It’s Time for MLS to Realign it’s Conferences

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.