ST. LOUIS — St. Louis CITY SC is the Western Conference champion.
A night after a dominant 4-1 win over cross-state rival Sporting Kansas City, CITY SC got some help in locking up the top spot in the conference. LAFC lost to Real Salt Lake Sunday, making it impossible for anyone to catch the upstarts in St. Louis.
With their 17th win on Saturday night, CITY had already set a league record for wins by an expansion team. The regular season conference championship is also a first for an expansion team in league history.
CITY SC has held the top spot in the Western Conference nearly all season long. After winning their first five matches, they have been able to outpace the rest of the conference and are currently 10 points up on the next closest teams, Real Salt Lake and Seattle Sounders.
A Western Conference championship for CITY SC was seen as a longshot by MLS analysts heading into the season, with every one picking them to finish last or second-last in the conference in a preseason preview of the squad.
When the conference championship was locked up on Sunday night, CITY defender Tim Parker took to social media to point out those preseason predictions.
What's next?
CITY will play again on Wednesday in a road matchup against Vancouver, and the regular season finishes up with a home matchup with Seattle at CityPark on Oct. 31.
With the top seed in the West in hand, CITY knows it will have a number of advantages heading into the playoffs. They will play the winner of a single-game Wild Card match between the Nos. 8 and 9 seeds. They will then have home-field advantage throughout the Western Conference playoffs.
The first round is a best-of-three series. The first and third games of the series will be played at CityPark.
The Conference Semifinals and Conference Finals are single-elimination matchups that would also be held at CityPark.
The only team in the league with a better record than CITY is FC Cincinnati, so if those two teams meet in the MLS Cup Final, the game would be in Cincinnati.
The schedule for those playoff matches is as follows:
- Wild Card matches: Oct. 25-26
- Round One Best-of-3 series matches: Oct. 28-Nov. 12
- Conference Semifinals and Conference Finals: Nov. 25-Dec. 3
- MLS Cup presented by Audi: Dec. 9