That Has NOTHING to Do With Pro/Rel

As MLS has open discussed moving to the European calendar, conversation around the schedule change has been extremely divisive. Unfortunately for the United States, there is not a perfect solution. The current schedule has cities like Miami, Phoenix, and Houston whose temperatures in the summer are more comparable to the country of Qatar than they are to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Meanwhile, in the Twin Cities, the wear is outright dangerous in the middle of the winter, if players are not treated properly.

The USL Super League

The USL Super League is a brand new Division One sanctioned women’s league in the United States. The new league is the only current league that plays the European Calendar in the United States. Because of this, the league’s schedule structure will be the basis for all my arguments for and against the European Calendar.

There are inherent flaws to using the Super League as the prime example for the calendar. The primary flaw is that there is not a single extremely cold climate currently included in the league. That said, we can still use the schedule as a general framework.

The Schedule

The 2024/2025 USL Super League Schedule started August 17th and the first half ended December 14th. The league schedule then resumed February 8th and ends May 31st (not including the playoffs).

To compare, the 2024 MLS schedule began on February 21st and ended December 7th.

We Are Already Playing in the Worst Months

The first part of my argument is that we are already playing in the extreme cold part of the schedule. The only difference is that MLS schedule started just two weeks later than the USL Super League, which is obviously not enough time for cold weather climates to warm up. How does MLS handle those cold weather teams? They send them to warm weather places. Teams like Montreal were sent to Atlanta, Minnesota was sent to Los Angeles, Philadelphia was sent to Orlando, etc.

Meanwhile the end of the season for MLS ended just one week earlier than the Super League ended their first half, already well into the frigid cold weather months for places like Minnesota, Salt Lake, Colorado, Montreal, and Toronto.

The only difference is that the end of the season will come before teams would have to go into Miami, Orlando, Houston, Dallas, or Nashville before the weather turns into 100 degrees with 90% humidity in June and July.

The Most Important Time of the Year

As a shock to everybody, my personal opinion is that the most important time of the schedule is the playoffs. This is when the best-of-the-best play each other to decide the overall winner of the league. It’s a controversial take, I know. In the current format, the League Final for MLS was one the same day as college football conference championships. If the goal is to grow the popularity of soccer in the United States, going head-to-head with the most popular sport is never a good idea.

Georgia vs Texas alone drew over 8.8 million eyeballs. Meanwhile the MLS Final between LA Galaxy and the New York Red Bulls drew just 468,000. If the schedule ended one week earlier, then MLS would be fighting against rivalry week in college football, which saw Texas vs Texas A&M draw over 9.4 million viewers. If the schedule ended one week later, then MLS would have ended at the same exact time as the European Calendar.

With moving the calendar to end in June/July, you would be only competing with the NBA playoffs. While that is still a daunting task for MLS, the NBA is far from the TV Rating juggernaut that football is in the United States.

Buying and Selling

One thing that makes soccer much different than the rest of the American sports is that trades are a nonexistent in the global game. While MLS and USL have had trades inter-league, they do not exist outside of those respective leagues. Because of this, players get just as much say in when and where they go. If Birmingham Legion FC put in a bid for Mbappe for over $1 billion, Real Madrid would more than likely say yes, but Mbappe would have the option to decline the deal and stay in La Liga, or accept it and move to the second division in the United States. Hard decision, I’m sure.

A move to the European Calendar would make it much easier to convince players and clubs to accept deals to move to and from the United States. Whether it is to or from, a player coming internationally would be coming or going in the middle of the season.

Earlier this year, we saw USL Golden Boot winner Nick Markanich stay in Charleston to finish the season, despite the deal for him being done in the summer transfer window. Markanich chose to stay in Charleston to finish out his season and a championship push in Charleston, rather than moving to CD Castellón immediately. These kind of decisions don’t have to happen with the move to a unified European Calendar. A player can move straight away to help their new club in the brand new season.

This also would be much more friendly to players who are internationals trying to move to or from the U.S. A player who is playing in a summer international tournament would have to heavily consider the amount of games that they would be playing. A player playing in Europe in August, transferring to MLS in the winter, then playing in the tournament in the summer, and continuing the MLS season into the winter would not have a single break for over 12 months. That is a real deterrent for a player that a league like MLS would desperately want.

Allows for Ambition

If a season is not working out, the European Calendar, as currently constructed, would allow teams with ambition to win show more ambition to win. As we saw earlier this season in the Super League, DC Power FC became the first team in league history to fire their coach. This, of course, comes from the team believing that Brilliant was not the man for the job. However, this allowed the club to make the best of a bad situation.

How many times have we seen in American sports a coach who clearly needs to be fired immediately stay until the end of the season? This normally comes from organizations who feel that giving a team a full offseason under the new coach is far more impactful than bringing in the new coach midseason. With a break in the calendar from December-to-February, this will allow players to get used to the new coach without it effecting the season, and possibly even salvage a season that seemed like a complete loss.

Heat Strokes for Different Folks

The primary argument against the European Calendar is how cold it will be in the northern states, but the primary argument against our calendar is simply how hot it is in the southern states.

While I also enjoyed laughing at the English Premier League for implementing water breaks at just 86-degrees Fahrenheit, our superiority complex in being able to deal with playing in Las Vegas and Phoenix does not mean that it is a good thing. Starting matches at 7:30pm local time is already late for families with a young children, but add on that it is still over 90-degrees at kickoff, it is not the safest thing for fans to endure, and leads to declines in attendances, especially for those young families who these clubs are desperate to hold onto.

No Perfect Solution

While there is not a solution that will make everybody happy, we are already dealing with the downsides of the European Calendar while also dealing with the downfalls of the American Calendar. We are not avoiding cold with our current set up, we are just having to endure the heat.

If we want to grow soccer in the United States, we need to stop playing in those dangerously hot months and we need to stop trying to fight American Football for views, because those are two battles that soccer will never win.