Major League Soccer revealed more details on Thursday about plans for a sprint season in the first half of 2027.
The shortened February-May season will help MLS flip its calendar after the ongoing 2026 season. Starting in July 2027, Major League Soccer will run its entire season starting in the summer and ending in late spring, in line with most of Europe’s top leagues. But in order for the calendar to flip, it would have to fill the months between this December’s MLS Cup final and the start of the format.
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Now we know a little more about what exactly the sprint season will look like. Here are three key points that stand out.
14 games to prove yourself
The biggest question that needs to be answered is how long the “sprint” season will take, and now we know there will be a total of 14 games, with all teams playing each other club in the division once. There will be no intraconference games, which could be beneficial from a travel standpoint if the schedule is a little more condensed than the typical February through May.
This is approximately 40% of a typical MLS regular season transaction volume. While the math related to conference size may have an impact, it also suggests that when the July-May format begins later in 2027, the winter break from sometime in December to sometime in February will be slightly beyond the midpoint of the 34-game schedule.
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This is also consistent with what we are seeing in the 2026 calendar, where MLS extended its summer break for the World Cup. Most teams will play 15 games before players are released to the national team, and 19 games when play resumes.
Five CONCACAF seats at stake
This isn’t necessarily a surprise, but the league has also revealed that sprint season results will count towards qualification for the 2028 CONCACAF Champions League, with five tournament spots available.
The real point here is that the calendar flip will mean that clubs that qualify for continental competition will once again face longer wait times; a team that is notified in April or May that it has qualified for CONCACAF will not compete in that area for the next nine to 10 months.
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It’s actually a bit of a throwback to a previous era. MLS teams faced a similar wait when the CONCACAF Champions League included fall group stages, which were canceled from the start of the 2018 tournament.
Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on your perspective and perhaps the circumstances of the individual club. The team may be losing momentum relative to their tournament-qualifying form. Or they could make additional moves over the next two transfer windows to strengthen and deepen the squad’s continental competition.
If the League Cup remains a summer event, the wait will be longer (we think?) for the 18 teams that qualify for the 2028 League Cup based on the 2027 sprint season.
Return to single-elimination playoffs
The most interesting news is that the 2027 MLS Cup playoffs will be a single-elimination, 16-team tournament, with the top eight teams from each division qualifying.
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We already know that MLS will likely adopt a new playoff format in 2028 for its first summer-to-spring season. But it could tell us something about the direction the league might go in this format.
First, amid criticism that the current playoff structure has become too permissive, 16 teams is actually slightly fewer than the 18 teams that will make the playoffs this year.
When you consider that the last time Major League Soccer played a shorter season (length) during the Covid-19 pandemic, it was a bit surprising that it responded by expanding the playoff field to 18 teams.
The format also ditches the best-of-three first-round series that would last four years after 2026 and was criticized by many league observers as being too cumbersome relative to the single-elimination tournaments in later rounds. While this may just be a function of available time, early reports also suggest that these best-of-three series will be left in the past when the 2027-28 season begins.