Two-thirds of MLS teams could make the playoffs. Let that sink in. According to The Guardian, the league is seriously weighing a format that would send 20 of its clubs into a postseason bracket starting with the 2027-28 season — more than any major North American sports league currently allows.
MLS declined to confirm the specifics when approached by Sports Illustrated, but didn't deny them either, saying the league is "continuing to evaluate potential adjustments to its postseason format" as part of its wider move to a fall-to-spring calendar. That's not a denial. That's a league letting a trial balloon float.
How the bracket would actually work
The current two-conference setup gets scrapped entirely. In its place: five geographically based six-team divisions that exist purely to shape the schedule — they carry no direct qualifying weight. Instead, all 30-plus clubs compete in a single combined table, with the top 20 advancing to the postseason.
Here's where it gets complicated. Teams ranked 13th through 20th enter a play-in round. Four survive and join teams ranked 9th through 12th in a secondary round. The top eight teams, meanwhile, enter a double-elimination bracket in Round One — meaning a single loss doesn't end your season, but two does. Every subsequent round is re-seeded, so the highest remaining seed always faces the lowest and hosts the match.
Single-game elimination throughout. No best-of-three series, no two-legged ties. One match, move on or go home.
Double elimination is standard in curling and Australian rules football — the AFL has used a similar double-chance bracket for years — but it's largely foreign to American sports audiences. That's either an exciting wrinkle or a fan-education nightmare, depending on your optimism level.
The 66% problem — and why it matters for value
Context on that 66% figure: the NHL sits at 50%, the NFL at 44%, MLB at 53%. The NBA gets close with its play-in format, also allowing up to 20 teams to compete beyond the regular season, but without double elimination. MLS would be in a bracket of one.
The obvious criticism writes itself: if two-thirds of your league makes the playoffs, what exactly does the regular season prove? The league is attempting to square that circle with the double-elimination structure for top seeds — theoretically rewarding regular-season performance with a safety net — but a team finishing 18th still gets a path to the MLS Cup. That's a feature or a flaw depending on who you ask, and it makes mid-table regular-season positioning almost irrelevant from a qualification standpoint.
For anyone tracking MLS futures markets, this format would dramatically compress the odds field. When 20 clubs have a live shot at the title, the gap between a favorite and a long shot shrinks considerably. A team that finishes 15th in the regular season could, in theory, run the table.
Before any of this kicks in, at least one more MLS Cup gets awarded under the current format — the 2026 final is set for December 18, 2026, the latest date in league history. A transitional 14-game sprint season follows in 2027, with its own as-yet-undetermined playoff format. The first full campaign under the new divisional structure would be 2027-28, with the MLS Cup final penciled in for May 21, 2028.
No determinations made. Process ongoing. But the direction of travel is clear enough.
