A professional soccer game lasts ninety minutes. It always has done and it always will, unless knockout competitions demand a winner. So please, Major League Soccer, abandon the ludicrous ten minutes overtime for regular season games.

For the third successive week DC United has had to play on at the end of a tied 90 minutes. Soccer is a cruel enough game at the best of times, without a team that has striven for an hour and a half to gain a single point finding itself robbed of that point, as happened in Kansas City, because of a fortuitous MLS ‘innovation’.

Overtime replaced an even more superfluous gimmick, the circus-like Shootout that was abolished at the end of the 1999 season, together with the off-field timekeeper. So by comparison we should be thankful. Yet if the introduction of OT was a compromise solution to appease those who wanted to retain the Shootout, that compromise has now reached the end of its useful lifespan.

Soccer is a wonderful game just as it is, thank you. Some of its rules may need tampering with occasionally, which is one of the reasons that FIFA exists (besides providing jobs for generations of people called Havelange). And soccer fans in the US are already convinced that the game is great on its own merits.

MLS must finally understand this and cease attempting to attract a handful of doubters it thinks might be persuaded by some added attraction. "Let’s have overtime, perhaps that will fill the stadia!" If new fans want to come and watch soccer, let the game itself do the persuading. And if people don’t like the idea of a tied match, let them head off to Camden Yards and sit past midnight until the bottom of the fourteenth.

If MLS rules were properly in line with the rest of the soccer world, DC United would still be unbeaten. And looking back at their first three games, they deserve to be so, a tie having been a more or less fair result in all three encounters. That’s even allowing for Zizi "Top" Roberts’ tangle with Nick Rimando’s boot that led to the dubious Colorado penalty on Saturday night (it was, after all, evened out by an unseen Mike Petke penalty area shirt-pull just before half-time that was missed by the TV commentators as well as the referee).

So what if a tied game is neither here nor there, that it’s neither tears nor joy, and that it probably creates no major headlines? Do fans feel a vacuum of existential dread when the final whistle sounds ("Oh my God, there was no winner! What do we do now? What does that mean?"). Or do you see fans jumping up and down with excitement at the prospect of a further ten minutes of play? Certainly not at RFK last weekend against Chicago — the general mood seemed to be a grave-faced stoicism that we had to endure another ten minutes.

If DC had won all of its first three games with a golden goal, perhaps this column would read differently. Certainly no one was complaining in the final game of the 2002 season against Dallas, when Ali Curtis’ late equaliser took the match to overtime, and DC’s slim chances of a play-off place were extended for a further fickle five minutes. Even then, though, a DC victory just wouldn’t have seemed right. For if losing a game to an overtime goal seems unjust, so does winning one too. It might as well be a victory gained through the toss of a coin.

Extra minutes have a place in soccer, but only when used sparingly in knockout cup competitions. And only then when thirty minutes are played, a time span long enough that teams might be more realistically expected to score. The League has flogged to death the unique tension of overtime when it should have securely stowed the device away for the play-offs and the MLS Cup Final.

If MLS can cope with the idea of a tied match after 100 minutes, then it can do so after ninety. In most cases, these games produce no more goals, and do not make soccer overall any more exciting. Overtime for regular season games is just a fake marketing device borrowed from too many other US sports. It should be scrapped at the next available opportunity.