Villas-Boas, manager at Chelsea, wants the English to try to adapt their system to be more like Spain and Germany, where the reserve teams become "B" sides that operate within the pyramid.

David Moyes over at Everton actually tried to register their Reserve side in the Conference, unfortunately for his plan he would have had to start in "Division Nine of the North-West Outer Counties or whatever you want to call it." The English pyramid is so entrenched that the desire to get younger players experience in competitive games means that instead of an integrated system with reserves and independent teams at lower levels, loans must be used. Moyes' points:

"Because the games would tend to be on a Saturday or a Sunday, the young players would be able to follow the same programme as the senior ones," added the Scot. "The training week is similar and the players can do similar work. When your reserve games are Tuesday or Wednesday night it makes it difficult to follow programmes and your weekends become difficult because they (younger players) may have to come with the first team."

MLS has similar issues with its Reserves, but no entrenched history at the lower pro level. Some teams use their Reserves to keep deeper senior players fresh, while others use their 10 games to develop roster spots 21+ and get Academy players a taste of the pros. The idea of integrating Reserve teams with lower leagues in America isn't new on this site, but in light of the recent news out of England I revisited the topic with Adrian Hanauer at practice on Saturday.

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I'm not gonna lie, my motivation is that I have spent much of the day watching the last day of the professional tackle-football season and watching playoff scenarios and seedings fall into place. It all gets me thinking about how the MLS is going to work going forward.

Yeah, okay, that's a reach, but bear with me. You see, I've actually nothing against playoffs; I just actively hate the MLS playoffs. Fact is, I find the NFL playoffs fundamentally flawed as well. I'll spare you the excruciating details of how and what I would do to fix it, but just know that it is a logical fallacy to assume that the NFL playoff format is fantastic because so many people love the NFL playoffs. What people love is that it is professional tackle-football and the intensity derived from "loser-out" competition; similarly people love college football but the consensus opinion seems to be that the BCS is a joke and the "super-conference" system is getting, um… silly.

But that is all rather beside the point.

As some of you may be aware, I have had a hunch for some time now that when the MLS finally gets around to adding that 20th team (which seems a necessity given the tortured schedule gyrations the League is going through with an uneven number of teams) there will be 4 divisions - meaning two in each conference. The smoking gun - and reason I am now CERTAIN this will be the case, lies in the current format for the 2012 season, which I will explain in a bit.

It will probably stun many of my readers to realize that a 4 division system is actually something I could enthusiastically get behind, but not necessarily in the way that MLS wants to do it. So I'll begin with a look into the way I would do it:

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