MLS Changes the Calendar

Whither the fan?

Look around in all the materials MLS distributed on their new switch to a July-May calendar and you might struggle to find the word “fan.” Yes, of course, there are numerous sentences written with Deloitte-esque, mealy-mouthed verbiage discussing how much work they did with “stakeholders.” They even conducted a survey that provided the insane statistic that “92% of fans surveyed approved of the shift,” a number that would make Pyonyang shed a tear.

That’s because this decision was not about fan experience, it was about money, so much money. It follows a pattern of prioritizing the exponential financialization of the sport at the direct cost of fan experience. Because the problem with the Calendar Shift announcement is not really related to weather, its related to the league’s endless pursuit of money.

The Calendar Shift

As someone who lives in a Northern climate and who makes his living in part from bringing people together around soccer on game days, I can say two things: the calendar shift kinda stinks, but it’s not the end of the world.

In Minnesota, June is absolute heaven. The sun still hasn’t set as we sing Wonderwall to celebrate a Loons victory. And losing these days would be a shame. Replacing them with games in November and December, well that stinks.

In reality, though, Loons played two home games in June this year and in 2026, they won’t be playing any because of the World Cup. So no, I don’t think it’s the end of the world to shift 2-3 games from the best time of the year to colder weather.

However, I have been tilting at this particular windmill for a while: this is not a “Minnesota and Montreal” problem. The discussion keeps being framed as if it only affects the far Northern cities and it affects 2/3 of MLS markets. Sure, the winter isn’t has extremely cold in Philadelphia or Ohio as it is in Montreal, but fans in those markets sure as hell don’t want to be sitting in a bitter, 40 degree wind.

And while fans will show up for bitterly cold days in the playoffs, will they show up for week 12 of the regular season? Perhaps. I think all of these changes really depend on how much the league wants to change the rest of its structure.

I don’t think the summer versus winter shift is actually the biggest part of this equation.

A Long Break

One of the reasons weather ends up not being a real problem in this big shift is that the league is going to be taking an extended winter break. In the German Bundesliga, they take a winter break, but it lasts only 3-4 weeks. To the best of my knowledge, no other league except Denmark takes a full two months off.

A league that covers the United States and Canada should not really compare itself to European countries. To state the obvious, no other major footballing league has to deal with the physical distances, let alone climatic differences as MLS. And so, a winter break shouldn’t really be compared to other leagues.

That said, the two months break creates a huge problem for MLS. The break doesn’t come in the middle of the season, rather coming after about 2/3 of the season will have been played.

MLS made their decision from the back to front: playoffs are their most important resource and they want those to come at the most optimal time, May. The logic makes sense, but it comes at the great expense of the regular season.

It seems as if the league has doubled down on the logic: the regular season doesn’t have a lot of stakes, so lets make it even harder to get mid-season interest. Ask any supporters group (haha, just kidding these be-suited dudes would never) and they’ll tell you just the one month Leagues Cup break absolutely kills fan interest and momentum (this year, they shortened the LC break and it helped).

So what will the league do to make the middle of the season interest? Why not just skip an entire four months and just show up again for the final few regular season games in April?

One point made repeatedly by perennial Dad of the Year Candidate Andrew Wiebe is that no matter what, this all comes down to whether your team is putting a compelling product on the field. If your team is fun and you’re playing well, fans will show up in 30 degree weather. If you want to be the New England Revolution, yeah, they’re not going to show up. I think this is a basic tenet that can’t be overstated. But I don’t care how good your team is—I don’t care if you’ve gone into the winter break having won every game—two months is a long time, a momentum killer.

However, the league could look at other models around the world for inspiration. The eurosnobs of the world will decry the playoffs, but they are the ignorant parochial folks who don’t recognize that the single table begets a champion format of the EPL, La Liga, etc… is outlier only utilized by the big leagues of Europe. A majority of European leagues have weird variations on playoffs or split season formats.

Could MLS do a Fall Season, Spring Season set up? The champions of each plays on another for a season champion? Perhaps (the NASL’s ghost calls from off-stage “Mark Me!”). Could you create two tables and have internal promotion and relegation, thus giving actual stakes from top to bottom of the league?

The league seems to be kicking around a new format, but all of it appears to be maintaining the regular season followed by month of playoffs format. That’s going to be a big mistake.

I’m meandering through this all because you’ve solved a real problem (international break during playoffs, playing through international breaks during the season) and you’ve created a new problem that will be a massive momentum killer. This is far more important than (though not unrelated) playing a few more games in colder weather.

Whither the Fans

All this comes because the league has increasingly chased a magical dragon of NFL (or EPL) level wealth. The “we want to be one of the top five leagues in the world” ambition has literally nothing to do with fans. When Wilfried Nancy says “MLS can’t be taken seriously” without a calendar change, it has nothing to do with the fans.

All of this is 100% driven by wanting more revenue. Which—to be clear—is not necessarily oppositional to fans. These are businesses and I have no illusions about that. However, this is part of a trend in MLS, where they explicitly make choices that prioritize revenue over fans.

Let me take it back a moment. MLS was saved by fans. The Seattle Sounders and Portland Timbers fans—annoying as they may be—created an atmosphere and energy to the league that changed the narrative of contraction (e.g. the long, hospice death of Chivas USA).

It didn’t matter that Portland is a small city, Seattle a second or third tier “sports town.” Neither of these were sexy markets in the eyes of the TV guys who make decisions. But what made them a success was that they were incredibly relevant in their own markets. This is one of my gospel beliefs: The size of the market matters far less than the ability for that team to completely capture it.

A league lives and dies not by its national presence (measured by how much the meathead turds on major sports networks care about it), but by how much each individual market succeeds. Being at a soccer game is a unique sports experience. It doesn’t look, feel, or sound the way other sports events do. This is the primary lesson that the suits in MLS HQ have completely forgotten: MLS and American soccer grew because it offered an alternative experience, one that wasn’t canned and artificially preserved for television.

And yet, MLS continues to make decisions that try to make it more banal and predictable. They canned their quirky, obsessive Extratime podcast so they could focus more on the tepid, forgettable video content.

Bigger than just a podcast, though, they do things like exponentially drive up their franchise fees to richer than god status with no care about those markets. San Diego FC, a team that bought its toy cop crest at the Dollar Store, paid $500M for a franchise so that they could play in a stadium they share with college rugby. The result is that the league quarterfinal between Minnesota United and San Diego is played on a Monday night, because college football has priority. It’s a joke. An embarrassment. You paid half a billion dollars and can’t even pony up for a stadium.

Further back, you have the league getting in bed with a human rights violating petrostate and then playing for a decade in the absolute embarrassment that is the Mets baseball stadium.

You drive up these franchise fees so far that the owners become less and less tied to their communities and more and more become faceless private equity. And there is a direct tie between the fan experience and these ownership groups.

There are those around the league who believe that finally FINALLY the league will get respect if they just start spending more on players. It’s a continually moving end line. Say whatever you want about the weather and the south, but this calendar change is 100% about aligning transfer windows.

And to those people I would beg for proof. The league is already spending more, you already have top players coming in: remember when bringing in the still entering his prime Giovinco was MLS 3.0 or 3.5 or whatever we were at? Did that make Tom in Pittsburgh tune in? No. Did Frank Lampard move the needle? How about Stephen Gerrard? How about Pirlo?

The Apple deal bringing in a billion dollars over 10 years was supposed to be a game changer. Did the game change? When I can turn the TV on CBS and watch a NWSL playoff game on a Saturday afternoon, how does that Apple TV deal look? And we were told this was the future of sports, hiding it deep behind a subscriber paywall. The payoff of the big money would more than make up for that paywall. Did it?

Messi was supposed to be a game changer and he has certainly done good things. But then we see teams like Columbus Crew chase the cheap hit of a one-time cash grab by moving their game to Cleveland rather than use his visit to build their hometown fanbase. (These examples might be some of the most infuriatingly short-sighted decisions of the recent era).

This is not to say quality on the pitch doesn’t matter, but it’s to say that spending money on better players is only one factor for creating the unique gameday environment.

So consider me dubious of the belief that if we suddenly open the pocketbooks even more that it will lead to more fans. We’ve already seen that opening the pocketbooks more means the pocketbook holders want to fill those pocketbooks again.

No, folks, this is a well-trodden path. It’s enshittification. It’s taking American soccer, something built on communities, built by fans creating unique atmospheres, and it’s sucking the blood out of it, sanding down all the edges, and repackaging it. It’s the countless consultants.

We could do this differently. You can look at leagues like the Bundesliga and see the ways they function differently than the EPL and the NFL. You can see the way they prioritize fan experience, the way they let their fans lead the way. But MLs has chosen its path, a path where every step of the way, they chase a national tv audience that still hasn’t appeared. In classic Tobias Funke tradition, MLS suits tell themselves “it might work for us.”

Ask not for whom the enshittification bell tolls, it tolls for thee.