After years of conversation and deliberation, Major League Soccer and its Board of Governors voted Thursday for a landmark change to the league and its calendar to move its season to a Summer-to-Spring schedule, away from the current calendar orientation that the league has been on for the first 30 years of its existence.
The move to the Summer-Spring schedule, which would for the first time align MLS with the regular season timeline of the biggest leagues in the world, will come into effect in the Summer of 2027 season that will run into May of 2028. To set up that season, MLS will for the first time undergo a sprint season in the Spring of 2027 to set up the new calendar. The league also confirmed they would be taking a Winter Break during the new Summer-Spring calendar from Mid-December through early February, with no games played in January.
While a significant change for the league as a whole, the move signals an evolution into a larger global game that now aligns MLS with leagues like the English Premier League, the German Bundesliga and Spain’s LaLiga. No longer, for example, will International Breaks come in the middle of the MLS Cup Playoffs or the week before Decision Day. Nor will the MLS Cup Playoffs potentially come in the harshest, frigid temperatures of the calendar year. Nor will hundreds of MLS players leave their clubs in the middle of the season to compete for their national team sides like so many did for FC Cincinnati the last two years. Superstars like FC Cincinnati’s Miles Robinson won’t have to choose between representing their countries at a Copa America or Olympic Games, and their clubs in regular season or even postseason action.
There is a wild variety of positives that come with the change even if a swap from what has been so normal for so many years presents scary or foreign ideas. It is, in the long run, the best thing for a league looking to continue to grow.
It may not come as a surprise to you that I, Carter Chapley, am coming at this from a positive perspective. You are after all on FCCincinnati.com and from a club perspective this change is undeniably a positive. General Manager Chris Albright has spoken at length about the positive aspects of the flip and Head Coach Pat Noonan has echoed that sentiment when queries have come his way on the subject. But the case for the change is, to me, obvious and beneficial for both club staff, players, and its fans.
“As far as conversations at league level, I'm not going to get into that. What I will say is, and give the league credit, for Don (Garber) and Todd (Durbin) and everyone that continues to try to improve our league, is that we are trying to evolve, and we do recognize that some of the things that we've done are perhaps archaic,” Albright said a year ago at an end of season press conference in 2024. “So whether that's a look at the schedule, whether that's a look at some of our roster rules…there's conversations going on.”
From a sporting perspective the benefits of a flip are somewhat obvious. In player acquisition most business internationally is done during the Summer window when most clubs outside of MLS are in their “offseason”. When dealing on a flipped calendar, MLS clubs play at a disadvantage when searching for fair market value – both in outgoing and incoming transfers. In the summer/midseason window you are massively disincentivized from transferring out your top players as you chase trophies and success in your season. On the flip side you are also challenged in bringing in top players in the winter for the same reason; clubs on that calendar are also trying to do the same and the market economics of the transfers mean you are always needing to pay a premium to get a deal. Then, if you do bring in a player during the Summer Window, you have effectively less than 10 games to get them involved before the end of the season. So you are, at that point, hardly maximizing that asset.
On the pitch the message is clear that the ruthlessness of the American summer heat and humidity makes it a challenge for teams to play at their best for 90 minutes. The product on the field, and potentially the health of the players on it, suffers because of the brutal heat that impacts all of the clubs in MLS. A switch to having more of the season in moderate-to-cool, even chilly, temperatures is a preference there.
You may quibble with these points as they are. Unless you are a very specific subset of reader you are not a sporting director or Major League Soccer player and those concerns impact you a little less. As a fan they should matter as a club and staff like FC Cincinnati have been on the forefront of success for the last four years and their opinion on quality should hold sway. But as fans it is undeniable that experience is a key element to your patronage.
So it makes it easy to say that while the undeniable fact is that at the end of the day this change is unprecedented and upends the status quo, it is not a “radical” change by any means. It is an alteration that reorients the league, but keeps the actual footprint of when games are played remarkably similar.
Major League Soccer, as it is today, is an 11-month league. Plain and simple. Games are played from February to December and the game has a year round presence if you begin to include preseason action in January to the equation. A swap to the Summer-Spring calendar has the opportunity to not only shorten the full year in terms of months in a season, but also do so while eliminating the most challenging months of the year climate wise.
If you are nervous about FC Cincinnati or Major League Soccer competing with other sports, they already do. For the last 10 weeks FC Cincinnati and the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals have competed at the same time, with the Reds, UC Bearcats and Xavier Musketeers Athletics all crossing over there through the year. In a 11-month league, again, such as it is, there is no time where you won’t cross over with other sporting competition, so you are better suited to position yourself in the best place you can for yourself rather than try to totally avoid them. It is in the league and sports best interest to position itself in the best opportunity it can; In this case, aligning the postseason in the best opportunity it can to bring the most attention, and aligning the sport with the top-flight of international competition does that.
If you are nervous about FC Cincinnati or any of the other teams further north (or even south) playing games in cold weather, they already do. The league is already playing games at all weathers, and in the current situation the biggest games of the year are being played in the temperatures this hypothetical person is worried about.
According to initial projections done by MLS as to what the schedule could look like, 91 percent of all MLS games that would come in the new Summer-Spring calendar format would also take place in the window the league currently plays with. Meaning this change, for what it’s worth, is adjusting just 8 percent of the schedule to realign when the most important games are being played.
Yes winter weather may be a part of the game (it always was but I digress) but now instead of the most important games of the year being impacted – the stretch run of the regular season and the MLS Cup Playoffs – those games will be played in more opportune times with far more ideal conditions.
While the league has not yet formally announced the structure of the new calendar, just their intention to change, they have included a few promises of intent that may help picture what the year would look like that could dispel worries.
“Although the start and end dates of the season will change, the vast majority of MLS matches will still be played within the same general timeframe as today’s schedule. Initial projections for the 2027–28 season indicate that 91% of matches will fall within the current MLS season window,” the league said in a press release. “The 2027–28 MLS regular season will kick off in mid-to-late July 2027 and conclude with the Audi MLS Cup Playoffs and MLS Cup presented by Audi in late May 2028. Like many other major international leagues, MLS will observe a midwinter break from mid-December through early February, with no league matches scheduled in January. Before the change to the new calendar, MLS will stage a transition season from February to May 2027, featuring a 14-game regular season, playoffs, and MLS Cup. The results will determine 2027 qualification for the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, Canadian Championship, Leagues Cup, and Concacaf Champions Cup.”
CF Montréal, for example, the most northern club in MLS and unlike their longitudinal Canadian allies in the Vancouver Whitecaps do not play in a domed stadium. CF Montréal opened their 2025 season with seven consecutive road matches before returning to Stade Sapputo for a home opener in April, a brutal start to the year where they did not win a game during that gauntlet. Southerners by comparison Toronto FC didn’t play their first home game until mid-March.
Major League Soccer has, for better or for worse, always been a league keen on tweaking itself with the intention of creating the best version of itself it can in the long run. These kinds of adaptations to regional challenges are part of the DNA of the league and when nuances need to be sorted out, they will be. Just like always.
It would be wrong to say there are not massive implications, and likely unforeseen ones both positively and negatively, to this alteration even if the causes for the change are well reasoned and logical. There are also still plenty of details that need clarity, which will come in the next 18 months as MLS solidifies not only its plans for the future but any supplemental changes the league may look to make coming out of the 2026 FIFA World Cup next summer. But this announcement creates clarity for the league moving forward, and when the time comes and the change occurs, positions it to be among those on the forefront of the sport globally.
There are plenty of good reasons for Major League Soccer to make this switch (and I haven’t even dived into how this could bring new financial support to the league and its clubs through corporate partnerships and improved visibility internationally that would ultimately lead to the ability to invest more in the players on the field) but at the end of the day, for FC Cincinnati, this move allows its Sporting Staff to excel and it’s on field product to improve. It allows for the most important games to be played at a more ideal time of year, and it positions The Orange and Blue alongside more of the biggest clubs in the world all while playing in the exact same period of time…just reorienting itself a little bit.
So as the 2025 MLS calendar year winds down, we enter the 2026 season as normal. But after that, FC Cincinnati and Major League Soccer take a big step into new, a little unfamiliar, territory.
Jump on board. It’s worth it.
