Major League Soccer released its schedule for the 2025 regular season on Thursday, and in the process showed the league and its media partner Apple TV have taken some recent criticisms by fans to heart.
Here's what will be different about how the league contests its 34-game regular season schedule and why it matters.
Although MLS can't guarantee that Lionel Messi will be healthier in 2025 than he was in 2024 for Inter Miami, they can schedule Miami's matches so more of the league's fans have a chance to watch without choosing between the eight-time Ballon d'Or winner and their own team.
According to the dates and times on the initial schedule, 12 of Miami's 34 league games will be standalone affairs, meaning they won't be running concurrently to any other matches in league play. That's good news for fans of the league's 29 other clubs who still want to watch the game's greatest living player as often as possible.
Now the league will hope the 37-year-will plays most of Miami's matches this season. He only made 19 league appearances in 2024 while battling leg injuries and managing international commitments. But when he was on the field, he put up numbers better than anyone who has ever played in the league.
Putting Messi in more standalone spots is just one part of a broader strategy to move more matches outside of the 7:30 p.m. local time Saturday and Wednesday match windows that dominated the first two seasons.
In 2025, there will be 102 total matches played outside the 7 p.m. ET to 1 a.m. ET windows on Wednesdays and Saturdays, or exactly 20% of the league' schedule. That's way more than a season ago.
The majority of those games fall either on Saturday afternoons or on Sundays.
Some of those kickoff times owe to the preferences of FOX or TSN, the league's lineal TV partners in the U.S. and Canada. And some appear to be concessions to colder weather markets who prefer daytime kickoffs in the spring and fall.
But it also appears like the league is making a purposeful effort to spread out the footprint of the week-t0-week schedule to make it easier for fans to watch their own club in person and check out a couple other games on TV each weekend.
The league will take only one weekend off on account of the 2025 League Cup this season -- the weekend of Aug. 2 -- compared to four weekends in the first two years of the competition.
While the format of the 2025 tournament hasn't been announced, what is clear is at least the later stages will be contested as a midweek event while league play continues during weekends.
The result is that no teams will be forced to endure an extended wait for competitive play to resume if they crash out of the Leagues Cup earlier. Last season, eight MLS teams faced a break of about three weeks between competitive matches as a result of their early Leagues Cup exits
There has been some discussion that the addition of San Diego as the league's 30th team will bring with it a switch in playoff structure.
That wasn't clarified on Thursday. But we did learn that the league's final regular season games will still fall in mid-October. Theoretically, that could allow the league to maintain its current playoff format for a third season.
The league could also choose to play a single-elimination tournament and conclude its season earlier, as it did during the 2022 season. Or it could employ a World Cup-style tournament with a group phase contested before the November international window and a knockout phase contested after. This latter idea was originally discussed when Apple TV first entered its worldwide 10-year streaming deal with MLS, but was passed over for the current format.