MLS 2026 (M)

The United States won the right to host the 1994 World Cup on one condition: create a genuine professional league. MLS was founded in 1993 to keep that promise and did not kick off until 1996, with ten teams.

It nearly died trying. The early years brought losses in the millions, half-empty American football stadiums and an audience that would not quite show up; in 2002 the league shut down two franchises to survive. What changed it was an accounting rule: in 2007 the Designated Player was introduced, letting each club sign up to three footballers outside the salary cap. The first was David Beckham, at LA Galaxy on a guaranteed $6.5 million a year, and the rule has been known ever since as the Beckham Rule.

That mechanism is what, thirty years later, brought Lionel Messi to Miami, and what explains how a league with a salary cap can hold modest squads and front-page names at the same time. From the ten clubs of 1996 it has grown to thirty.

Philadelphia Union had the best regular season of 2025: 66 points, the second Supporters' Shield in their history and the league's meanest defence with 35 conceded. They won nothing else.

The trophy went to Inter Miami, who beat Vancouver Whitecaps 3-1 at Chase Stadium in Fort Lauderdale and lifted the first MLS Cup of their short history. They were also the year's highest-scoring side with 81 goals, and their man won everything on his own account: Lionel Messi finished as top scorer with 29 and the league's best player.

The rest of the season left two numbers that explain why this league keeps growing. San Diego FC came in as the thirtieth franchise — the last expansion before the announced pause — and the stadiums drew 11,094,594 spectators over the year, an average of 21,754 a match. Very few leagues in the world move that.

The 2026 calendar has a six-week hole in the middle: from 25 May to 16 July nothing is played, because the World Cup is at home, shared between the United States, Canada and Mexico. The regular season runs from 21 February to 7 November and the play-offs begin on the 18th of that month.

There are no new teams. Commissioner Don Garber has frozen expansion until after the World Cup, so the league stays at thirty clubs, fifteen per conference, for the first time in years without a newcomer.

And it is the last time it will be played this way. MLS has decided to abandon the spring-to-autumn calendar — the one it has used since 1996 and which sets it apart from the rest of the world — and move to summer-to-spring from 2027-28, like Europe. In between there will be a bridging campaign: a short season of only fourteen matches in early 2027. Which means this is the last full season of the format the league was born with, and the last champion crowned in December before everything shifts.

Each team plays 34 regular-season matches, nearly all of them against opponents from its own conference. When that ends, nine of the fifteen on each side qualify, and another competition starts.

The top seven go straight into Round One. Eighth and ninth play for the last place in a single-elimination Wild Card: lose and the year is over. Round One is the strangest thing this format has for a European eye, because it is not a two-legged tie but a best-of-three series, with the higher seed hosting the first game and, if needed, the third. Every game in that series has a winner: draws do not count.

From there it simplifies: conference semi-final, conference final and MLS Cup, all single matches at the higher seed's ground. That is the difference from Europe that is hardest to absorb when predicting: being the best for eight months here earns you the Supporters' Shield and home advantage, but the champion can be a ninth seed who won five games in a row in November.