Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber declared it “one of the most important decisions” in the league\\\'s over 30-year history. But the announcement in November that MLS would finally shift to a summer-to-spring calendar in 2027 to align with the larger footballing world was years in the making. Since the league was founded in 1993, there has been the lingering existential question of “what exactly is MLS?” There are tangible facts - it sits atop the American soccer pyramid, there are 30 teams - but what is its purpose within the larger soccer ecosystem outside of putting on a season within a given timeframe? For its part, the league sees itself as a 30-year startup, still moving with agility, not yet entrenched as tradition.
In startup fashion, reacting and responding to a fast-changing market, the league began to find its modern “why” in 2018 when Garber declared that MLS needs to “become more of a selling league.” The emphasis on integrating into the larger world transfer market was built on the financial survival of its clubs. The second-order implication of becoming a selling league is that teams would have to invest in academies in order to develop prospects who captured Europe’s attention.
The concept of being a “selling” league drives a perception gap between MLS and other American leagues that house the best players in the world without question. Dynasties defined dynamic eras in the NBA, MLB, and NFL. An MLS dynasty would theoretically be pulled apart by the transfer market before it ever reached its full potential.
But soccer supporters are used to those realities. There is pride in being a selling league - or rather, a league that develops the top talents in the world (and outside of the top four in Europe, every other league is technically a selling league). It also gives a clear identity to a league that attempted to define itself through distinctions like colorful uniforms or penalty shootouts in the 1990s. It was as if the league took inspiration from HBO: this wasn’t soccer, this was MLS.
With startup agility, top-down roster building mechanisms were created on the fly to attempt to increase the level of play. The Designated Player Rule, introduced in 2007, was one of MLS’ initial attempts to have a dialogue with the larger footballing world. The rule led directly to the David Beckham era of roster-building, and along with it, the jibes of being a “retirement league.”
The boardroom-to-field strategies worked in one sense, with MLS adding 17 teams since the Designated Player Rule. The pace of expansion also revealed the difference between MLS and its European counterparts - that clubs are franchises, with value maintained by the security of playing in the top division independent of yearly results. Detractors point out that the valuations come at the cost of overall competition, but the finances are staggering: the Sounders paid around $30 million to join MLS in 2007. That number rose to a $500 million fee paid by San Diego FC in 2023.
Expansion not only added to valuations, but also pushed the league forward from a roster-building perspective. It is telling that Garber’s push for MLS to be a selling league came after Atlanta United’s inaugural season in which they built around young South American players like Miguel Almiron and Josef Martinez. Atlanta’s roster-building strategy opened up another prospect pipeline: not only could clubs develop local talent, they could be a middle stop between South America and Europe. Almiron would hold the record as the most expensive MLS transfer at the time after his move to Newcastle in 2019. The current record belongs to Jhon Duran, whom Chicago Fire signed as a 19-year-old from Colombia and sold to Aston Villa two years later.
Now fully aligned with the world’s transfer markets, the newly updated MLS calendar also adds a slight wrinkle that the window will remain open later than most European leagues, giving players an option of moving to MLS instead of heading to Turkey or Greece (depth has frequently been cited as the x-factor when competing against Liga MX sides in the CONCACAF Champions Cup). Former Orlando City chief soccer officer Luiz Muzzi stated that the new calendar was more impactful than promotion and relegation, adding that he was previously unable to sell players over the summer due to the risk of bringing in a replacement heading into the playoffs.
And it’s not just MLS. U.S. soccer recently funded a study recommending that Division I college soccer programs also shift their calendars from the current fall-winter window to an August-April schedule. While the plan has a financial focus of saving on traveling expenses, elongating the schedule would allow student-athletes to emulate a similar training calendar as their European peers at a similar age.
Both Garber and FIFA president Gianni Infantino described MLS as embarking into a “new era” with the schedule shift. And it’s difficult to overestimate how significant an inflection point 2026 could be for soccer in North America, with the World Cup directly the global gaze across the region. There will be momentum across corporate and audience investment like never before. The league will do its part by pausing play for seven weeks. The inaugural season of MLS took place in 1996, but it might have taken until 2026 for the league to truly embed itself into the world conversation.
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This year’s playoffs already featured a classic match in the conference semifinals between the Vancouver Whitecaps lead by midseason signing Thomas Muller against LAFC featuring their own midseason signing in Son Heung-Min. It showcased the best of “MLS after hours” rawness: Son scored a free kick in the 95th minute to take the match into extra time before Vancouver won it in penalties in front of 53,000 home supporters. The Whitecaps will go on to face Inter Miami, led by Lionel Messi (and Luis Suarez, Jordi Alba, Sergio Busquets, and Rodrigo de Paul), in the MLS Final.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
MLS could have it both ways. Its clubs could continue to sign aging stars from Europe to capture audiences while profiting from sending young players the other way. For a league that almost folded in 2001 and has felt the anxiety of needing to justify itself both within the American and global soccer landscape, the future feels strangely stable. By fully acclimating to the football market, the next era of MLS is to grow from an agile startup to a mature, sustainable institution.