Sporting KC
Would you Rather St. Louis win the Wooden Spoon or SKC Make the Playoffs?
A question that will be answered over the final five games of the Major League Soccer season.
Rivalries. They often make an otherwise meaningless game mean so much more. Or they take a game with the utmost important, and they crank the intensity up to 11. In the three short seasons Sporting Kansas City and St. Louis City SC have faced off in Major League Soccer, the rivalry has been nothing short of great.
The first season saw St. Louis get the better of Sporting KC in regular season play on their way to a first-place finish in the Western Conference. SKC got their revenge in the playoffs, going on the road and winning before completing the sweep back home in game two. It’s something St. Louis fans can never take away from Sporting fans.
Years two and three were just as contentious, even if the teams were pretty bad in the standings overall. STL finished a single spot ahead of Sporting KC in 2024 and in 2025 SKC are currently up by a single spot over St. Louis. And none of those spots are in the playoffs.
On last week’s Shades of Blue Soccer Show (listen below), an interesting question was brought up.
Would you rather see Sporting KC make the playoffs, or St. Louis win the Wooden Spoon?
What is the Wooden Spoon?
First, let’s take a quick aside and learn about the Wooden Spoon. It is the trophy given out to the team with the worst record in Major League Soccer. It’s an ‘honor’ no team wants.
The Independent Supporters Council, “a collective dedicated to promoting supporters’ culture and advocating for fair treatment,” gives out the spoon every year. It was designed “to be a tool for supporters of teams that had absentee owners, in order to shame those owners.”
I’m not sure St. Louis has an absentee owner, but they may have gotten their Sporting Director hire wrong, as Lutz Pfannenstiel was recently fired.
Spoon or Playoffs?
While the actual trophy has only existed since 2015, Sporting KC and the Kansas City Wizard/Wiz before them, have never finished dead last in the league in 30 seasons. They are the only original MLS side that can say that.
On a positive note, #SportingKC officially remain the only MLS original to never "win" the wooden spoon as San Jose can not finish ahead of them.
— Mike (@downthebyline) September 22, 2024
However, St. Louis find themselves alarmingly close to the bottom of the table. They are just two points clear of the LA Galaxy for dead last in the league. And the Galaxy are in much better form than St. Louis.
So, back to the original question. Would you rather see Sporting KC make the playoffs, or St. Louis win the Wooden Spoon?
Sporting KC are chasing some of the teams that play St. Louis, so STL beating them would aid in SKC’s playoff hopes. St. Louis, like SKC, have five games remaining, as they face CF Montreal, San Jose, LAFC, Austin and Real Salt Lake, in that order.
Montreal are only two points ahead of St. Louis, so that could be a critical, Spoon deciding game in itself. D.C. United are also only two points ahead of STL.
However, the answer is clear. Even before Sporting KC were put on playoff life support after losing to Austin FC this past weekend, they were extremely unlikely to make the playoffs. They have still not put together consecutive wins all season, and they would need to basically win all their games to have a shot. It’s not going to happen.
St. Louis winning the Wooden Spoon is a real possibility though. Their schedule is pretty soft, but they’ve won only once in the last seven weeks (a shocking 3-1 win over Nashville). The Galaxy undoubtedly has a tougher schedule as they face two of the top five teams in the West (Seattle Sounders and Minnesota United. They also have to face FC Cincinnati, who are battling for a Supporters Shield.
LA even play Toluca in the Campeones Cup, since they are the defending MLS Cup Champions. That adds some unnecessary schedule congestion for Los Angeles.
But the reason St. Louis ‘winning’ the Spoon would be great is SKC fans could hold that over them forever. In just four seasons, they could get the record for being the worst team while Sporting KC has avoided it for 30 years!
Much like Sporting KC fans will always have the fact that they eliminated STL from their first ever playoffs (in a #8 over #1 upset, no less), they could pick at them about the Wooden Spoon forever.
When there is (almost) nothing left to root for when it comes to Sporting Kansas City, at least they can hate watch the St. Louis games.
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Make the playoffs, and it’s not close.
I just spent the last half hour typing. The webpage reset itself and all of my work is gone. Frankly, that is the best example I can think of of what it is to be a sporting Kansas City fan.
Except that ownership isn’t putting nearly that much work into trying to contribute to the soccer fan community.
Except their social media team trying to dunk on their own fans, honesty feels like the culture many of us fell in love with 10+ years ago is just dead
I couldn’t care less where any other team ends up. Same nonsense I read on arrowhead addict about the Bengals. The only thing that matters is this team and what are they doing to change the culture and win and right now it’s not happening.
Sporting won’t make the playoffs, even if St. Louis beats those teams because we would have to win out the end of the season. So yeah, if we have to suck, let’s hope they suck worse.
We seem to be in the minority on this one.
If Sporting KC isn’t going to make it (and even if they are perfect, which is near impossible, they might not), St. Louis will have their name on that ugly spoon forever.
It seems like an easy answer to me, but most of the social media comments, comments here and most everyone on the podcast voted the other way.
Any sane person would always choose glory (playoffs) AND seeing a rival do worst than you (which would happen if Sporting miraculously made the playoffs). So picking playoffs as preferred is a no brainer. Since that’s not going to happen, finishing anywhere above St. Louis is the next choice. A wooden spoon for St. Louis would just be icing on the cake.
Comment redacted because I initially misunderstood the premise of the article. But as much as I enjoy dunking on a rival, if given an actual choice I’d go with SKC playoffs every time. It’s one thing to directly enjoy knocking a rival down the table in a head-to-head matchup. But I’m not all that invested in openly hate-watching, anti-rooting against St. Louis. Frankly, the league would be better off with BOTH of these teams being competitive. And St. Louis has done enough things right off the field that I’d like to see some success from them to put pressure on SKC’s pathetic ownership.
I started the conversation on the pod a couple of weeks ago when there was a better chance that SKC might make it. Slim then but better than now. I would always want my team to have success, of course. That quandry of making playoffs but likely not having the horsepower to do anything makes it a valid question to me. Have a rival permantly marred by the spoon or make a playoff that foes nowhere?
I would rather SKC make the playoffs (very unlikely now) but I think we can hope for both.