MLS commissioner Don Garber eyes changes, faces challenges

Major League Soccer will conclude its 29th season on Saturday, when the LA Galaxy and New York Red Bulls face off in MLS Cup, the league’s championship match.

Ahead of Saturday’s final, MLS commissioner Don Garber gave his annual “state of the league” address, touting the growth of the league at home and abroad. In a subsequent Q&A with the assembled media, Garber, who has headed MLS since his appointment in 1999, addressed a wide range of topics, even breaking a bit of news in the process.

Here, then, are the highlights from Garber’s remarks. Quotes have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

MLS schedule change

Garber broke a bit of news during the Q&A portion, confirming that MLS will “not be playing during the 2026 World Cup.” MLS will also take off “for a portion” of the 2025 Club World Cup, clarifying that it would be a “specific break, not a full one.”

Garber said the league is still finalizing details for its break for the Club World Cup, which will be played in the U.S. next summer from June 15 to July 13. Any changes would have to be approved by the MLS board of governors, which is set to meet next week.

The 2026 World Cup will be co-hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico and will run from June 11 to July 19, 2026. The 48-team tournament will be hosted jointly by 16 cities across the three countries, with a record 104 games played.

MLS paused for the World Cup group stage in 2010, for two weeks in 2014 and for nine days in 2018.

Earlier during his state of the league address, Garber confirmed the league is weighing potential schedule changes which could have an impact on what the MLS schedule looks like in 2026. The Athletic previously reported the league was weighing a move to a fall-spring calendar used by many European leagues.

“It’s important to point out that the league, in 2004 and 2005, and then again in 2014 and 2015, looked at a schedule change,” Garber said. “I think now we could be the only league, or one of only two leagues in the world that works on our schedule. But it’s complicated. We’re across three time zones, multiple weather factors, we’re traveling across a continent, and making those changes is something we’ve got to be very, very thoughtful about. I do think that we are considering, more than ever before, this opportunity to change, but it’s not something that we’re ready to talk about right now.”

Club World Cup

Garber was at the draw for the Club World Cup, which took place in Miami on Thursday. Two MLS clubs — Inter Miami and the Seattle Sounders — will compete in the tournament, which will be played across the United States next summer.

Miami’s draw included Brazilian club Palmeiras, historic Portuguese club Porto and Egyptian club Al Ahly. Seattle landed with some significant global giants, including Paris St-Germain and La Liga powerhouse Atletico Madrid. While clubs like Seattle and Miami are high-spending sides within MLS, their roster values pale in comparison to other clubs, globally.

Seattle and Miami’s place in this tournament is surely a rare opportunity for the league to leave a stamp internationally — and to sell itself to a domestic audience that will be able to compare MLS teams against top clubs from around the world. That could backfire, of course, if results go badly. On Friday, Garber was asked whether he feels MLS’ clubs are truly equipped to compete on a global stage. His answer felt grounded in reality and did not do a ton to inspire confidence.

Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami won the 2024 MLS Supporters Shield, but the Club World Cup will be a stern test (Chris Arjoon / AFP via Getty Images)

“I was at the draw yesterday,” said Garber, “and I saw something in the news today about transfer market values of each club (in the tournament) and clearly, MLS teams are at the lower quadrant of transfer market value. And that’s something, over time, that I hope will continue to grow as our teams are investing more in players and hopefully generating more revenue to justify that expense.

“We’re working on ways that we can provide each team with some opportunity to be more competitive,” added Garber. “Talk about that a bit at our next board meeting, which is next Thursday. So stay tuned on that factor.”

Garber also alluded to potential changes the league could make in terms of roster construction and spending but stopped short of giving any specifics.
“There’s discussions going on (about that),” Garber told reporters, “But I wouldn’t put it in the category of significant. MLS is constantly, every year, looking at ways that we could incentivize our teams to use their resources better, to be very, very productive and efficient. We’re in the middle of a collective bargaining agreement with the (Major League Soccer Players Association) and we’ve got a great relationship with them, but I don’t anticipate anything significant happening in the next couple of years.”

What is the right metric for Apple and audience comparisons to linear?

On a media tour ahead of MLS Cup over the last few days, Garber has continued to express optimism around the league’s media deal with Apple.
The commissioner has also been more open about his desire to share numbers that might give the public a better idea of how the partnership is going, but said that the industry is still figuring out how to gauge streaming numbers. At some point, Garber said, “we and Apple and the rest of the streaming world” will determine a measurement that will “become the norm.”

“This is a new world for all of us,” Garber said. “We have decades and generations of Nielsen ratings, of traditional measurements of how people consume sports. There’s a couple of people have a box in their house, and those people have that box turned on, and that’s the way we measure traditional, linear viewership. As we get into a world of streaming, the entire industry has got to figure out a new metric. Is that metric, average minute audience? Is it unique viewers? How could we figure out the right way to compare the audiences that we’ve had in the past to the audiences that we have now?

GO DEEPER

MLS took a risk with the timing of its Apple TV partnership. Did they get it right?

“How important is subscriptions to viewership? To us, subscriptions are very important. Somebody’s paying for the opportunity to watch a game, so when they do watch it, it is intentional. That’s leading to this 65-minute time that people are spending on our games. But we are very pleased with the viewership numbers.”

Garber speculated whether the league should be measuring audience on a per-game basis, as they did when they had games on ESPN, or whether they should measure nightly audience across games on their streaming app.

“We have over a million viewers watching those games on a Saturday night, the collective viewership of those games; we’re proud of that,” Garber said. “That’s way more than we’ve ever had for a regular season match. We’re having more than than that watch our playoff games. … At some point soon, we’re all going to have a measurement that the industry is going to accept, and we’ll be the first ones to be happy to talk about it.”

What is MLS doing to grow the fanbase?

If MLS wants its viewership numbers on Apple TV to grow, it needs to find ways to reach new audience, a challenge that is even more difficult when the majority of the product is behind a paywall.

The league has said it wants to double its fanbase in coming years, though it hasn’t been specific as to what metric it is using toward that goal. Garber said the league has been studying how it can reach new fans.

“What does it mean now that we have a direct relationship with a consumer? How could we lean in better to data? How do we have a more structured infrastructure, and investment in that infrastructure for our teams and for our league to be a funnel to collect information about fans and talk to them about what matters to them, so that we can convert them from being a soccer fan to being an MLS fan,” Garber said. “How could we work with Apple to have more content and other partners like Bleacher Report and OneFootball to have more content that would promote and tell the story about our players, similar to what we’re doing with (production company) Box to Box (Films).

“And then we’ve got to look at our competitive format. Should that change? Should it stay the same? What are we going to do with our calendar? When could those changes be made? Do we have the same conference set up?… I don’t have an answer to it, but we’re looking at it. Now that we’ll have 30 teams, do we have the same playoff format? Maybe. Maybe we don’t. But all those things will go into a pathway to grow our fan base and make our league more competitive.”

On Bruce Arena

Garber was asked about San Jose Earthquakes head coach Bruce Arena, who joined the club in November. Arena, the winningest coach in MLS history, was forced to resign from his most recent MLS job at the New England Revolution after a league investigation found he’d made “insensitive and inappropriate remarks.” The nature of those remarks has never been publicized.

Bruce Arena’s appointment in San Jose was a major talking point (Jeff Dean / Getty Images)

Arena landed in San Jose after completing a league-mandated reinstatement protocol, the specifics of which have never been shared. Arena himself has never specifically addressed the incident in any real detail but expressed remorse for his actions in the aftermath of the investigation. Garber was asked whether the league could shed any light on any of it.

“I appreciate the question, but it’s not something that I’m going to talk about,” said Garber. “Obviously Bruce would not have been approved to coach in Major League Soccer if he didn’t satisfy whatever standards and things that we wanted him to satisfy. Much more than that, I’m not going to comment.”

Open Cup/Leagues Cup chatter

The Leagues Cup, MLS and Liga MX’s joint venture that includes every team in both leagues, suffered a bit of a letdown in year two, failing to recapture the Messi-inspired magic of the tournament’s inaugural edition in 2023.

Some of those issues stemmed from the format of the tournament itself, which led to a bevy of matches played between MLS sides, sort of defeating the competition’s stated purpose of pitting one league’s clubs against the others. The tournament, played in the middle of the MLS season, felt more like a burden for some MLS clubs.

Changes could be afoot — ESPN and others have reported that MLS may limit which clubs participate, choosing to send some to the U.S. Open Cup instead. MLS has in recent years also revised its approach to that tournament, the oldest competition in American soccer.

On Friday, Garber addressed both tournaments, saying that the league would like teams to play in at least one tournament each season, and for some clubs to participate in multiple competitions.

“We will participate in the US Open Cup again next year,” Garber said, “We will likely have more teams (than 2024) … but it is going to be nearly impossible for all teams to be able to participate in all tournaments, it’s just not enough games during the schedule, with or without any change in the calendar.”

Of the changes to Leagues Cup, Garber didn’t provide specifics but seemed to hint that it would be geared toward more rivalry play between the MLS and Liga MX sides.

“We need more MLS versus Liga MX matches,” Garber said. “That was really the point of the Leagues Cup in the in the beginning. … We’ve been trying to figure out a way to get this right. I think we really got it right with the Leagues Cup. It worked super well in the first year. That was not just about Messi, it was just the way the tournament laid out. And we’re looking at modifications that will, I think, make it more focused on what it is that we’re trying to achieve, which is this great rivalry between our two leagues.”

(Top photo: Mike Lawrie/Getty Images)