The Battle for MLS Parity

MLS is at a delicate position where parity reigns king... but will that last?

MLS is at a crossroads right now.

In 2027, the league will shift its schedule to match the European calendar, in theory making it easier to attract high-end talent. The change was made for that exact reason and to capitalize on that market to sell players.

It also means that the current CBA will expire at the halfway point of the new season. Ending in January 2028, the league will need to renegotiate with the MLSPA in order to prevent a work stoppage during its brand-new and improved format. With a new CBA comes the potential for new roster rules, the hot-button topic of MLS. Everyone has an opinion on the rules, with the vast majority of fans and executives hoping for change.

The ideas have ranged from getting rid of everything and significantly increasing the cap to a more modest increase with the same mechanisms in place. There’s one aspect that MLS and its competition committee need to be wary of when making these decisions. Something that every league in North America has yearned for.

Parity.

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Parity is such a powerful thing in sports. It keeps fan interest going. Often, in other European leagues, we see the same teams running away with the league. In England, it’s the Big 6 (well, minus Spurs). In Germany, Bayern Munich always pulls away. In Spain, Barcelona and Real Madrid duke it out, with an occasional appearance from Atletico Madrid. The parity seen in MLS is almost unheard of in the sport. The last repeat MLS Cup winner was the Galaxy in 2011/2012. It’s been 14 years since we’ve seen a team go back-to-back. While we always call out teams who will be at the top of the MLS standings, the champion has changed.

We can credit part of that to the ever-so-restrictive roster rules. Yes, they are at times complicated and convoluted, but the cap and the way teams can obtain GAM prevent a team from pulling away. A team can spend a boatload, but they are confined to essentially six special slots to spend damn near whatever they want. Each player on the rest of the roster has to be below the average budget charge of $1.8M, within some other parameter, bought down; y’all know the drill.

But those rules do provide us with this league, where any team can turn around its roster with two or three transfer windows and be back into contention.

Where does that balance lie? The league needs to increase its spending across the roster. Multiple teams have signaled that they’d like to increase the spend, while there are a few that seem to be fine with the current rules. The league has made minor tweaks to increase total spend on a roster, as we detailed in a previous post. While those changes worked, there’s still more work to be done if MLS wants to consider itself in the upper echelon of soccer across the world.

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Let’s take a look back on MLS salary spending in 2025. We’re going to take the latest MLSPA salary release from October 2025 and look at the wages teams spend. Removing DPs and U22s, teams on average spent around ~$10.3M. This ranged from CF Montreal, who spent $7.4M on its roster, to LAFC, who spent $12.7M. This does include players who went on the SEI, as they’re still being paid, just not hitting the cap.

The gap of around $5M is a lot, and we see it on the field. LAFC is competing for championships and continental supremacy, while Montreal finished 13th in the Eastern Conference. There’s already space forming from the rest of the roster spend. LAFC is trying to maximize every spot, while CF Montreal left two U22 positions open.

Now throw in Heung-Min Son and Denis Bouanga, and the difference grows even further.

We’ve already discussed why the spending has to go up in this league, and why the rules have to loosen. What happens when that difference between Montreal and LAFC is way more than $5M? It’s easy to say that we should just let them fail. That’s how people lost interest in MLS and move on to other things.

I’m not a believer that the league should just have four to five marquee teams. Are there going to be brands that people know and stand out? Yup. Inter Miami will probably be the brand that everyone recognizes. The Galaxy are another, even with their inconsistency. When it comes to parity, leagues are fighting for it now.

The NBA implemented all of its apron rules to prevent super teams from forming again. The Boston Celtics had to blow up their championship-winning side to avoid the harsh penalties of second apron and massive financial implications. It’s why CBA talk is so big in the league; forming a team that can fit under those restrictive rules is an art and constantly sees teams refresh in order to keep their core together.

Look, across the league, everyone needs to increase their spending on their roster. The rules should incentivize that. I just don’t want a league where the haves and the have-nots are separated by an even greater margin than what exists today, even in the era of the current cap. The teams that are slower to adapt need to be held accountable, but the rules should give them a reason to do so.

Parity is something that we should be protecting in some capacity. It shouldn’t be the end-all, but there have to be some guardrails to maintain some semblance of it.

Do we really want the same four to five teams competing for MLS Cup year in and year out?