mls?

Conferences: Eastern Conference; Western ConferenceMajor League Soccer is the most recent in a series of men’s premier professional national soccer leagues established in the United States and Canada. The predecessor of MLS was the North American Soccer League (NASL), which existed from 1968 until 1984. MLS was founded in 1993 as part of the United States’ successful bid to host the 1994 FIFA World Cup. The inaugural season took place in 1996 with ten teams. MLS experienced financial and operational struggles in its first few years, losing millions of dollars and folding two teams in 2002. Since then, developments such as the proliferation of soccer-specific stadiums around the league, implementation of the Designated Player Rule allowing teams to sign star players such as David Beckham, and national TV contracts have made MLS profitable.^[10] In 2022, with an average attendance of over 21,000 per game, MLS has the fourth-highest average attendance of any major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada after the National Football League (NFL) with over 69,000 fans per game, Major League Baseball (MLB) with over 26,000 fans per game, and the Canadian Football League (CFL) with nearly 23,000 fans per game.^[13] MLS was the seventh-highest attended professional soccer league worldwide by 2013.

The MLS regular season typically starts in late February or early March and runs through mid-October, with each team playing 34 games; the team with the best record is awarded the Supporters’ Shield. Eighteen teams compete in the postseason MLS Cup Playoffs in late October and November, culminating in the league’s championship game, the MLS Cup.

Instead of operating as an association of independently owned clubs, MLS is a single entity in which each team is owned by the league and individually operated by the league’s investors.^[18] The league has a fixed membership like most sports leagues in the United States and Canada, which makes it one of the few soccer leagues that does not use a promotion and relegation process.

The LA Galaxy have the most MLS Cups, with five. They are also tied with D.C. United for most Supporters’ Shields, with four each. The Columbus Crew are the defending champions, as they defeated Los Angeles FC 2–1 on December 9, 2023, to mark the end of the 2023 season.

Major League Soccer’s regular season runs from late February or early March to October. Teams are geographically divided into the Eastern and Western Conferences, playing 34 games in an unbalanced schedule. With 29 teams in 2023, each team plays two games, home and away, against every team in its conference and one game against all but four or five of the teams in the opposite conference. The 2020 season was the first season in league history in which teams did not play against every other team in the league. At the end of the regular season, the team with the highest point total is awarded the Supporters’ Shield and home-field advantage throughout the playoffs.

Teams break for the annual All-Star Game midway through the season, an exhibition game containing the league’s best players. The format of the All-Star Game has changed several times since the league’s inception; 2020 was the first year in which the MLS All-Stars were planned to play against an all-star team from Mexico’s Liga MX, before the event’s cancellation due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unlike most major soccer leagues around the world, but similar to other leagues in the Americas, the MLS regular season is followed by a postseason knockout tournament to determine the league champion. As of 2023, eighteen teams participate in the MLS Cup Playoffs in October and November, which concludes with the MLS Cup championship game in early December.

Major League Soccer’s spring-to-fall schedule results in scheduling conflicts with the FIFA calendar and with summertime international tournaments such as the World Cup and the Gold Cup, causing some players to miss league matches. While MLS has looked into changing to a fall-to-spring format, there are no current plans to do so. Were the league to change its schedule, a winter break would be necessary to accommodate teams located in harsh winter climates. It would also have to compete with the popularity and media presence of the National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA), and National Hockey League (NHL), which all run on fall-to-spring schedules.

On February 21, 2023, MLS announced a new playoff format which included a pair of single-elimination play-in matches ahead of a best-of-3 series in the first round.

MLS teams also play in other international and domestic competitions. Each season, up to five MLS teams—four from the U.S. and one from Canada—play in the CONCACAF Champions Cup (CCC) against other clubs from the CONCACAF region. Two U.S.-based MLS teams qualify based on regular-season results from the previous year: the teams with the highest point total from each of the two conferences, one of whom is the Supporter’s Shield champion. The third U.S. team to qualify is the reigning MLS Cup champion. A fourth U.S.-based team can qualify by winning the U.S. Open Cup. If a team qualifies through multiple berths, or if any of the three MLS berths are taken by a Canadian team, the berth is reallocated to the highest-placed U.S.-based team in the previous season’s overall table that has otherwise not qualified. Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver compete against other Canadian sides in the Canadian Championship for the one CONCACAF Champions Cup berth allocated to Canada.^[35] Seattle Sounders FC became the first MLS team to win the CONCACAF Champions Cup under the competition’s updated format in 2022.

Since 2018, the reigning MLS Cup champion plays in the Campeones Cup, a Super Cup-style single game against the Campeón de Campeones from Liga MX, hosted by the MLS team in September. The inaugural edition saw Tigres UANL defeat Toronto FC at BMO Field in Toronto in 2018.

Another inter-league competition with Liga MX, the Leagues Cup, was established in 2019. The 2020 edition of the tournament was originally planned to pair eight MLS clubs against eight Liga MX clubs in a single-elimination tournament hosted in the United States, reviving an inter-league rivalry that previously took place in the now-defunct North American Superliga, before its cancelation. Beginning with the 2023 edition all MLS and Liga MX teams participate in the competition, which functions as the regional cup for the North American zone of CONCACA.