Major League Soccer will explore a switch to its schedule that would align with the international soccer calendar but no potential changes to the playing calendar would happen until 2027 at the earliest, the league said in a statement on Thursday.
Coming into Thursday’s MLS Board of Governors meeting in Chicago, the league and its 30 owners discussed getting in line with the international leagues.
MLS commissioner Don Garber told The Athletic’s Paul Tenorio: “We clearly have work to do to figure out whether or not we can move over the international calendar and we’re not there yet.”
European leagues begin in August and end in May. The German Bundesliga takes a winter break. MLS used to begin its season in March but has moved to late February in recent seasons, with the regular season ending in October and the MLS Cup played in early December.
In a statement, MLS said: “Major League Soccer’s Board of Governors today authorized a second phase of exploration into a potential move to the international soccer calendar, along with a continued evaluation of the league’s regular season and playoff formats. Any potential changes would not take effect until the 2027 season at the earliest. This next phase will include additional consultation with key stakeholders and the development of a comprehensive transition plan.”
Speaking to reporters at his annual State of the League address in December, Garber indicated that the league had previously considered changing the league calendar to a fall/spring format in 2004-05 as well as in 2014-15.
The initial stages of the plan were for MLS to make the switch coming out of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. However, that would mean a lot of changes to the current landscape, as Galaxy coach Greg Vanney pointed to Thursday.
“There are massive pros and cons,” Vanney said during his media availability. “The cons to it are kind of outside of my scope. They’re a little bit more on the business side and for some markets, it will be difficult to play through a winter and then it creates some awkward scheduling. I think there are some things they really need to figure out.”
Alignment with the international soccer calendar would certainly help elevate MLS’ role in the global transfer market, which is dominated by major moves in the summer, around the midpoint of the MLS season.
“When you look at it logistically and from a pure playing standpoint, it (the move) makes a ton of sense,” Vanney said. “Our primary market should be in the summer, not our secondary market in the summer. There’s more business that happens in the summer, you can find more players who are free, more players who are available that we can bring into our league. We already have financial constraints with the budgets that we have and right now having the winter as our primary market, it’s not always easy to get players out of teams that are midseason.
“We would have to take a winter break. Could it be a month? I think it’s possible. Also, where do you position things like League Cup and Champions League (Cup), and all those things. You’re looking at a real calendar realignment in many ways. And how do each of these events or tournaments, that have become positives inside of the league, how do they fit inside of that calendar? There’s also how do you align the leagues, now that we have 30 teams, all the players and everybody’s under contract under the current system and now you’re going to shift that around with guys who have multi-year deals that are framed off of our current calendar? There’s so many factors inside of this.”
The MLS Board of Governors will meet again in July around the All-Star Game in Austin.
