Major League Soccer is considering overhauling its calendar, flipping to a fall-spring season with breaks in the summer and winter, multiple sources briefed on the league’s discussions tell The Athletic.
MLS executives and owners have been weighing the changes to the calendar, which they believe will help maximize the league’s participation in the global transfer market, among other benefits. The hope is for the league to institute the changes as early as the summer of 2026 coming out of the World Cup.
MLS executive vice president of sporting product and competition Nelson Rodriguez told The Athletic it is still “too soon” to know if MLS will institute changes or what those changes could be.
“We have been engaged, really, since January, and it’s been very extensive and exhaustive and deliberate,” Rodriguez said. “It’s still too early. We’re still asking questions. We’re still collecting and analyzing some data. We’re still formulating models. Some of those models are for formats themselves, some of those models are how to assess the information that we get.”
A change would certainly impact MLS’ competition in the American sports calendar. The MLS Cup playoffs, which started this week, are up against the MLB playoffs, college football and the NFL, as well as the NBA, college basketball and NHL regular seasons. Under the new calendar, the playoffs would likely be played in April and May, with most of the competition coming from the Stanley Cup playoffs, the NBA postseason and the start of the MLB season.
MLS is holding group meetings with sporting directors, chief business officers and owners. Rodriguez said the league has also done extensive fan polling “and we’re going back into the field with another fan survey.” The league is also planning to have fan and player focus groups to gauge interest and hear concerns about changes because “this impacts the entire ecosystem,” according to Rodriguez.
Why make changes?
Altering the schedule could have multiple benefits from a competitive standpoint, from syncing up the league’s transfer windows with the European calendar to maximizing the visibility of the playoffs in the American sports calendar.
The vast majority of global transfer business is done in the summer window. That currently falls in the middle of the MLS season, which creates conflicts for teams hoping to buy and sell players — a problem that has been felt more acutely as MLS teams have become more active in the international market.
Teams that want to sell players in the summer, when they are at their highest value, must weigh losing some of their best players in the middle of the season with little time to replace them. The MLS and Leagues Cup schedule also means summer signings arrive with fewer than 10 games left in the regular season.
Sporting directors looking to buy players during the summer window have also complained that the U.S. summer window closes too early to fully leverage the market. With the MLS window closing before most European windows are shut, teams often find that players want to wait to see all of their options and it causes MLS teams to lose out on potential signings. MLS clubs essentially cannot benefit from the dominos that fall later in the transfer window.
“I wish our window was a little bit more friendly to us,” Charlotte FC sporting director Zoran Krneta told MLSsoccer.com this summer. “I am a big advocate for the window being moved to, like, September 5, because we would not only have way more chances to pick up really good players, but we will also have a chance to pick up the players that suddenly are surplus to requirements.
“Sometimes, with those deals that fail in the last two days, the club’s like, ‘OK, what do we do now?’. It would really be a smart move by American clubs and Major League Soccer. The league was keen to change it this year, but they couldn’t for various other reasons, but this is where we need to go to be super competitive.”
While the transfer window is determined by the Canadian Soccer Association and U.S. Soccer, not MLS, a move to a fall-spring schedule could help to alleviate some of those issues.
How would the schedule change?
With the changes, the MLS season would begin, like most European leagues, in early August. The first portion of the schedule would run through mid-December before taking a winter break, likely around five weeks long. The season would resume in early February and run through the spring, with MLS Cup in late May.
A schedule change would flip the MLS playoffs and MLS Cup to a less crowded portion of the American sports schedule. A warm-weather MLS Cup, with less competition from other sports leagues, is certainly appealing to all.
A fall-spring calendar would also mean that MLS, like the rest of the world, would pause the season during all FIFA international windows, which would be a welcome change for most teams and players.
“The playoffs are the most valuable piece of real estate in a league season, and playoffs that would be spring or summer suggests a different dynamic,” Rodriguez said. “It starts with (the fact that the) weather is closer to optimal for all 30 clubs, your stadium conflicts are a little bit less, competition with other North American sports is different and you’re more aligned with at least the European rhythm of football. So, those are factors. They also come with their own sets of tradeoffs.”
The league is also weighing the possibility of organizing teams into divisions instead of conferences and playing part of the schedule as intra-conference and intra-divisional play only, with playoff spots on the line. The second half of the season would then help determine full-season playoff seeding and spots.
The MLS Players’ Association will play a crucial role in these discussions and Rodriguez said the league is working with the MLSPA to ensure it gets player feedback. The league will need player sign-off on any schedule changes, especially because the collective bargaining agreement requires that each player is entitled to six weeks of vacation per year, with five consecutive weeks of vacation time required.
What are the drawbacks?
The league would no longer play from around June 1 through July 15 and it would replace those weeks of games with games from early November through mid-December. That might be welcomed by fans in cities like Dallas, Orlando, Miami, Houston and Austin, but it would be difficult for markets like Toronto, Chicago, Minnesota, Salt Lake City, Montreal and New England, which see the summer months as their most attractive and profitable weeks of the season.
Sources involved in and briefed on discussions said there has been concern about a potential calendar change from certain MLS stakeholders that play in the colder markets. The league hopes to gain more insight by surveying fans in different markets to determine whether they would go to games played in winter months, especially in those markets most impacted by the weather.
While ticket sales would likely be impacted, there are also other logistical issues to consider, including the impact on training environments. Teams in colder climates might be forced to train inside on turf, for example.
“Any consideration set has a different impact across all our clubs, and so that becomes part of the balance,” Rodriguez said. “The greatest strength of our single-entity system is our ability to work as partners off the field, and our ability to evaluate our business — our business being commercial, sporting and brand — and that has proven to be a great aid in this process, because there has been an amazing spirit of collaboration, not just internally among all departments at MLS, but among all our clubs.”
There are other hurdles to figure out, as well. The Leagues Cup is currently played for one month in the middle of the summer, interrupting the regular season. MLS is weighing different formats and timing for the Leagues Cup that would fit into this new calendar, including potentially playing the tournament in January and February with teams in pods in warmer-weather locales like California, Texas and Florida.
The league would also have to determine how the U.S. Open Cup and Canadian Championship fits into the new calendar, though MLS pulled back its participation in the Open Cup this season.
These issues could end up holding up the calendar switch. The league previously held discussions on a potential change in competition format in 2013 and 2014, but opted not to make a change. With the World Cup around the corner, however, discussions about the calendar now feel like they have real momentum — though Rodriguez cautioned it was simply too soon to know.
“We are at a different point in our evolution as a league,” Rodriguez said. “With the World Cup, we have more eyes on us than ever before. And so it has been really rewarding that no one has been territorial, and everyone has been thoughtful and collaborative. I think there’s a recognition that this is the right time to be doing this level of analysis.”
(Top photo: Aaron Doster / USA TODAY Sports)
