MLS expansion is a pyramid scheme dressed up as a soccer league

The Franchise Fee Addiction

Major League Soccer cannot stop expanding. It is an addiction, pure and simple.

The league is barrelling toward 30 teams by 2026, and Commissioner Don Garber still leaves the door cracked for more. San Diego FC paid an eye-watering $500 million franchise fee to join the party. That is half a billion dollars just for the right to exist, before a single blade of grass is cut or a single player is signed.

When you look at the raw financials, the strategy becomes glaringly obvious. MLS is functioning less like a competitive sports league and more like a franchise fee pyramid scheme. Existing owners get a hefty payout every time a new billionaire buys a seat at the table. But what happens to the actual football?

The on-field product is suffering. You cannot add this many teams this quickly without severely diluting the talent pool. The American developmental system is improving, but it is nowhere near deep enough to supply 30 competitive starting XIs.

Diluting the Product

Let's be brutally honest about the current standard of play. For every thrilling LAFC versus Inter Miami clash, there are a dozen turgid, error-strewn matches between teams constructed entirely of allocation money and hope.

When St. Louis City SC entered the league, they shocked everyone by winning the Western Conference in their inaugural year. It was a great story. But it was also a damning indictment of the league's overall quality. A team of cast-offs and budget signings, playing a chaotic high-press system, managed to steamroll established clubs because most MLS rosters are incredibly fragile.

Look at the bottom of the table. The Colorado Rapids and the Chicago Fire have spent years wandering in the wilderness, trotting out squads that would get absolutely slaughtered in the English Championship. Adding more expansion teams does not fix this. It just spreads the limited pool of competent domestic players even thinner.

San Diego making a splash by signing Hirving Lozano is exactly the kind of move the league office loves. A big name, a designated player, a shiny hood ornament. But a single star winger cannot mask a backline anchored by a 32-year-old journeyman selected in the Re-Entry Draft.

The Parity Trap

The core problem with the 2026 expansion rush is how it interacts with MLS salary rules. The league is obsessed with parity. It desperately wants to ensure that every team has a theoretical chance to make the playoffs, which now invite a comical nine teams per conference.

But parity in a 30-team league does not mean everyone is great. It means everyone is painfully average.

The convoluted roster rules—TAM, GAM, Designated Players, U-22 initiatives—are designed to prevent any single owner from spending their way to dominance. This protects the investment of the cheapest owners. The San Jose Earthquakes can spend the bare minimum, field an uncompetitive roster for a decade, and their franchise value still skyrockets because they are insulated from consequence.

Without the threat of relegation, there is no punishment for incompetence. Austin FC reached the Western Conference Final in 2022, then collapsed into irrelevance the following year because their front office made terrible decisions. And it does not matter. The stadium still sells out, the beer flows, and the owners count their money.

The Apple TV Disconnect

Garber and the owners will point to the massive 10-year, $2.5 billion broadcast deal with Apple TV as proof that the expansion model works. They boast about being a global product.

The broadcast presentation is undeniably slick. But it also hides a growing local disconnect. By moving all games behind a paywall, MLS has virtually eliminated the casual local fan. If you live in Houston, you used to be able to stumble across a Dynamo game on a regional sports network. Now, you have to actively seek it out and pay for a subscription.

When you combine reduced local visibility with a diluted on-field product, you get a serious problem. You can build a beautiful new stadium in Indianapolis or Sacramento, but if the team strings together three losing seasons, the hype will evaporate instantly. We saw it happen in Cincinnati before Pat Noonan arrived to clean up the mess.

The 2026 Mirage

The entire expansion push is timed to capitalize on the 2026 World Cup. The idea is to blanket the United States with localized franchises so that when World Cup fever hits, everyone has a team in their backyard.

It is a bold marketing strategy, but it ignores the reality of the modern soccer consumer. The American soccer fan in 2026 is incredibly sophisticated. They watch the Premier League on Saturday mornings. They watch the Champions League on Tuesday afternoons. They know what elite football looks like.

If a new fan tunes in to watch Arsenal slice through a low block with precision passing, and then turns on their local MLS expansion team on Saturday night only to watch two exhausted midfields turn the ball over 40 times, they are not going to stick around.

MLS needs to stop selling expansion slots. The map is full. The league needs to focus entirely on raising the salary cap, simplifying the roster rules, and allowing ambitious clubs to actually build super-teams. Let Atlanta United and LA Galaxy spend heavily on their entire roster, not just three guys at the top.

Until the league stops dragging the ceiling down to protect the floor, this relentless expansion is just creating a perfectly mediocre product. The music will stop eventually, and a lot of these new clubs will be left playing in half-empty stadiums.