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Major League Soccer is considering overhauling its calendar, moving to a fall-spring season with summer and winter breaks, multiple sources briefed on the league’s discussions say Athletics.
MLS executives and owners have weighed 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 that the league will implement the changes as early as the summer of 2026 after exiting the World Cup.
MLS executive vice president of sports product and competition Nelson Rodriguez said Athletics it’s still “too soon” to know if MLS will create changes or what those changes might be.
“We’ve been engaged, really, since January, and it’s been very extensive and exhaustive and intentional,” Rodriguez said. “It is still very early. We are still asking questions. We are still collecting and analyzing some data. We are still formulating models. Some of those models are for the formats themselves, some of those models are how to evaluate the information we receive.”
A change would certainly affect MLS’s competitiveness on the American sports calendar. The MLS Cup play-offs, which began this week, will face MLB playoffs, college football and NFLas well as NBAcollege basketball and NHL regular seasons. Under the new calendar, the playoffs will likely be played in April and May, with most of the competition coming from the Stanley Cup playoffs and the start of the MLB season.
MLS is holding group meetings with athletic directors, business executives and owners. Rodriguez said the league also did an extensive fan poll “and we’ll be back on the field with another fan poll.” The league is also planning to have fan and player focus groups to gauge interest and listen to concerns about the changes because “it affects the entire ecosystem,” according to Rodriguez.
Why make changes?
The schedule change could have numerous benefits from a competitive standpoint, from synchronizing the league’s transfer windows with the European calendar to maximizing playoff visibility on the American sports calendar.
The vast majority of global transfer business is done in the summer window. This currently falls in the middle of the MLS season, which creates conflicts for teams hoping to buy and sell players — a problem that has become more acute as MLS teams have become more active in the international market.
Teams looking to sell players in the summer, when they are at their highest value, must weigh losing some of their best players mid-season with little time to replace them. The MLS and League Cup schedule also means the summer signings arrive with less than 10 games remaining in the regular season.
Sporting directors looking to buy players during the summer window have also complained that the US summer window closes too early to fully exploit the market. With the MLS window closing before most European windows close, teams often find that players want to wait to see all their options and this causes MLS teams to miss out on potential signings. MLS clubs essentially cannot take advantage of dominoes falling later in the transfer window.
“I wish our window was a little more friendly to us,” Charlotte FC sports director Zoran Krneta told MLSsoccer.com this summer. “I’m a big advocate for the window to be moved to, like, September 5, because not only would we have a much better chance to get really good players, but we’d also have a chance to get players that suddenly are redundant to the requirements.
“Sometimes, with those deals falling through in the last couple of days, the club says, ‘OK, what do we do now?’ It would indeed be a smart move by American clubs and Major League Soccer. The league was keen to change that this year, but they couldn’t for various other reasons, but that’s where we have 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 alleviate some of these issues.
How would the schedule change?
With the changes, the MLS season would start, like most European leagues, in early August. The first half of the schedule would run until mid-December before taking a winter break, likely around five weeks. The season will resume in early February and run through the spring, with the MLS Cup at the end of May.
A schedule change would return the MLS playoffs and MLS Cup to a less crowded part of the American sports schedule. A warm-weather MLS Cup with less competition from other sports leagues is sure to appeal to everyone.
A fall-spring calendar would also mean that MLS, like the rest of the world, would pause the season for the duration. FIFA international windows, which would be a welcome change for most teams and players.
The Columbus Crew won the 2023 MLS Cup last December. (Maddie Meyer, Getty Images)
“The playoffs are the most valuable piece of real estate in a league season, and the playoffs being 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, the conflicts in your stadium are a little less, the competition with other North American sports is different and you are more connected to at least the European pace of football. So these are factors. They also come with their own set of trade-offs.”
The league is also weighing the possibility of organizing teams into divisions instead of conferences and playing a portion of the schedule as intra-conference and intra-division play only, with playoff spots on the line. The second half of the season will then help determine the qualifiers and full season points.
The MLS Players Association will play a crucial role in those discussions, and Rodriguez said the league is working with the MLSPA to ensure it receives player feedback. The league will need players’ signatures on any schedule changes, especially because the collective bargaining agreement requires each player to be entitled to six weeks of vacation per year, with five consecutive weeks off required.
What are the drawbacks?
The league would no longer be played from June 1 to July 15 and would replace those game weeks with games from early November to mid-December. That might be welcomed by fans in cities like Dallas, Orlando, Miami, Houston and Austin, but would be difficult for markets like Toronto, Chicago, Minnesota, Salt Lake City, Montreal and New England, which see the summer months. as their own. attractive and profitable weeks of the season.
Sources involved and briefed on the discussions said there have been concerns about a possible calendar change from some MLS stakeholders who play in colder markets. The league hopes to gain more insight by surveying fans in various markets to determine whether they would go to games played in the winter months, particularly in those markets that are more affected by the weather.
While ticket sales are likely to be affected, there are other logistical issues to consider, including the impact on training facilities. Teams in colder climates may be forced to train indoors, for example.
Shifting the MLS calendar also requires consideration of colder weather and climate. (Rob Gray, USA TODAY Sports)
“Each set of considerations has a different impact on all of our clubs, and so that becomes part of the balance,” Rodriguez said. “The biggest strength of our single entity system is our ability to work as partners off the field and our ability to value our business – our business is commercial, sports and brand – and that has proven to be a huge help in this process. , because there has been an amazing spirit of cooperation, not only within all departments in MLS, but between all of our clubs.”
There are other obstacles to understanding, too. The League Cup is currently played for a month in the middle of the summer, interrupting the regular season. MLS is weighing different formats and times for the League Cup to fit into this new calendar, including the possibility of playing the tournament in January and February with teams in groups in warm-weather areas like California, Texas and Florida.
The league will also have to determine how the U.S. Open Cup and Canadian Championship fit into the new calendar, although MLS withdrew its participation in the Open Cup this season.
These problems can be solved by keeping the calendar switch moving. The league previously held discussions about a possible change to the competition format in 2013 and 2014, but decided not to make a change. However, with the World Cup around the corner, discussions around the calendar now feel like they have real momentum – although Rodriguez warned it was simply too early to tell.
“We’re 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’s been really rewarding that no one has been territorial and everyone has been thoughtful and cooperative. I think there’s a recognition that this is the right time to do this level of analysis.”
(Feature photo: Aaron Doster / USA TODAY Sports)
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