Lionel Messi, right, of Inter Miami CF. greets Son Heung-Min of Los Angeles FC prior to their MLS match at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on February 21, 2026 in Los Angeles, Calif.
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Major League Soccer on Thursday revealed more details about its plans to play a sprint season in the first half of 2027.
The shortened February-to-May season in miniature will help MLS flip its calendar following the ongoing 2026 campaign. Beginning in July of 2027, MLS will contest its full seasons beginning in the summer and ending in late spring to align itself with most top European leagues. But to make that calendar flip, it had to fill the months between this December’s MLS Cup final and the start of that format.
Now we know a little bit more about what exactly the sprint season will look like. And here are three key points that stand out.
14 Matches To Prove Yourself
The biggest question to answer was just how long a “sprint” season would be, and now we know it will be 14 matches total, with all teams playing every other club in their conference once. There will be no intraconference matches, which potentially could prove beneficial from a travel standpoint if the fixture list is slightly more compact than a typical February-to-May.
This is roughly about 40% of the volume of a typical MLS regular season. And while the math related to conference size may have been influential, this also suggests that when the July-to-May format begins later in 2027, the winter break to run from sometime in December to sometime in February will arrive sligthly beyond the midpoint of the 34-game schedule.
That also aligns with what we see in the 2026 calendar, in which MLS is taking an extended summer break for the World Cup. Most teams will play 15 matches before players are released to their national teams, and 19 after play resumes.
5 Concacaf Spots at Stake
This isn’t necessarily a surprise, but the league also revealed the sprint season results will count toward qualification for the 2028 Concacaf Champions Cup, with five berths in the tournament at stake.
The real takeaway here is that the calendar flip will mean a return to a longer wait for clubs who earn the right to play in continental competition; A team learns it has qualified for Concacaf play by April or May won’t begin participation in that realm for another 9-10 months.
That’s actually sort of a return to a previous era; MLS teams faced a similar wait when the Concacaf Champions League included a fall group phase, which was discontinued beginning with the 2018 tournament.
Whether this is good or bad depends on your outlook and perhaps individual club circumstances. Teams might lose momentum relative to the form that saw them qualify for the tournament. Or they might make additional moves in the next two transfer windows to strengthen and deepen squads for continental play.
It will be an even longer wait (we think?) for the 18 teams that qualify for the 2028 Leagues Cup based on the 2027 sprint season, provided the Leagues Cup remains a summer tournament.
Return to Single-Elimination Playoffs
The most interesting revelation is that the 2027 MLS Cup Playoffs will be contested as a single-elimination, 16-team tournament, with the top eight teams from each conference qualifying.
We already knew MLS was likely to adopt a new playoff format in 2028 for its first summer-to-spring season. But this may tell us about the direction the league may go with that format.
For starters, the 16-team field is actually slightly smaller than the 18 clubs who will make the postseason this year, amid criticism that the current playoff structure has become too forgiving.
And it’s slightly surprising when you consider that the last time MLS played a shorter season (in length) during the Covid-19 pandemic, it responded by expanding the postseason field to 18 teams.
The format also abandons the best-of-three first round series that will have been played for four years after 2026, and have been criticized by many league observers for being cumbersome relative to the single elimination of later rounds. While it might simply be a function of time available, early reports have also suggested those best-of-three series will be left in the past when the 2027-28 calendar begins.
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