MLS Football: The Complete Guide to Major League Soccer

MLS stands for Major League Soccer, and it is the top tier of professional men’s football in the United States and Canada.

Since launching in 1996, MLS has changed from a small competition that few people paid attention to, into one of the top 12 soccer leagues in the world.

For anyone more familiar with European football, MLS will seem a bit different at first glance. It’s a closed league for a start, so there is no promotion or relegation, and the competition takes place across two conferences: East and West. Then there is a playoff competition to decide the winner of the coveted MLS Cup.

The game itself is played no differently than anywhere else in the world, but the rules and league structure set MLS apart.

This guide will explain everything you need to know to get a big picture understanding of Major League Soccer. So, if you’re new to the league, this is the place to start, before moving on to the more detailed guides on the site.

League Structure

MLS League Format

This is the main thing to get your head around.

MLS is made up of 30 different soccer clubs across the United States and Canada. Due to the size of the country, these teams are split into an Eastern Conference and a Western Conference, both of which contain 15 teams.

The competition is split into:

During the regular season, which usually takes place between February and October, teams mainly play against others from their own conference. However, each season a handful of cross conference matches take place to fill out the 34 game schedule. These are decided centrally on a rotating basis to keep things fair in the long term.

The playoff places are earned via each team’s performance in the regular season, so playoff places are essentially what teams are competing for in the regular season. Teams finishing between 1st and 7th in both conferences get an automatic playoff spot, and the teams finishing 8th and 9th play a wild card round to decide who gets the 8th spot. This means 16 teams take part in the playoffs, which is a knockout competition.

Teams that don’t qualify for the playoffs don’t face any real consequence, there is no relegation to worry about. They do miss out on opportunities to qualify for other competitions though.

Single Entity Model and Ownership Structure

MLS Single Entity Structure

MLS is also structured in a unique way behind the scenes compared with other leagues around the world, because it operates as a single entity.

This means that although clubs are controlled by owner-operators, they don’t actually own the club itself, they own the rights to operate it. However, when a club buys into the league, a club representative becomes part of the Board of Governors, who are the people that make all the decisions. So you could say that nobody actually owns MLS, but at the same time, everybody does. Every club has a voice at the table, and changes have to be voted through.

Similarly, all the players are contracted centrally to MLS rather to their clubs, before then being given permission by the league to play for the club that signed them. The club is the one that negotiates the contract, but that contract is ultimately owned by MLS. Maintaining control in this way stops a handful of clubs running away with the league.

Almost all other leagues in the world are run by a separate governing body, with individually owned clubs competing as per the rules set by that governing body. However, in many of these leagues the richer clubs have been able to effectively buy success. The whole point of Major League Soccer’s single entity structure is to avoid this. It’s about maintaining relative parity and keeping competition tight.

Some MLS clubs are richer than others, but the rules set by the league will only allow those riches to benefit them up to a certain point. So clubs can still build star studded squads, but only within the framework set by the league.

Regular Season Format

I partly covered this in the League Format section, but can go into a little more detail now.

Each team plays 34 games during the regular season, with an equal balance of home and away games and a small number of games against teams from the opposite conference. As with all other leagues, a team gets 3 points for a win, 1 point for a tie, and 0 points for a loss.

This makes things a little more interesting than elsewhere because the cross conference games won’t necessarily have the same impact on the conference standings. Beat a team in your own conference and you take three points while denying a direct rival those same three points – a true six-pointer that can swing tiebreakers too. Cross-conference matches still give you three points, but they don’t deny your conference rivals, so they’re more like solo climbs up the table than head-to-head swings. It just adds another dynamic to the league.

At the end of the regular season, the top 7 teams plus the winner of the wild card round move on to the playoffs to try for the MLS Cup. However, the regular season position is also important for another reason, because the team with the best regular season record wins the Supporter’s Shield.

Supporters Shield

Supporters Shield Winners List

The Supporter’s Shield was introduced in 1999 and awarded retrospectively to the winners between 1996 and 1998.

It goes to the team with the best regular season record across both conferences, so to find a winner, both conferences are combined into a single table known as the Supporter’s Shield Standings. The team with the most points all season wins the trophy, with goal difference being used in the event of a tie.

It’s actually more difficult to win the Supporter’s Shield than the MLS Cup, but while it is certainly seen as a major trophy, it most definitely comes second to the MLS Cup in terms of prestige.

Extra clout is given to any team that manages to win both in the same season, although this is rare.

Playoffs and MLS Cup Final

MLS Cup Winners List

With 8 teams from each conference progressing to the playoffs proper, the soccer season is stretched an extra couple of months: the playoffs usually begin in October and end with the MLS Cup final in early December.

The first round is a best of 3 series, with teams from the same conference pitched against each other based on their finishing position in the conference standings. The team in first plays the team in 8th, and so on. The higher placed team plays at home first, and if a third match is needed to decide the series, that is also played at the higher placed team’s ground.

The winners move on to the Conference Semi Finals, which are single knock out games. The winners of these 4 matches move on the the conference finals, for which a trophy is won. However, it is fair to say that few fans care about the conference final trophy.

Nevertheless, the conference final winners get a better prize – a shot at the MLS Cup.

With just two teams left, the MLS Cup final is the ultimate decider. The best playoff team from the Eastern Conference against the best playoff team from the Western Conference. This is the big one, and the winner lifts the most important trophy in US soccer, the MLS Cup.

Other Competitions

Outside of the league, MLS clubs have the chance to try for a number of other trophies each season too. One of these is a domestic competition, one is an international competition, and the third is a kind of hybrid.

  • Lamar Hunt US Open Cup – The oldest domestic soccer competition in the US, first played in 1914. It’s similar to the FA Cup in England, in that clubs from the bottom tier of American soccer can take part, even amateur and semi pro teams. It’s a huge tournament full of qualifying rounds, but MLS teams don’t enter until the Round of 32.
  • Leagues Cup – A relatively new addition, the Leagues Cup is played between teams from MLS and Liga MX of Mexico. The format is quite convoluted, involving conferences, sets within those conferences, and the fact that MLS clubs and Liga MX clubs are on different league tables despite only playing teams from the opposing league. No ties allowed either.
  • CONCACAF Champions Cup – An international association football competition organized by CONCACAF, which is similar to the Champions League in Europe. MLS clubs can qualify for a place in this competition by performing well domestically, but may enter at different stages based on how they qualified.

All of these trophies are seen as great achievements that are worth winning, and doing well in them comes with financial prizes as well as advantageous seeding in competitions the following year.

Transfers and Salaries

Like any other soccer league, MLS players can be bought and sold within the league as well as being traded with teams from other countries. However, there are a few key rules in place that you won’t typically find with other leagues.

The salary cap exists to stop any team simply spending their way to the top. It keeps things fair across the league and forces clubs to spend within their means. The exact amount and the additional rules around it change periodically, but the idea is always the same.

There are ways for clubs to spend more than the salary cap, but these are tightly controlled.

The first of these is the Designated Player Rule, also known as the David Beckham rule, since it was introduced especially to bring him to MLS. The league wants big name players, but recognises they will demand a higher wage than the salary cap allows, so each team is allowed up to 3 designated players whose salaries do not contribute to the salary cap after a certain amount.

Then there is the Homegrown Player Rule. This was introduced to encourage clubs to invest in their academies and youth players. Clubs can sign players to the first team directly from their own academies, and their salaries are off the salary cap budget. It also means the club gets to keep the player rather than having to compete for them via the draft.

There are other rules and mechanisms in place such as a limited number of international roster spots, target allocation money and general allocation money, and the ability to trade assets between MLS clubs in exchange for players, but it’s way too complicated to go into here. Understanding these basics is good enough for most fans.

Betting on MLS

Betting on MLS

When the Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in 2018, it opened the floodgates for sports betting activity in the US, and Major League Soccer was a big part of that.

Betting on soccer is big business around the world, but it’s still relatively new for American fans, and even then it depends which state you live in since they all set their own sports betting laws now.

The following states all allow sports betting in some capacity, although how easily accessible it is varies from state to state:

Those who do bet on MLS have a slightly different experience to those betting on other football leagues around the world, because as explained already, the structure of Major League Soccer is set up to promote parity. In other words, there is less to separate the best teams from the worst, so it is more difficult for bookmakers when setting their odds.

There are also extra outright betting markets such as wagering on a team to make the playoffs, as well as considerations such as the impact on teams who have t travel a long way or play in a different climate for a certain game. Most countries aren’t big enough for this to be a major contributing factor, but in MLS it could be.

So the betting landscape is fertile in America, and especially on MLS with so much growing interest in soccer.