Major League Soccer (MLS)

Major League Soccer (MLS) is a professional soccer league based in the United States and Canada. Aside from national teams, the league features the highest level of play in North America. Its teams compete each season for the MLS Cup. They also have exhibition matches—also called friendlies—against national teams and professional teams from other leagues.

The MLS began play in its first season in 1996, with ten original teams. Because soccer has never been as popular in the United States as it is in many other nations, the league initially struggled. However, American interest in soccer increased over the years. The league grew in popularity in the early twenty-first century and the amount of participating teams more than doubled.

While based in North America, the MLS features players from around the world. The league struggled to draw the sport’s top talent in its early years, but adjustments to its salary cap and roster structures later enabled teams to pursue international stars with more success. This in turn drove further interest in the league both domestically and abroad.

Despite its success, the MLS has faced criticism and other challenges. Its refusal to adopt rules and customs common in other professional soccer leagues has frustrated some soccer fans. While its talent level has improved, soccer players and analysts have said that it still lags behind other professional soccer leagues, such as the United Kingdom’s Premier League. And even as its visibility grew, it remained considerably less high-profile than the other major North American sports leagues: the National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the National Hockey League (NHL).

History

Soccer is called football in much of the world. The name soccer originated in England in the late 1800s. The sport was officially called association football. A linguistic trend in England at the time was to shorten names and add the suffix -er as a sort of informal nickname. Association football was shortened to assoccer and eventually just soccer. The nickname was never widely used in England, but it did catch on in the United States when the sport grew popular at the turn of the twentieth century. The Great Depression and World War II hindered soccer’s development in the United States, however, while other sports such as baseball, basketball, ice hockey, and American football became cultural fixtures.

By the 1960s, American soccer was gradually recovering. Two professional leagues—the United Soccer Association and the National Professional Soccer League—both emerged late in the decade. By 1968 the two leagues merged to form the North American Soccer League (NASL). With few amateur soccer organizations in place to train North American players to a high level, it quickly became evident that the league would require international players to fill its club rosters. This proved to be a financial burden for the young league. Players required significant compensation to be convinced to play abroad in an unproven league. The NASL also struggled because it made many changes to the rules and structure of soccer in an attempt to better appeal to its American audience. Many of the changes were seen as gimmicks and left soccer fans dissatisfied.

In the mid-1970s, the New York Cosmos club secured the services of Pelé, a Brazilian forward widely considered among the greatest soccer players of all time. The publicity associated with Pele’s arrival boosted the league’s profile immediately. Once Pelé retired in 1977, however, interest in the league largely left with him. The NASL eventually folded in 1984.

Although the league had collapsed, US interest in soccer had not. The United States campaigned to host the FIFA World Cup, the most prestigious international tournament in professional soccer. By 1988, the United States won the hosting bid for 1994, but only on the condition that it establish a new professional soccer league. Major League Soccer was therefore established in 1993, although it would not play its first season until 1996.

Buoyed by a surprisingly strong showing by the US team, the 1994 World Cup increased interest in soccer throughout the United States, leading to a successful debut season by the MLS. Ten teams participated in the league’s first year, with several World Cup players on MLS rosters. The first MLS champion was DC United, a team based in Washington, DC. The league expanded in 1997 with new teams in Chicago and Miami.

After the initial excitement surrounding the new league died down, however, the MLS found itself losing money. Like the NASL before it, the MLS made changes to the sport that did not sit well with dedicated soccer fans. Most of the changes were made to make the MLS more closely resemble other North American sports leagues, such as the NFL and NHL. While most soccer organizations use a game clock that counts up, the MLS counted down. It also employed penalty kick shootouts to settle ties. Other leagues usually only resorted to shootouts in elimination tournaments where ties were not possible because one team had to advance. These changes damaged the credibility of the MLS in the eyes of many soccer fans, who preferred to continue following more established leagues elsewhere. Meanwhile, even with MLS's rule changes, soccer in general did not appeal to many North American viewers, and the league struggled to draw fans away from other North American sports leagues.

The United States finished in last place in the 1998 World Cup. Much of the US roster was made up of MLS players. The disappointing result further harmed the reputation of the MLS and hurt American interest in soccer. Also contributing to the league’s difficulties was the fact that most of its teams leased stadiums from their respective cities’ NFL teams. This complicated scheduling and limited the freedom of the MLS. Furthermore, many of these stadiums had very large seating capacities. As the MLS struggled with attendance, the sight of small crowds in such large stadiums made the issue stand out very clearly.

The league’s fortunes began to change at the end of the twentieth century. The US women's national team won the FIFA Women's World Cup in 1999, helping to renew American interest in the sport. In 2002 the US men’s national team reached the World Cup quarterfinals, again raising the stock of US soccer. Continued success of the US national program—especially the women's team—along with increasing investment in youth soccer steadily drove growth in the sport over the next two decades. The MLS also took criticism into account and altered some of its more controversial policies, eliminating shootouts and changing its game clock.

The MLS saw several important developments in 2007. That year the league expanded with its first club outside the United States, based in Toronto, Ontario. Perhaps even more important was the arrival of British superstar player David Beckham, who signed a five-year, $250 million contract with the Los Angeles Galaxy. The move made international headlines, driving fresh attention from both fans and investors. It also encouraged more top international players to look at the MLS as a serious option; notable figures who eventually joined the league included French striker Thierry Henry in 2010 and Zlatan Ibrahimović in 2018.

Meanwhile, as the league's finances gradually stabilized, it became more common for MLS teams to have their own, soccer-specific stadiums. The league also continued to expand, reaching sixteen active teams in 2010, twenty in 2015, and twenty-six in 2020. This growth was sustained by the steadily increasing popularity of soccer among the American public. By the late 2010s the MLS saw average attendance of over 20,000 people per game, more than the NBA and the NHL.

Like other sports leagues, the MLS halted play as the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in early 2020. Competition resumed later that year in an altered format, but the league announced severe revenue loss approaching $1 billion due to the pandemic disruption. Nevertheless, growth resumed in the following years. A huge boost came in 2023 when Argentine superstar Lionel Messi signed with the club Inter Miami. Like Pelé before him, Messi was widely considered one of the greatest soccer players ever and enjoyed immense fame and influence even off the field, which drove up interest in the MLS both in North America and worldwide. Observers noted that in addition to attracting more fans, the "Messi effect" was felt in rising merchandise sales, increased advertising revenue, and other financial gains.

Structure and Rules

The structure of the MLS has evolved over the years as the number and locations of teams has changed. By 2023 the league included twenty-nine teams (twenty-six in the US and three in Canada), with a thirtieth club (based in San Diego, California) approved to begin play in 2025. The teams are divided into Eastern and Western conferences based on geographic location.

The MLS regular season typically begins in late February or March and extends into October. Each team plays thirty-four games. Teams play each opponent in its own conference twice, once as host and once as a visiting team. For the remainder of the schedule, teams play each opponent in the opposite conference once, splitting the games between home and away. Every regular-season victory earns a team three points. If a game ends in a tie, each team earns one point.

Similar to other North American professional sports leagues, the MLS holds an all-star game in the middle of its season. This is an exhibition game in which the best players in the league are invited to play. In the league's first couple of seasons, the game had a similar format to other North American leagues, with the chosen players from one conference playing against the all-stars of the other conference. The MLS then tried experimenting with different formats. In the 1998 season it pitted its US all-stars against its players from other countries. In 2002 a team of MLS all-stars played against the US National Team. The following year, MLS all-stars played a Mexico-based professional team. Beginning in 2005 the all-star game took the form of MLS all-stars facing a professional team from outside the United States.

The team with the most points in the regular seasons is awarded the Supporters’ Shield. The shield was proposed by a fan and discussed by a group of fans after the first MLS season ended. Many other professional soccer leagues lacked a playoff, and the team with the best record at the end of each season was considered the league’s champion. In the MLS, holding the best record was advantageous because it granted home-field advantage throughout the playoffs. Since many MLS fans were also fans of other professional soccer leagues, this lack of recognition for the best record was controversial. A group of MLS fans campaigned and negotiated with the league, eventually establishing the Supporters’ Shield in time for the 1999 season. It was also retroactively awarded for the seasons prior to its debut.

When the season is over, the top seven teams in each conference automatically advance to the playoffs. Beginning in the 2023 season, the eighth- and ninth-place teams in each conference play a single-elimination Wild Card game, with the winner also advancing to the playoffs. In the playoffs, teams are sorted according to their regular-season points. Teams with better records get home-field advantage against teams with lesser records. The first round of the playoffs was expanded into a best-of-three series in 2023. Once each conference has a single team remaining, they play for the MLS Cup at the home stadium of the team with the best record.

DC United was dominant in the league’s early years, winning three of the first four MLS Cups and a pair of Supporters’ Shields. In the early 2000s, the San Jose Earthquakes and the Los Angeles Galaxy each won multiple cups. The Houston Dynamo FC won back-to-back cups in 2006 and 2007. The Galaxy emerged as the most decorated team of the next decade, securing three more cups and two Supporters’ Shields. Other clubs with multiple MLS Cups include Sporting Kansas City, Seattle Sounders FC, and the Columbus Crew.

In addition to the MLS regular season and the MLS Cup playoffs, MLS teams can participate in other competitions as well. As many as five teams can qualify for the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) Champions Cup, a tournament held by the relevant governing body within the international soccer organization FIFA. The top team in each MLS conference for the previous season automatically qualifies, as does the reigning MLS Cup champion. Additional MLS teams can qualify by winning the US Open Cup or the Canada Championship, special tournaments organized by CONCACAF. If a single team meets multiple of those qualifying criteria, or multiple Canadian teams qualify, additional teams can qualify based on their ranking. Other competitions include the Campeones Cup, in which the reigning MLS Cup champion plays the winner of Mexico's Campeón de Campeones tournament, and the Leagues Cup, also between MLS and Mexican clubs.

A key aspect of the success of the MLS is the designated player rule, which was first instituted in 2007. Like the NFL, NHL, and NBA, the MLS has a salary cap. This sets limits on how much money each team can spend on its players, theoretically keeping all teams on a level financial playing field. The designated player rule allows each club three players that are exceptions to the salary cap. This gives MLS teams more freedom to recruit international stars. The designated player rule became informally known as the Beckham rule due to the great influence of David Beckham, who was the first player signed under the rule in 2007.

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