Photo Paul Rudderow

Next year in 2027 MLS’s previously announced calendar transition will occur. MLS will switch from a Spring-Summer-Fall season with the off-season being the Winter, to a Fall-Winter-Spring one with the offseason being the Summer. It will take a mid-winter break with no matches in January.

The transition makes tracking when Philadelphia players’ contracts expire more complex because contract expiration dates now vary. Who has signed for what future seasons with what expiration datesbecomes more complex to discern. Fortunately, the complexities will be “one offs.”

Below we do four things.

• We clarify the calendar transition and the sprint season.
• We develop our understanding of whose contracts expire when.
• Then we identify and summarize what Union roster decisions must be made this season in 2026.
• And in a postscript, we attempt to unravel an apparent 2026 Philadelphia Union roster anomaly.

MLS’s calendar transition

In its condensed essence, MLS’s calendar transition will move Major League Soccer from a Winter Off-season to a Summer one. They will synchronize themselves to all European leagues except the four most northern ones. And they will synchronize themselves to Mexico.

The 2026 MLS calendar (February 21^st, 2026 through December 18^th 2026) will be the league’s last Spring-Summer-Fall one. Its next full-length 34-game competition will be a Fall-Winter-Spring event that – we guess – will run from the middle of July, 2027 to the end of May, 2028 with the aforementioned winter break.

Without any supplemental addition of games, the change would create a one-time seven-month hole, seven months without games between December 18^th, 2026 and – we estimate – mid-July 2027. Without those games all MLS clubs would be without two significant revenue sources, ticket sales and broadcast TV/livestream video revenues.

But for those seven months expenses would not disappear. Both club and league budgeting currently expect an off-season of one and a half to two months, not seven. Simultaneously MLS will continue to have an obligation to provide its annual quota of participants for the Concacaf Champions Cup, one of the regional federation’s own revenue sources, and to the Leagues Cup, a joint operation with Liga MX.

For all these reasons – and for others we probably do not discern – a one-time special “season” is being created as a transitional stepping stone towards the new calendar arrangement. It is to be called the “Sprint Season.”

Mexican professional soccer provides a rough analogy that may clarify the new creation via a partially comparable example.  The comparison has limits. The anomalous one-off “sprint season” compares approximately to a Liga MX half-season Apertura or Clausera followed by its culminating Liguilla. But the analogy then breaks down because MLS’s creation will have dual, simultaneous competitions of 15 teams each, while Liga MX has a single one of 17.

What we know and deduce

The short “sprint” season will be a transitional stepping-stone lasting approximately half a year. As suggested above it will provide revenue to owners, front office employees, technical staff, and players, and indirectly to Concacaf itself.

It has been announced as a 14-game regular season followed by a simplified, shorter playoff event. After off-season this coming December and January of uncertain length, we estimate the 14-game sprint season will begin in mid-to-late February 2027 and probably endure until latest April or earliest May. We would guess the length to be ten or eleven weeks.

A simplified playoff will follow. An example to imitate might be MLS NEXT Pro’s. They use single playoff games a week apart hosted by the higher surviving seed. The Sprint season’s simplified playoff would end with the only interconference play of the entire event, MLS NEXTPro Cup itself. These playoffs would most likely occupy all of May.

June and earliest July 2027 would become the new summer offseason, with the new full-length season starting probably in the middle of July.

Concacaf has clearly agreed, since MLS has announced that the sprint season’s process will generate MLS’s participants for both Leagues Cup and Concacaf Champions Cup. The announcement could not have been published without the regional federation’s approval. . Revenue generation for both themselves and their constituents provides partial explanation for Concacaf’s acceptance.

As of last November 13th the MLS Players Association and the league were still talking. There has been nothing announced publicly since.

Since the sprint season has 14 games and each conference has 15 teams, logic suggests each MLS club will play its 14 conference opponents once. Since the number of total matches is divisible by two, the games will split equally between home and away, thus giving every club equal revenue opportunities. The only inter-conference match during the sprint season will be the playoff championship final, presumably called and recorded as an MLS Cup.Logically, it should be played on the very last weekend of May.

The new full season would logically begin six or so weeks later in the middle of July. The 2027-28 regular season is expected to end by the end of April with the playoffs occupying all of May.

Player contracts

As we turn to Philadelphia Union player contracts and pending roster decisions, we must warn that many of the  details we presented above rely on logical inference and sensible analogy rather than formally announced facts. It is guesswork.

Players signed long before MLS’s calendar transition had been announced were often announced as signing contracts ending on December 31^st of the particular year. All the official roster announcements, league provided explanations of roster procedures, and the current Collective Bargaining Agreement or CBA (as provided by the players association) use that date.

Players signed since the transition’s announcement have been signed to contracts that reflect a Fall-Winter-Spring season and should end on June 30^th of the particular year. Both club and league announcements pertaining to goalkeeper George Marks, center back Japhet Sery, midfielder/left back Ben Bender, center back Geiner Martinez, attacker Agustin Anello, left back Philippe Ndinga, defender Nathan Harriel, and striker Malik Jacupovic illustrate our assertion of June 30^th of the given year as their contract’s end date.

2026’s roster decisions

On to the Philadelphia Union roster decisions that must be made this year.

1. Alejandro Bedoya. The midfielder and captain emeritus will be out of contract and become an unrestricted free agent after December 31^st, 2026.
2. Andre Blake. The club holds an option for next year to bring back goalkeeper and captain Blake. We presume the option runs through and includes December 31^st, 2027 , given the early date of his most recent contract announcement (23rd May, 2024).
3. Jesus Bueno. The club holds an option for next year to bring back defensive midfielder Bueno, we presume through December 31^st, 2027.
4. George Marks. The Marks decision is the most complex. The club holds an option for the 2027 sprint season itself to bring back the third goalkeeper through and including June 30, 2027. They then hold a second option on him through and including June 30^th, 2028.

The club holds many other options that lie further forward into the future, but none of them requires a decision to be made during calendar 2026. That does not mean other decisions may not be made, as new Sporting Director Jon Scheer asserted in the  press conference that introduced him.  But the four we list above are certain to be made this calendar year.

Postscript

A postscript for detail-obsessed roster junkies concerns teenage left-footed center back/left back Kaiden Moore.

On its recently released spring 26 salary guide the MLS players association lists him as a first team player. We infer from the inclusion that his contract is held by MLS as it was last year when he was on loan from Atlanta and officially his contract was held by the league on behalf of the five stripes.

But Philadelphia’s directly observed behavior suggests they classify Moore differently.

The technical staff treat him as a Union II player. Their website rosters him that way, and our ten years of covering both Bethlehem Steel FC and Philadelphia Union II suggests the technical staff controls roster listings.

• Moore practices with Union II,
• Moore dresses with them, usuall as a bench reserve,
• Moore plays with them in games.
• Ryan Richter has been his head coach, not Bradley Carnell.

Richter has answered direct questions about Moore’s development. In our experience Richter has always been most careful to not discuss first team players when he has judged the question should have fallen to Carnell.

Moore will also require a roster decision in 2026. But since Philadelphia treats him as a Union II player and this article covers only first team roster decisions, we exclude him from this discussion.