MLS updates their championship star protocol

Major League Soccer’s flagship club recently unveiled their new home uniforms, as the LA Galaxy officially showed off what was leaked a while back.

However, there was an interesting innovation in the process of the shirt unveiling. The Galaxy have reverted to using one gold star over their crest, instead of having one gold star and four silver stars. That’s because MLS has recently changed the rules when it comes to championship star protocol. Here’s the explanation from MLS:

Here’s how it works: The season following a team’s MLS Cup championship, they’ll sport the large gold star on their jersey as defending champions. The star will also include the year of their title. They’ll also sport a silver star under that for any previous MLS Cup championships, up to four silver stars total. If they don’t win another Cup title, then the following year, they’ll revert to a silver star for each win.
But now, on the fifth win, all the silver stars disappear in favor of one gold star, without any year on it. (Right now, the Galaxy is the only team with five Cup titles so far, so they’re the only team to sport this.)

The league admitted that this was a tad bit confusing, so they came up with an infographic in an effort to help. Everybody loves infographics, right? I know I do, so I’m glad that they did this.

So, this means that the defending MLS Cup champion Portland Timbers will be wearing a gold star for this season only and will have to revert to a silver star for the following two seasons — unless they repeat as MLS Cup Champs, which means they’ll keep the golden star and add a silver star as well.

Here’s hoping that they actually stick with this. MLS has experimented with both stars and scudettos in the past, so it’d be nice to see them try to stick with a consistent protocol going forward. Plus, the single-star look is a lot less clunky-looking than sticking one gold star over a few silver stars, so there’s that.