Few constants have endured from MLS’s 1996 debut to now. It’s still an operational soccer league, for one thing. There’s the name itself, although its initial logo was shelved in 2015 for its current shield-and-kickstand. Eight of the 10 teams that launched the league remain involved, though each one has changed their name, crest, or both over time.
Another rare constant will soon fade into the rearview: the league’s schedule. MLS has run spring-to-fall/winter since its launch, more specifically from late February to early December in recent years. Preseason kicks off at the start of each new year, three weeks or so after the previous season’s championship bout. It’s a pretty well-ironed routine, even as ancillary competitions like the Leagues Cup and Club World Cup shuffle the middle bits each year.
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Starting next year, MLS will be a summer-to-spring operation. Just like the big leagues in England, Spain and Germany; but no longer like the big leagues in Norway and South Korea and, well, the rest of US soccer. It helps associate MLS with the competitive company it wants to keep, and should further firm its foothold in the global transfer market.
As a result, the next 18 months could feel bizarrely compartmentalized for those who began following the league long before Lionel Messi took his talents to South Beach. That won’t weigh on the players and coaches when the 2026 season kicks off on 21 February, who will stress, as usual, that “the most important game is the next one”.
For the league’s chief soccer officers, who may most directly benefit from the schedule shift, this is just another part of the job. Their jobs often operate in multi-transfer window waves, needing to project how any immediate business may impact their subsequent maneuvers. For Corey Wray, appointed by St Louis City as their sporting director this past November, the schedule change is just another consideration.
“It’s not a massive thing of importance when it comes to how I’m building it out,” Wray told the Guardian. “I would say you have to be mindful of these things. We take guidance from the league in terms of our contracting process, and they can provide us with some clarity on how it could work for the rules. But outside of that, I’m looking to create ultimate flexibility in the roster for the next couple of windows.”
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Throughout our conversations, Wray – along with Mike Jacobs, in his ninth year with Nashville SC, and Khaled El-Ahmad, in his third with Minnesota United – referred to the impending “sprint season,” the widely adopted colloquial term for next spring’s bridge between the 2026 and 2027-28 seasons.
Related: Why James Rodríguez signed in Minnesota amid a federal occupation
One framed the sprint season as something of a spiritual successor to the MLS is Back Tournament, a stand-alone competition held during the Covid-19 summer of 2020. While players and coaches should be mercifully free of a Floridian bubble this time around, the sprint season – which will last from February to May 2027 and consist of 14 regular-season games followed by playoffs – should be judged accordingly: very entertaining, but unrepresentative of MLS’s modus operandi.
Nonetheless, those will be league games and players need contracts. This winter’s free agency window saw very few one-year deals, with one-and-a-half year deals being the norm that offers more stability than usual without forcing a club to commit for long beyond their ideal timeline.
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“On the players’ side, I think it’s actually pretty good,” Wray said. “Typically, there are arguments: ‘Hey, we want to give you a one-year [deal]’, and then the players always want two years. So I think it does side with them pretty well, where they get split in the middle and get a year and a half in those situations.”
Squad-level signings, like Nashville’s additions of Shak Mohammed and Isaiah LeFlore, often treat the spring of 2027 as an option year to execute or void like any other. Their other free-agent signing was arguably the biggest of any player who moved within MLS’s ranks, as the club brought in two-time MLS All-Star Cristian Espinoza after seven excellent seasons in San Jose. At age 30, the Argentinian winger joined a side that had a successful 2025, winning the club’s first major trophy (the US Open Cup) and setting club records for wins in a year, but came up short against Inter Miami in the first round of the playoffs.
After longtime club captain Walker Zimmerman’s contract ended, Jacobs’ aim was to get a player who could quickly integrate into the core of the roster and help the team challenge for additional hardware. It’s the type of signing that required ample foresight and planning, given MLS’s multitude of roster rules and mechanisms.
“When it comes to things like contract length of the current players you have, and also about the salary cap and how you’re utilizing that and GAM (general allocation money) for us, we want optionality,” Jacobs said. “Let’s have the flexibility so when the right guy presents itself, we can strike. The reality was, when someone like Cristian was available, and we knew he was the right guy, we went for a full-court press trying to acquire him.”
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“GAM” (with a hard G) has been used by MLS for over a decade to help teams add talent while being rules-compliant. Each team gets $3.28m of the stuff from MLS each year, and can add more through trades and competition achievements (good and bad alike; this is American sports, after all).
As of late January, no team has accumulated more GAM than Minnesota, with $7.26m on-hand to use as it works to buck a two-year trend of quarter-final playoff exits. It isn’t an act of stockpiling like your neighborhood doomsdayer. Part of shrewd planning is ensuring greater flexibility, both before the calendar flips and thereafter.
“Having money in the bank is always better than not having any,” El-Ahmad said, “There’s clubs I think have done [squad planning] really well, like Seattle. Not only do they win titles, they are competitive over and over and over again. You have other teams that might win one year, then they drop off. I want Minnesota to be a consistent team that is competitive. It’s a strategic decision to always make sure that we have flexibility.”
GAM tallies may bloat across the league as sporting directors ready for the calendar flip. The most common usages for GAM are either trading it within the league in lieu of a transfer fee (though those are now more prevalent after a rule change last winter) or “buying down” a player’s salary budget charge to keep cap compliant.
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It’s one of many considerations that goes into every move, including experience-defined squad slots, international spots, and those pesky discovery rights. For the Loons, having those funds is invaluable to remain competitive in both the league and the market.
“The one thing I want is to have the flexibility to improve in every window,” El-Ahmad said. “Sometimes we will, sometimes we might not because we didn’t think it was worth it [at the market’s rate]. But I at least want to have the choice and control. We looked at several domestic players, but honestly, sometimes it seems to be easier to go abroad and do deals than internally [within MLS], because the price is more expensive because they know the league, because they have the green card or the domestic status.”
Historically, Nashville have been among the most bullish MLS teams on domestic talent. Each offseason would see Jacobs’ staff agree to part with as many as four international slots to recoup GAM and invest it into the squad.
That trend varies by year, as does the trading value of international slots. Still, it’s another way Nashville can benefit from committing to a clear approach depending on factors in their control and beyond. Despite the “only in MLS” nature of GAM, it has helped raise the league’s competitive level. Time and the almighty market will determine whether the calendar change will do the same, and to what extent.
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“Every club’s different about how they want to build their roster,” Jacobs said. “Like in a free market, I think everyone should be able to pick their own model of how to build their team. For us, we want to have players who are prime age, because athletically, they can do certain things and also where they fit the whole ecosystem of their potential market value, having someone who’s prime age rather than someone who’s past their prime.
“We have been able to acquire players from top leagues and top countries in their prime age. I do think the U22 initiative has also helped to incentivize clubs to acquire players within those age groups. I also do think the success of some of these guys do make it easier for people to look and say, well, it’s not a retirement league. It’s not a league for players who are 35 and up, on their last paycheck. It’s gonna be an aspirational league.”
For Nashville, their aspirations meant bringing Espinoza in as a designated player was worth the knock-on effects that are both projectable and unexpected. It justified offering the 30-year-old a deal that could run through the 2029-30 season rather than follow the league’s modern trend of identifying young players who can be developed and sold for profit.
Market gains are great, but trophies look better in a boardroom display. Every move forces teams to weigh potential returns on the field and on the balance sheet alike before committing definitively. That much won’t change when the league’s calendar flips.
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“For us, we want to have players who can become stars, but become stars on our team,” Jacobs said. “We want to have players who are prime age, and reach their potential with us. Depending on what their aspirations are, whether it’s to stay in our club and our league long-term and help us be successful, or it’s to go somewhere else and pursue opportunities somewhere else and make more money, we want to help. We want to be aspirational as a club.”
