Major League Soccer
It’s Time for MLS to Realign it’s Conferences
Two conferences are a broken system. Let’s look at some better solutions for MLS for 2025 and beyond via realignment.
We’ve landed at an empty spot on the Major League Soccer (MLS) calendar. While there is no doubt dedicated Chief Soccer Officers, Sporting Directors and others plugging away building their rosters, this tends to be a quiet time when it comes to MLS news. Players are on holiday and even the most dedicated front office staff likely get a few days off.
Couple that with last week’s release of the Major League Soccer schedule and it’s the perfect time to think broadly about MLS. A problem the league has had as it continues to expand is how unbalanced the schedule is. With the addition of the 30th team, San Diego FC, ahead of the league’s 30th season, won’t make that any better.
There is simply no way to play each opponent home and away when there are 29 other teams. No matter how much you love soccer, a 56-game season would be insane. Not to mention the issues with player safety. The solution in the past has been conferences. For 2025, the league is set for two 15-team conferences. Teams then play their conference schedule with home and away fixtures against every other team (28 games) and then fill in the final six games with seemingly random teams from the opposite conference.
It’s a bit of a failure though. We’ll use Sporting Kansas City as an example. As a part of their 2025 schedule, they are playing Charlotte FC for the first time, despite them joining the league in 2022. Inter Miami were an expansion team in 2020, and they didn’t face Sporting KC until the 2023 season (and now they can’t seem to avoid one another).
It would be a lot better if teams could face each other every year and have a consistent format to know when you’ll face a team home and away. The NFL, the league the rest of the American sports leagues would love to be, have a consistent formula.
The solution is smaller conferences or even smaller divisions. None of them are perfect, but it’s easily argued the current system isn’t great. There is an artificial line in the “middle” of the country. Sporting KC are a great example as they were in the Eastern Conference before having to slide West. Nashville SC pinged back and forth in their first few seasons over the last few years.
While no solution is perfect, there are some that are far worse than others. Let’s work through the worst ones before landing on what I believe is the best. You can thank me later Don Garber.
Bad Solution 1: Three Conferences
With two current conferences, going to three seems like a logical solution. MLS actually had a Central division when there were 12 teams was back in 2000, so it’s not unprecedented. Currently, there are 30 teams, that divides equally by 10. It seems to make sense. Where is gets troublesome, and this is a theme, is in how you divide the teams up.
No matter how I drew the lines, the geography doesn’t work that well. My “best” solution had Minnesota United oddly out West, but as the only central time team getting moved. It felt wrong to move real rivals in SKC/St. Louis, any of the Texas teams or a team even further East. Not to mention the issues where there are too many teams in the East forcing someone like Atlanta United to the Central.
A bad attempt at three conferences.
Another area where it doesn’t work very well is in the schedule. Assuming you play all your conference opponents home and away, that’s 18 conference games. But then you’d want to play the other 20 teams in the league and suddenly you are at 38 games. Far too many.
Bad Solution 2: Six Divisions
Perhaps conferences are too broad. Maybe divisions would be a good solution. You could keep it semi-balanced between two conferences with six, five-team divisions and three divisions per conference. But the groups just don’t divide up well. Minnesota kept getting sacrificed to the West with all the California teams. I liked how the poorly named “East 1” (below) panned out, but then it left the two Eastern Canadian teams with southern teams. Not to mention the Florida and Texas teams together, which geographically isn’t that far off, but it still felt wrong.
Six divisions don’t work either.
The math on the games is a bit better. Home and away against each team in the division gives you eight games, plus the other 25 games could be alternating between home and away from season to season. That leaves one “spare” game that could be against a rival that’s out of your division or can be filled with basically anything.
Best Solution: Forget the Conferences
As I juggled this equation in my head, I had an epiphany. Why do there have to be conferences? Why not an uneven number of divisions? It trips up the playoffs, but I’ve always hated that the playoffs would allow in a bad team from one conference when the other conference had teams higher in the table.
Instead of seeding it East versus West, simply seed the best teams across the entirety of the league. It still won’t be perfect because you could have a bad division or two, but MLS could do what the NFL won’t and make a division champion go on the road if their record is inferior. Then if MLS still want 18 teams with play-in games, they can do that. Just seed it one to 18 by record, ignoring geography.
Don’t mind the division names, they are simply place holders.
The alignment still isn’t perfect, but it makes a lot more sense regionally. The biggest stretch is the three Texas teams being paired with the three Pacific Northwest teams. While geographically, it’s less logical, they are all Western Conference teams who already play each other home and away. The other thing I didn’t love was separating D.C. United from the rest of the “East,” as they have rivals in that group. This is honestly the greatest flaw of this format.
Update 12/29/2024: The D.C. United thing bothered me so much (and was a consistent point in online discourse) that I decided to swap them and CF Montreal. Their rivalry with Toronto FC isn’t nearly as important as D.C.’s with RBNY, Philly and others. This is a better compromise.
There is so much to like with five divisions. That central division brings together the trio of Sporting KC, St. Louis City and the Chicago Fire. The Ohio teams have no real attachment to KC or STL, but on the map they are relatively close and as rivals they should stay together. And it doesn’t put Minnesota in some weird grouping.
The Atlantic group is fun too, keeping Atlanta with the Florida teams that it has started to build rivalries with, while also keeping Charlotte and Nashville in that group.
Overall, it’s not perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than what we have now. Plus, the math on the games is perfect. Each team plays home and away against the five other teams in their division (10 games) plus the remaining 24 teams in the league for a perfect 34 game schedule.
Every team plays every team, every year.
Major League Soccer can feel free to adopt this format for 2026 and I’ll only require a nominal payment.
What do you think? Do you like the format? Do you think some teams should be moved around? Perhaps a different format entirely? Let us know in the comments.
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Only disagreement here is that the Prem plays 38 games so I think that the first idea really isn’t all too far of a stretch.
That’s fair, but I still don’t like the geographical alliance of those conferences.
Plus, I’d imagine some sort of CBA negotiations may need to happen to add more games. But maybe not based on Leagues Cup games being invented a few years ago.
The problem isn’t 38 games per se, it’s expanding the MLS regular season along with all the other games being forced on players (expanded Club World Cup, Leagues Cup, etc.). And the ongoing restrictions to MLS roster rules that make it hard to carry the deeper rosters that help Euro teams manage schedule congestion (and even there players are pushing back).
I’d be fine with 38 if we dropped Leagues Cup and CWC went back to a four-team mini-tournament.
It’s time for a premiership like in the UK. Franchise sports blow, and don’t provide value for the ticket price. If teams actually had to win to be able to play top flight football then the play in the MLS would get a lot better. We have enough teams for a Premier league and two sub leagues. This is the real way to do it
There is just no way MLS owners will give up what they have. I’m not saying you are wrong, I’m just saying it won’t happen.
Look at the most valuable soccer/football teams in the country and how many MLS teams are in the Top 50 despite massively lower salary expenditures.
The biggest argument against pro/rel in MLS is geography. It works in compact countries like in Europe, but it blows schedules and reasonable travel to pieces in a continental-scale league like MLS. As soon as Vancouver gets relegated and replaced by Charleston, in whatever division/conference alignment, you have a real problem. Whereas all of Germany is the size of Missouri and Arkansas put together, Berlin and Frankfurt are the same distance as St Louis and Chicago, so it just doesn’t matter where teams are. Here, it does. And the scale of North American sports pretty much requires some form of divisions/conferences, which again means you get badly misaligned pretty quickly. And even if you somehow adapt it so that there’s separate regional pro/rel within, say, West, Central, and Eastern Conferences, you’re still talking far more travel uncertainty than in most of the soccer world.
There should be relegation within the existing MLS. MLS1 and MLS2. Top 15 teams get more revenue from Apple and other deals etc It horrible to watch clubs that don’t invest play against teams that want to win. What a waste.
Well done. I’ve always hated MLS having an unbalanced schedule, particularly as teams and pundits argue how valuable or invaluable winning the supporters shield is.
I say MLS can adopt a “fake” pro/rel, thanks to their Appletv deal. We know owners won’t want to jeopardize their investment with legitimate pro/rel. Divide the league to two, single table, divisions, have pro/rel between them. All games are still shown on Appletv and thus all teams still participate in the revenue sharing. Only top division teams would be eligible for MLS Cup, Champions Cup, Leagues Cup, etc. This provides incentive for teams to be in the top division. All salary options and roster rules can remain identical for teams in either division so every team can fairly continue to attract high caliber players. When games are played, change up the stadium signage and tv graphics to distinguish divisions, probably use a different ball as well, and there you go… “fake” pro/rel.
I’ve played with this, too, and came to the same conclusion regarding the three conferences. It’s honestly the best solution, EXCEPT for the massive problem of how to divide up Central teams.
By the way, I’m guessing you don’t follow hockey, but the NHL has a similar problem out east with there being too many northeastern teams to balance out others, and it awkwardly lumps in the two Florida teams with the likes of Montreal, Toronto, Buffalo, and Detroit, because otherwise you have to split up the big clot of tightly rivaled Northeast Corridor teams (the DC-NYC axis) and no one wants that.
I’ve proposed the three-conference solution before, and another objection is that the three-part math doesn’t work because you can’t just match up the top seeds and so on. My response is that it works just fine within MLB and NFL; we manage to get pennant winners and AFC/NFC winners into the championship series/games without any fuss, so MLS could handle it too. Essentially just treat MLS Cup as if it’s the AFC/NFC championship game. Who care’s that there’s not another one-off game after that? Or if you want to be literal about it, both MLB and NFL were historical two separate leagues anyway, meeting in the World Series, so you can consider the Campeones Cup as the “Super Bowl” of North American soccer, in which case the three-conference system functions exactly the same as the three-division system in the NFL.
All of which is a long-winded way to say that while I’ve obviously given this way too much thought, and have defended the three-conference/division system as a functional option, I’d never considered the five-way system and really like it. It functionally works the same as the three-way once you abandon the idea that everything has to be base-two, and it makes the geography a lot more sensible.
My first reaction was why not 3 and 5 is weird, but like you, it is growing on me. It actually improves the validity of the Supporters Shield because at least everyone plays everyone else at least once. There are too many teams in the playoffs, but that’s another topic. You could go top three in each division to give you 15 and give the Shield winner a bye, or you give a 16th spot to a lucky 4th place team.
And please, please do away with the 3 game series…oh, that’s another topic too.
I to would love to see a bit of pro-rel, but don’t see it happening. Unless USL followers through with it and is successful with to force a change. I feel like there could be a reasonable way to bring some of the pro-rel excitement without leaving clubs on the gutter.
For instance, have a tournament of the teams that don’t make the playoffs that would award draft picks and GAM/TAM. This would create excitement for the fan base at the end of garage seasons, discourage tanking, and promote quick rebuilds.
On the other side, the US geography does make any sort of league changes tough. Therefore (with the current pool of teams) I like the 6 division idea, (but would set it up like below, where all but 2 or 3 teams would be in their same time zone).
Division winner and the 10 teams with the best records makes the playoffs. Teams are then seeded 1-16 ignoring geographical location or division standing. (Reward division winner with GAM/TAM) The other 14 teams are seeded and go in to the tournament for losers. To make it super awesome MLS makes a spectacle out of it, like the current Next Pro system, where the top seeds choose who they want to play.
This would give incentive to guarantee your spot by winning a division, force you to keep winning for you playoff seeding, make the playoffs.
If a team happens to get hosed by a bad division winner and misses the playoffs, had untimely injuries, or are terrible for a stretch they still get the benefit of keeping or getting it together to be playing their best soccer come playoff time.
Here would be my divisions. Still a few drawbacks but it keeps nearly all major rivals in the same division and it feels right.
Wild Fire & Pricy Properties
San Diego
Galaxy
LAFC
San Jose
Salt Lake City
The Northern Territories
Portland
Seattle
Vancouver
Colorado
Minnesota
Muggy Summer
Houston
Austin
Dallas
KC
STL
Hillbillies & Florida Man
Miami
Orlando
Atlanta
Charlotte
DC
Midwest
Chicago
Nashville
Cincinnati
Columbus
Philadelphia
The Red Coats
NYFC
Red Bull
New England
Toronto
Montreal
Once again you’re screwing Minnesota by putting them in a division without a single team in their time zone, and three teams two hours west.
And Philadelphia won’t go for being divorced from ALL their local rivals and stuck in a trans-Appalachian division. Same for DC.
I don’t know about these divisions, but a tourney of losers (it needs a better name) would be nice.
I’ve long wanted the NFL to do a tournament for non-playoff teams for draft position (particularly as a fan of a mediocre NFL team that never does bad enough to pick high but also doesn’t make the playoffs most of the time). Obviously, the draft means less in MLS, so GAM and prize money for the players seems like a potential reward.
I know, let’s call the tourney of losers “Game of Spoons”
5 divisions of 6 is the best way to split the league up because we would play everyone at least once and still keep 34 games. Playoffs can be seeded exactly like CONCACAF Champions Cup; seed the 5 division winners like they seed Leagues Cup winner, Central American Cup winner, Caribbean Cup winner, MLS Cup winner and highest-points Liga MX winner.
As for the divisions, move the 3 PNW teams to Pacific division with San Jose, Colorado, and RSL. Leaving the two LA teams and San Diego with all the Texas teams. This is a better line up and keeps travel pretty decent.
I just didn’t want to kill the Cali Classico with the LA Galaxy by moving San Jose.
And the more I look at my divisions, DC being away from their rivals doesn’t work. It feels more likely that the league screws Montreal and moves them away from Toronto with teams that are at least in their time zone, but to whom they have no rivalry games. Montreal has zero DPs, it seems they don’t care anyways.
MLS needs a tiered competition program that mirrors other leagues around the world. “Tiered” implies a 1st Division, 2nd Division..etc with relegation/ promotion incentives. I think this is the single most limiting factor to MLS’ current ranking among other leagues. While there are baseline requirements (i.e. Stadium size, salary level), those who meet these requirements must still compete nationally to attain and retain 1st Division status. This is a clear departure from other U.S. professional leagues such as NFL or NBA, but is a proven system for many leagues around the world.
That would be great. It’s just not going to happen.
The success of sports leagues around the world WITHOUT pro/rel also shows that it’s NOT a requirement for viability or respect, contrary to the claims so many pro/rel truthers.
Best solution is MLS premier with 15 teams and MLS Championship with 15 teams. Play whatever amount of games they want then have a Premier play off top 4 or 6 teams. Then 2 bottom teams in premier play a tournament with top 4 for Championship and then top 2 teams in that playoff move up or stay in premier.
Interesting read. The entire Premier League is in a country the size of Missouri. Travel is easy.
I think the largest problem is the Apple tv contract though. I’d like to go sit in my local sports bar or pub and watch the games. I’d also like to watch the games on basic cable at home. For free. Good example is the local NHL team. The Seattle Kraken. All their games air on basic free cable. Every game new people watch and become fans. They grow the fan base. The Apple contract is turning fans away. Really sad to see.
Counter-anecdote: I’m among the ever-growing number of households without cable. Putting games on cable is a far bigger paywall for people like me than Apple. I’d much rather pay $100/yr for exactly what I want, than $35-$100/mo for hundreds of channels I don’t want.
Fans in literally every other North American sport are clamoring for a universal package exactly like what MLS did. To watch the Royals or Blues on the cheapest option (Bally app) costs $20/mo, more than twice Season Pass, and that doesn’t include playoffs OR the various games dumped back onto cable (e.g. TNT for hockey). I used to have to spend nearly the entire cost of Season Pass just to get a 1-2 months of cable equivalent to watch MLS playoffs alone, even if SKC bowed out quickly.
MLS tried being on cable for decades. It didn’t work; they were always the neglected partner of any network they tried to dance with. It continues to boggle my mind that so many soccer fans are oblivious to this reality.
It’s fair to say that Apple needs to improve access in bars. But that’s a different problem than the basic setup of the deal.
I’m generally with KCOutsider on this but I do see it as an issue you aren’t pulling in new people as well. NWSL is doing well at this part, but watching NWSL is a hassle if you are already a converted fan. Different platforms and channels each week.
MLS seemed to acknowledge this and say they need to do a better job of pointing out when games are free on Apple TV (40% of them are).
NWSL probably needs to ride the popularity wave and throw some games of the week type set up on something easily accessible, but I’d love it if they were back on Paramount 100%. The “big” games could be on CBS – or both. And the ones that were on NWSL + had sketchy feeds all year.
Yes, I think Apple/MLS need to do a much better job of outreach. For example, it staggers me how many people still think you need an AppleTV subscription to watch, not just the standalone Season Pass. Or how many people still don’t realize how many games ARE in front of the paywall (though the fact that 40% are on the likes of FS1 and people still seem oblivious also debunks the myth that putting games on cable will magically reach a giant audience just waiting to fall in love with MLS).
And you almost never see MLS advertisements the way you do Apple product ads. They should be spending some of those Messibucks flooding the regular airwaves with slick Apple commercials for MLS.
There are lots of ways for Apple/MLS to improve how they present this deal. But the basic structure remains whatever everyone else wants for every other sport. And ironically, it’s what Eurosnobs already have for the big leagues: a streaming package that lets them access all games.