MLS has enacted its "far, far, far" futuristic vision
What a "competition calendar change" says about where MLS sees value, and who might bridle at the implications
In mid-December 2021, the same week that saw New York City FC win its first MLS Cup, ESPN asked Don Garber if the league was any closer to “flipping its schedule,” as we’ve all come to frame it. It was one of two structural changes that seemed too drastic for MLS to adopt, along with promotion/relegation.
“We continue to have to manage the largest geographic region for any league in the world, and the most weather changes and time changes of any league in the world,” Garber said. “As such, the likelihood of us playing in a dramatically different calendar is far, far, far in the future and we would only do it if we saw the value for our fans and for our competition. Today, we don’t see that value.”
At the time, MLS (like the rest of the world) was reacclimatizing to the new normal as society loosened its COVID-19 restrictions and got back to work. Four years isn’t exactly “far, far, far in the future1,” but one can forgive Garber for assuming it wouldn’t happen anytime soon.
Austin FC was the plucky newcomer, MLS’s 27th active franchise. San Diego had not yet been awarded an expansion slot. MLS was just ten months removed from Ron Burkle bringing the league’s plans for a Sacramento branch to a dramatic halt.
Games were broadcast across a gaggle of local and national partners. MLS affiliate teams still played in the USL. Lionel Messi had only recently left Barcelona for Paris. Inter Miami was hamstrung by sanctions after illegally rostering Blaise Matuidi. Wilfried Nancy wrapped up his first year as CF Montréal head coach. Cavan Sullivan had just turned 12. Atlanta United was still good at soccer.
With how continuously (and gradually) MLS adapts, sometimes it’s useful to create these snapshots of any given stage of its evolution. It’s a very different state of play in 2025. The Apple broadcast deal sped up some evolutionary processes; the schedule change arguably provides the most radical tweak yet.
Best I can tell, reaction has largely congregated into two camps, polarizing the discourse like most things do nowadays.
The support is most fervently voiced by the league, its players, and especially its sporting executives. It isn’t a coincidence that the first two “strategic benefits”2 on the league’s announcement double-down on the potential impact for MLS’s role in the global transfer market.
Teams should be better able to sign their preferred targets by operating on the same timeline as their competitive rivals. That would lead to fewer Plan B and Plan C targets providing middling returns on TAM or DP deals. Fewer players should be denied transfers abroad because it would hurt their MLS team’s playoff push. Those are January problems now, and teams will have another preseason to adjust to any departures.
If the experts are right, this should swiftly help MLS’s standard of play. How dramatic those evolutions will be depends, as always, on the financial ambition of its owners. Their willingness to spend on transfers post-lockdown compared to less stable rival circuits has helped MLS make significant strides up the global hierarchy this decade. Time will tell whether they’ll play along with the latest call to invest even further.
The quality of play should also improve simply by having fewer games in the summer, although it isn’t a talking point that the league uses often. MLS currently trots its players out in “cooling break” conditions far more often than may be advisable.
Few players will miss those midsummer soirees in Texas. One would think fans may feel similarly. And yet, those who the league serves to entertain are left with wildly polarizing reactions to the change.
It’s easy to see why fans are debating whether, to revisit Garber’s 2021 line, this change adds “value” for their support of one team or the league at large.
MLS has been playing chicken with its diehard fans for a few years now as it broadens its relevance. Prices for tickets and jerseys rise each year. The beloved in-house ExtraTime podcast was shockingly discontinued despite spending over a decade as the definitive midweek MLS show of any medium.
Supporting an MLS team now has a uniform “terms of service” to accept: either go to a game, sign up for MLS Season Pass, or rediscover humanity’s oral tradition and settle for summaries — and the league is leaning away from that third avenue by using generative AI to write some of its match recaps.
A few months after Messi signed with Miami, friend and former colleague John Muller spoke with deputy commissioner Gary Stevenson about the growth potential of MLS on the aging Argentine’s back.3 To Stevenson, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that there were countless potential fans just waiting to be activated.
“Our goal by 2026 is to double our fanbase. If we double our fanbase, you can imagine what that means,” Stevenson said. “And once we double our fanbase in 2026, then we double it and we double it again. It’s like compounding interest.”
“You can imagine what that means” doesn’t give any tangible benchmarks for measuring the impact of such potential growth. Nonetheless, I haven’t seen MLS claim a doubling of its fanbase since this quote first ran in October 2023. 2026 is 47 days away.
The story of Messi’s first contract has been one of anticipation, of potential seemingly left untapped. Recent hints at MLS’s viewership on Apple’s platform have ranged from “completely vague” to “missing crucial details.” It might not be compounding as projected, but the line is seemingly going up.
Progress hasn’t stopped the partners from regularly making adjustments. MLS made two other announcements that were quickly dwarfed by the schedule news: that Stevenson — the creator of the former Pac-12 Networks whose chief task was maximizing the league’s broadcast revenue — will retire4 in 2026, and that MLS games will no longer be compartmentalized in Season Pass and instead be included for all Apple TV+ subscribers. A third came Friday afternoon: the deal with Apple will now conclude after the 2028-29 season, the second year under the new format.
Since 2023, a host of efforts have gone into getting as many eyes on MLS+Apple broadcasts as possible. There have been sign-up promotions including T-Mobile Tuesdays, midseason discounts and Messi’s apparent acts of benevolence.
That has taken some emphasis away from the in-person experience. Obviously, not a single MLS team has doubled the capacity of its stadium to meet Stevenson’s stated aspirations. I haven’t heard of dedicated fan zones for those without tickets to mill about and find matchday camaraderie beyond the stadium walls.5 Teams that used to tout season-ticket waiting lists with thousands of members regularly struggle to sell out their games.
Fans aren’t clutching at pearls about how the change will impact them. For some, the summer games were the easiest to work into their schedule. Many (especially those with children) will have to weigh whether they can justify the outlay once MLS’s schedule runs parallel to the school year.
That could be music to the ears of the rest of the American soccer landscape. Rather than competing with MLS for attention during summer vacation, the NWSL, USL and amateur leagues can be the option for soccer fans wanting to catch a game in June or July.
It also gives MLS teams an opportunity to forge community during its new offseason. MLS teams could wisely direct their supporters to nearby clubs to grow a broader local following around the sport. It’s a symbiotic relationship that is seldom forged these days since every league prefers a Saturday fixture. I’ll be fascinated to see how each league reacts to this change.
No doubt, broadcast viewership is where Stevenson and MLS see its “doubling” potential. Even if MLS failed to set a new total attendance record in a non-lockdown season for the first time since 2013, a viewer tallies the same whether they’re in Saint Paul or São Paulo.
That doesn’t mean these two experiences are completely separate from one another. And that’s where the potential risks become unavoidable.
If the standard of play is the meat and potatoes of a league’s worth, then the in-stadium atmosphere is the secret sauce. You need the sauce to stand out, and this has long been a strength of MLS. It’s why some prefer more vibrant soccer cultures around Europe, South America, Africa, Asia and North America to the comparatively dull Premier League. The tifos, the chants, the constant murmuring soundscape turn good play into a sensory spectacle.
And, yes, shifting away from the summer will harm the fan experience for many.6 What’s good for the players isn’t always good for the fans; sitting in seats as winter slowly turns to spring is less enjoyable than running in identical conditions. Some disagree: to quote my buddy Mark, “I’d rather be cold at a soccer game than sweaty7.”
It’s a really complicated moment for fans who stood by the league through all of its growing pains. My friend and former FiftyFive.One Podcast co-host Wes Burdine wrestled with what’s become “the league’s endless pursuit of money.” In truth, that sea change was inevitable as the sports-investor class fixed its gaze on American soccer. What motivates this group and its decisions has also changed life across the NWSL, the USL, and the non-professional ranks.
These aren’t “just” soccer team owners in title. They’re owners of international businesses, of sprawling corporations. They’re retired CEOs of healthcare groups and some of the world’s most established brands. In a couple cases, like New York City and San Diego, they’ve allowed foreign investors to pad the coffers of a local operator.
They will ask how this scales and how to keep the lines going up, confident that the 20,000 regulars who attend their games won’t budge. Their investment provided the needed stability to more bravely chart a course forward. It has cost the league its former image of grassroots authenticity that hooked a legion of diehards during rockier eras of its operation, especially from its launch until the expansion boom’s formal kickoff in 2015.
What’s best for the business isn’t always best for the most loyal customers. High-end pro sports has been a business masquerading as community pillars for decades, adopting best practices in the image of Jerry Jones, George Steinbrenner, and Malcolm Glazer. The theory goes that, if a fan really loves the sport, they’ll put up with a lot of minor pain points to keep following it.
Once Messi arrived, MLS made it clear it aimed to find its biggest audience possible. To them, switching schedules to follow what esteemed rival leagues do eliminates one of its defining quirks and makes it more closely resemble “proper” soccer. They’re betting that the knock-on benefits along those lines will make up for any negative tradeoffs.
If the change worsens the atmosphere at games, MLS won’t panic. There are many empty seats in Italian and French stadiums, after all, and we still esteem Serie A and Ligue 1 above MLS. But those MLS diehards have fostered some of the most vibrant gameday atmospheres of any league; some may be left to question whether a reformatted schedule fits into their lifestyle. There have never been more alternatives for one to spend their time and money.
MLS is betting that it’s much further along as a soccer league than even four years ago, when Garber stressed that “the likelihood of us playing in a dramatically different calendar is far, far, far in the future.” At the time, Garber and the owners he represents didn’t “see the value.”
Revenue is what matters in the C-suite. But if the stadium atmospheres suffer for following the scheduling cadence of the sport’s top nations, then MLS risks being just another soccer league to the average viewer… which could result in a worse viewing product, in turn.
It’s an operational risk that MLS has seldom before been willing to make. Ultimately, the market — of local fans and subscribers around the world alike — will determine its effectiveness.
Although it certainly feels like it in some contexts…
A non-scale way to measure MLS’s evolution over the past decade is its departure from the “voice-heavy” tone of the early 2010s internet to now incorporating corporate speak terms like “strategic benefits” and “fan activations” with regularity.
I’d imagine, given the subject’s boardroom background, that the real question was “how does this scale?”
Well, kind of. In his SBJ interview, Stevenson stressed that he’s “retiring from MLS” but not ready for the shuffleboard circuit. I guess we’ll know what version of “retirement” he’s headed towards whenever his next venture is sorted. Semantics!
The lack of these opportunities continues to baffle me. Could be an inflatable screen on a stadium exterior lawn, an accessible park, a partnering business or two. Having these in every market would help alleviate some of the “bar watch party” pains created by moving nearly all match broadcasts onto a streamer.
Bet you didn’t think this Minnesotan writer would wait this long to raise The Winter Concerns!
Same, albeit with one infamous exception.
While I was sad to see you leave The Athletic given how your writing is what brought me there in the first place, you're back to writing with a joy those corporate confines constrained.
Well written as always
Now MLS players can attend family/friends weddings in early summer without having to get sent off the previous match.