- The 2027 season will end in May instead of the usual November.
- Total regular-season matches drop from 510 to 210, about 300 fewer games to watch.
- The shortened season precedes the calendar shift for the 2027-2028 season.
MLS has cut its 2027 regular season six months short.
All 30 MLS clubs released their schedules for the upcoming abbreviated season on Thursday, which the league has coined its “sprint season.”
The MLS season typically runs from February to November, but the upcoming 2027 season will conclude in May.
As a result, there will be 300 fewer MLS matches to watch next year. The 510-match regular season total will decrease to just 210, with each club playing 14 matches — seven at home and seven away — instead of the usual 34.
Why MLS is playing a shortened 2027 season
In November 2025, MLS commissioner Don Garber announced the league would shift to a summer to spring schedule to align with the sport’s top leagues in Europe.
“The calendar shift is one of the most important decisions in our history,” Garber said in the November announcement. “Aligning our schedule with the world’s top leagues will strengthen our clubs’ global competitiveness, create better opportunities in the transfer market, and ensure our Audi MLS Cup Playoffs take center stage without interruption. It marks the start of a new era for our league and for soccer in North America.”
The move will better align with FIFA’s international windows and the summer transfer market of the top leagues.
This summer, Real Salt Lake said goodbye to 19-year-old homegrown star Zavier Gozo when he transferred to the Premier League’s Crystal Palace for RSL record transfer fee of $15 million. Following his transfer, the team went on a nine-match winless streak.
“You just won’t have your best players leaving you in the middle of competition to go play for their international teams,” RSL’s founder Dave Checketts told the Deseret News in November 2025. “If you’re playing in the summer, that’s what’s going to happen and it creates an uneven playing field for all of the teams.”
Following the sprint season, MLS will switch to the summer-spring calendar later in the year for the 2027-2028 season. The season will begin in mid-to-late July 2027 and conclude with the MLS Cup in late May 2028, according to MLS.
The MLS Cup will no longer compete for attention with the NFL and college football seasons.
“That’s important because people love the intrigue and drama of playoffs and so this places it in a much better playoff window on the calendar,” Steve Starks, CEO of the Larry H. Miller Company, the owner of RSL, told the Deseret News in November 2025.
The calendar change means Real Salt Lake will play during Utah’s coldest months of the year. It’s that very reason why Checketts didn’t think the shift would ever happen.
“It’s never felt right to be on a different calendar than the rest of the world,” he said. “I just never dreamed that it could happen because you’ve got all these cold-weather cities. Actually, Utah is better off, in my view, than Chicago or Boston or even New York.”
Though it will be an adjustment, Starks admitted, the cold weather will add to Real Salt Lake’s “home-field advantage,” he said.
Starks doesn’t expect the weather to keep fans away, who are no strangers to snowy matches, like 2017’s “Snowmaggedon.” But going forward, cold weather games will likely make up several of the season’s matches, not just at the beginning or tail end of the season.
“We have a very loyal fan base,” Starks said. “We’ve seen that, even in colder weather games.”
RSL’s 2027 sprint season schedule
Real Salt Lake will play its first four games of the 2027 season on the road, beginning Feb. 21 in Seattle for the first match of the season.
It will play its home opener on March 20 against FC Dallas. It will host St. Louis City SC, LA Galaxy, Sporting Kansas City, Minnesota United FC, Portland Timbers FC and Houston Dynamo, whom RSL will close out the regular season against on May 8, 2027.
The top eight teams in each conference qualify for the Audi 2027 MLS Cup Playoffs. Western conference single-elimination matches will begin May 15, 2027, with winners advancing to the conference semifinals on May 19, 2027.
The Western Conference finals will be played on May 22, 2027, and the MLS Cup will be played on Memorial Day weekend.
Two months later, the 2027-2028 season will begin.