It's time to talk about the "P" word. That's right: Playoffs, the common format in North American sports, where teams play a whole regular season for most of the year that seemingly becomes irrelevant when the top teams — or, in the case of Major League Soccer, the NHL and the NBA, more than half the teams — advance to a whole other knockout tournament that determines the seasonal champion.

It's also a format that's been anathema to the vast majority of European leagues who, for the most part, have been more than happy to crown their champions the way they've crowned them for the past century or so.

However, that could be changing. It won't happen next year, or even the year after, but it's an increasing part of the conversation as the European game deals with a shifting economic landscape and the increasing effects of polarization with the rich (whether we're talking clubs or leagues) dramatically increasing the gap to everybody else, season after season. We've already seen UEFA radically change the Champions League format to the "Swiss Model" from 2024; Belgium introduced a post-season playoff format in 2009 and has tinkered with it since. Both Germany's Bundesliga and Italy's Serie A have been exploring the possibility of some kind of post-season playoff format — whether knockout or round-robin based — for a while now.

This talk won't go away, so here's a Q+A to better understand why it's happening and how things could look like in the future.

Q: Wait, why are they doing this? What happened to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it?"

A: Plenty of folk think that it is breaking, if not broken, and they range from those involved in big clubs right down to midsize and smaller clubs.

There are two main factors at play here. One is the economics of the system, where clubs find it difficult to be sustainable. The other is the sporting side, with resources so unevenly split that certain clubs dominate year after year. The two are linked: clubs feel they are forced to make a choice between sustainability and the ability to compete. And that, incidentally, applies to the big clubs as well, or at least it's the justification given by some clubs, like Real Madrid and Juventus, for the Super League project.

Q: How does that work?

A: Like any business, if you want to be sustainable, you either cut costs or grow revenue or both. Many clubs have been propped up by owners investing in teams to try to grow their brand and commercial revenue as well as chase on-field success, which leads to more prize money. But it's difficult to do since you can't control what happens on the pitch, you're all chasing the same pie and you can only fund losses for so long. And if you cut costs, you risk becoming less competitive.

UEFA and national leagues have tried to address this via mechanisms like Financial Fair Play and while it has broadly made football's ecosystem more stable, it has also made it less competitive. You only need to look at league tables from 20 or 30 years ago — as well as the number of points earned by champions — to see this, and that bleeds into the sporting case for playoffs …

Q: Which is? A: Every season, in May, you see a huge amount of frankly irrelevant games. Between teams that are already champions, teams that have clinched a European spot, teams that are already relegated and teams that know they aren't going down and aren't going into Europe, we get a whole load of empty encounters.