A friend of mine has been a season-ticket holder for Minnesota United pretty much from the moment the team bought its first soccer ball. The move to the lovely Allianz Field in St. Paul has provided a terrific home atmosphere for the Loons, and capacity crowds of more than 19,000 are the norm. They don’t have a Lionel Messi, not even a goal scorer among the league’s top 20, but are enjoying a splendid season and stand third in Major League Soccer’s Western Conference.
They will play their final home game this season Oct. 4 against Sporting Kansas City.
Should be a lovely night. October is a beautiful month in the Twin Cities.
February is not.
Which is why my buddy promises to be a season-ticket holder no longer if MLS adopts a proposal to switch its season to the European standard fall-to-spring schedule. He simply doesn’t want to expose himself to a winter filled with crummy-weather games. And it’s doubtful he’ll be the only one.
The Athletic’s Paul Tenorio reported last week the league and its players association “could soon be engaged in CBA talks”, and that one possible item could be completely changing the league calendar, which would require player approval, as part of an effort to capitalize on the FIFA 2026 World Cup coming to North America.
With the 2025 MLS All-Star Game arriving Wednesday between the best of the league and the best of Mexico’s LigaMX, it seems a good time to remind everyone why this would be such a horrendous direction for the Division I league in America (and Canada) to pursue.
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Those who follow American soccer surely remember the occasion of Feb. 2, 2022, when the United States men’s national team was attempting to qualify for the FIFA World Cup in Qatar. U.S. Soccer chose to place their scheduled game against Honduras at Allianz. The temperature at gametime was measured at 3 degrees, with a -14 wind chill.
It was an enormous game for the USMNT, which was battling through a contracted qualifying process to assure it would not miss the World Cup for a second consecutive cycle. So the game drew a capacity crowd.
Does anyone seriously expect that would happen if Austin FC visited Minnesota United for a February regular season game?
A 2022 qualifier in Columbus prior to the game in Minneapolis also was in sub-freezing temperatures, and the 2013 “Snow Clasico” qualifier against Costa Rica in the Denver suburbs was played in late March.
On a fall-to-spring calendar, there’s no way to avoid freezing hundreds of thousands of fans, because half of the league’s 30 teams are in serious cold-weather cities, from Salt Lake City to Cincinnati to Chicago to New York.
The league would be asking them to trade their pleasant spring and summer nights watching soccer to bundling in winter coats and under blankets. And for no apparent reward.
Could the league take a winter break? Sure. But not much of one. In Germany’s Bundesliga, the schedule demands an intermission lasting only three weeks, from Dec. 20 to Jan. 10. Borussia Dortmund will play nine league games in January and February combined. It’ll be the same number for Liverpool FC in England’s Premier League. The MLS regular season contains fewer games than either, but neither league conducts a postseason playoff tournament to decide its champion.
MLS now has 19 teams rated among the 60 most valuable in world soccer, according to Sportico. Five of those teams are valued at more than $1 billion. This seems a lot to gamble on a change that presents massive potential disadvantages and no signficant upside.
One element of the phenomenal growth in MLS — from 10 teams in 2004 to Chivas paying $7.5 million for an expansion franchise a year later to reaching 30 teams in 2025 with San Diego paying $500 million to enter — has been the league’s place on the American sporting calendar.
Using the Columbus Crew 2025 schedule as an example, an MLS team can expect to play 67 percent of its regular-season schedule from April to August, when the regular seasons of three of the other four men’s major league sports are dormant: no NBA, no NHL, no NFL.
The start of the schedule includes only six games at the fringe of winter (one February, five March) and the end brings five more in the fall (three September, two October) after the NFL and college football begin.
The elite soccer leagues in Europe do not contend with any of this competition for attention. There is one major men’s sport in England, one in Spain, one in France, one in Italy, one in Germany. They could start their games on Tuesday morning at 3 a.m., and people would fill stadiums and watch whatever is available on television. It’s what they have.
There is no debating that the MLS Cup playoffs, contested from October to December, struggle for television attention against football, particularly the NCAA on soccer’s preferred Saturday game days. Some of the league’s most successful cities are overwhelmingly oriented toward college football: Columbus, Atlanta and Austin.
MLS, though, never has been able to devise for its postseason a workable format with wide appeal. Its latest iteration features best-of-3 series in the first round, and just a single game from the quarterfinals to the MLS Cup final. Addressing public discomfort with this system is a much more urgent matter than a complete upheaval of the league’s competitive structure.
Those supporting this change contend MLS would be able to engage more commonly and effectively in the international transfer market if operating on the same calendar as Europe. This is a ludicrous construct. There are two obstacles to successfully competing for transfers: money, and access to the most glamorous competitions.
Unless MLS figures out a way to enter the UEFA Champions League – which seems about as likely as me succeeding Tom Cruise as star of the “Mission: Impossible” series – the greatest players in their prime years are unlikely to embrace a move to the States. The only possible way to supersede the desire of top players to be involved in that competition is to bid over asking price, so to speak, and how many players really would be worth that? And how many would be willing? It hasn’t worked for Saudi Arabia’s pro league, as we’ve seen over the past several years.
The drive to move MLS to a fall-spring calendar feels dangerously close to the effort decades ago of the United States Football League (USFL) to move its regular season from the spring months to the autumn – which would have placed the embryonic operation directly in competition with the NFL. The USFL voted in 1984 to make the change, with a planned launch two years later.
The league never played a single season in the fall.
It’ll never be that bad for MLS if it moves forward with this terrible idea. But it will never be this good again.
