Photo courtesy Bethlehem Steel FC Communications

Even as Ryan Richter has focused his team and his team’s fans on the possibility of making the 2026 MLS playoffs, Major league Soccer is on the verge of the second-biggest makeover in its history, second only to its creation out of whole cloth after the 1994 World Cup. Some elements of the makeover have already been voted and announced; many others have not. They range from reliably but unofficially reported to wildly rumored, and there are many gradations in between.

No longer two conferences

One unofficial but seemingly reliable, probable report is that the 30-team league will scrap its two conferences of 15 teams each and replace them with five regional groups of six teams each. The new scheme supposedly comes into effect in its next,  new full-scale season that runs from July of 2027 through May of 2028. No decisions on the matter have yet been voted into place. 

The regular season’s length would remain 34 games. Each team would play the other five in its group home and away providing10 games. And each side would play the other 24 teams in the league once making the total 34. They would alternate the other 24 home and away on alternate seasons.

MLS is double the usual size of most European soccer first divisions because it has the distances and time zones of an entire continent. Minimizing travel as a fundamental goal behind the makeover generates the following groups. We use in-air flight times and mileages to approach similarity  within the groups. Flying involving what it does with airport security, distances to gates, and luggage collection, total travel times would be longer. Group titles given below are working abbreviations and have not been massaged by anyone’s public relations or marketing department.

Consequences discussed

A regrouping necessarily preserves some existing rivalries but disrupts others.

• The Pacific/Northwest group would preserve the Cascadia Cup, but reduce three other rivalries to once a year and home every other year: San Jose versus the LA Galaxy, LA FC versus LA Galaxy, and San Diego versus the Galaxy. 
• The Southwest/Mountain group would preserve the Texas trio and the Intermountain Cup, but reduce the rivalries involving the Galaxy that extend in some cases back to the foundation of the league, 
• The Central/Midwest group would preserve the Hell is Real Derby between Cincinnati and Columbus and both St. Louis versus Chicago and St. Louis versus Kansas City. It reduces Cincinnati-Philadelphia from twice to once.
• The South/Southeast grouping reminds us that the nation’s capital has historically been a southern city..It keeps both Orlando versus Miami and the southern trio of Nashville, Atlanta, and Charlotte. But It reduces DC versus Philadelphia and DC versus both the New York teams from twice to once.
• The Northeast/Eastern Canada group preserves Toronto versus Montreal, Montreal versus both New York teams, and Philadelphia versus both New Yorks. It reduces DC versus Philadelphia and DC versus both New Yorks. 

Reducing travel equitably within the groups does happen under the new scheme. Only three of the 25 different intra-group itineraries call for buses.

Travel beyond the groups necessarily includes transcontinental and trans-climatological events since both latitude and longitude are involved.“Snow bird“ events continue, for example, Montreal to San Diego, but there are not as many of them.

The longest flight within a group is Los Angeles to Houston, four hours air time or slightly less. The longest flight overall is Miami to Vancouver, six and a quarter hours in the air or roughly equivalent to flying across the Atlantic from Boston to Dublin.

Here are the three logical candidates for bus travel.

• Cincinnati to Columbus, 106 miles & 1 2/3s hours drive time on interstate 71. 
• DC to Philadelphia 139 miles & 2 1/2 hours on I-95. 
• Philadelphia to New York, 95 miles & 1 3/4 hours also I-95.

The attractions of busing include the convenience of going door to door.  Ten-minute flight times still require boarding, deplaning, and the collection of luggage, to say nothing of the avoidance of airport security and internal distances. 

A history lesson

As a final note, we discovered years ago while covering Bethlehem Steel FC (see photo), that crossing the Canadian border adds the complication of passing a soccer team’s gear through customs. Back then after a bad experience on the first trip, Bethlehem did not fly directly to Toronto because airport customs demanded precise exactly listed  knowledge from each player of all the additional team gear he himself was carrying. To comply with aircraft weight and size limits on luggage, uniforms athletic equipment and training room kits all had to be distributed among individual players.  Bomb scares meant that security people demanded precise knowledge of exactly what was in every piece of luggage. Consider what that meant for a player carrying a medical kit. 

Instead of dealing with the Toronto airport, every subsequent time Bethlehem flew to Rochester, and then bussed from Rochester  to Toronto.  Because there were fewer security concerns, and because their were no weight limits on luggage, customs where the bus crossed the border was both faster and more flexible. The saved aggravation was well worth the extra effort and time.