Son Heung-Min #7 of the Los Angeles Football Club reacts after scoring a goal against Real Salt Lake during the first half of their game at America First Field on September 17, 2025 in Sandy, Utah. (Photo by Chris Gardner/Getty Images)
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On Thursday, Major League Soccer club owners voted to approve a long-anticipated change to the league’s schedule that will put it more in line with the top leagues in Europe and elsewhere around the globe.
The league will launch a summer-to-spring format beginning in the late July of 2027, with the MLS Cup Playoffs and MLS Cup final contested in May of 2028. There will be a two-month break from mid-December to mid-February.
The move will bring MLS more in line with top European leagues and other global competitions, allowing for fewer conflicts with international play and better interleague player movement.
To help the transition, MLS will play a compact 14-match season in the winter and spring of 2027 before adopting a new format.
That’s what we know. There is still an awful lot we don’t know as league owners, MLS commissioner Don Garber and streaming partner Apple TV begin the work of putting the approved change into practice.
Here are three of the biggest questions:
Will Anything Fill The Winter Break?
Two months is a long break, similar to what club sides in Denmark and Russia take, and lengthier than the gap in the German Bundesliga schedule. But it might not be completely unoccupied.
In a call with journalists on Thursday, MLS executive vice president of sporting product and competition Nelson Rodriguez indicated the league would be open to bridging that gap with other non-league competitions that make sense.
That could include a Leagues Cup tournament held entirely in warmer weather American and maybe even Mexican markets, or other yet-to-be-conceived competitions. With the former idea, there’s the potential to turn the three-year-old competition into a more meaningful MLS version of Spring Training, the popular preseason baseball games in Florida and Arizona that serve as a warm late winter getaway for many fans across the country.
Will The Playoffs Be Even More Inclusive?
As badly as teams wanted to reach the postseason before, there might be even more pressure to make the playoff field as expansive as possible given the new schedule.
For northern MLS markets, May is often some of the most pleasant weather for fans attending matches in person. With the new schedule already cutting into popular dates in June and July, it’s not difficult to imagine owners demanding an expanded playoff format where most or potentially even all 30 teams technically qualify.
That could mean a system like one the New York Times reported was under consideration, one that begins with lower-seeded teams playing elimination matches first, while higher seeded teams play qualification matches to tussle for seeding and hosting advantages for later elimination games.
Another possibility is a system where teams that don’t qualify for the right to play for MLS Cup still play meaningful matches in the final month. One hypothetical example could see the top 12 teams compete for the MLS Cup, while the remaining 18 teams play some sort of qualifying matches for the U.S. Open Cup or the Leagues Cup.
Will There Be More Daytime Kickoffs?
In its press release, MLS indicated it will try to minimize the number of December and February matches scheduled in colder markets. But another measure that could help minimize the negative impacts of cold weather is playing more of those cold-market matches during the daytime hours.
Take Minnesota United, one of the league’s coldest markets. The average high temperature on Dec. 1 and March 1 is 34 degrees Fahrenheit, hardly warm but bearable by Northern winter standards. The average lows are 21 and 19 on the same days, far less comfortable for even the most bundled fan.
The league began staging more Saturday afternoon matches in 2025 after concentrating the overwhelming majority of its schedule on Saturday nights in 2023 and 2024. Flipping the schedule would suggest a willingness to stage even more daytime kickoffs in the future. But at the moment, that’s a guess rather than a certainty.