26 teams and counting: has MLS become too big for its own good?

The number ’25’ has formed a central pillar of Major League Soccer’s promotional push ahead of the new season as the competition celebrates a quarter century of existence. Twenty-six also holds some significance, with the introduction of Inter Miami and Nashville further expanding MLS to 26 teams. By next year the league will count 28 franchises among its ranks. There will be 30 by 2022.

This represents a 300% growth since 1996, when the league’s 10 founding teams contested the inaugural MLS season. Of course, there are many yardsticks with which to measure the maturation of the league over the past 25 years, but this rapid expansion must be considered a sign of MLS’s overall success.

But how big is too big? MLS already has the biggest top-flight in world soccer and it’s about to get even bigger over the next two years. There’s no sign that expansion will stop at 30 teams either. In fact, Don Garber admitted at an industry conference last November that “32 teams will happen at some point”.

The goalposts have been moved more than once before, though. It’s not so long ago that the notion of expanding to 24 teams was played down. The first decade-and-a-half of MLS’s history was defined by a sense of caution. The ghost of the old NASL, of the New York Cosmos and Pele, haunted MLS and so it expanded tentatively.

Soccer in Canada and the United States, at least at the top level, no longer feels so fragile. Franchise spots now command fees in the hundreds of millions (see the $325m Charlotte has reportedly agreed to pay for an expansion place) with almost every major market in Canada and the US either already home to an MLS club or hopeful of one day hosting one.

Has MLS swung to the other extreme, though, by nearly doubling in size in just over a decade? Is this rate of expansion diluting the quality of the soccer being produced? And are prospective franchises being as thoroughly vetted as before - look at the recent power struggle between MLS and the mayor of Nashville over the reneging of a stadium deal for the city’s new club?

Related: Is promotion and relegation any closer in US soccer?

The size of the league is already changing the fixture list: this season will be the first in which teams will not play everyone else in MLS. This will warp the Supporters’ Shield, awarded to the team that finishes the regular season top of the standings. What true competitive value will be in the regular season if one side’s fixtures are tougher than another’s?

Of course, MLS is unique in the vast area and population it covers. Canada and the United States’ combined population is around 365 million, so maybe 30 teams for that many people isn’t a stretch.

MLS has always sought to strike a difficult balance between the Euro-centric culture of soccer and that of the American sporting landscape. This is, after all, a division with trades and salary caps and an All-Star game, as well as shirt sponsors and tifos and teams that make a point of underlining the ‘FC’ in their name. MLS is performing another balancing act in its rapid expansion, with the sport’s traditional norms cast aside in the hope that a North American audience will be more accepting of a format that would be thrown out in Europe or South America.

Many believe promotion and relegation to be the solution. With every expansion spot handed out, the discussion around the concept becomes increasingly pertinent, and tribal, with fans divided into two camps - those who believe the current structure is ideal and those who believe it limits the true potential of the sport in Canada and the US.

Once again, this could be another case in which MLS has to strike a balance between what is considered orthodox soccer culture and American sporting convention. Has Charlotte’s ownership group, for instance, really paid $325m for the risk of relegation to hang over them? If promotion and relegation is ever to happen it’s likely that rather than opening up the North American soccer pyramid MLS will create a pyramid of its own - mobility between an MLS 1 and MLS 2 for example. Even then, there’s no suggestion this will be implemented any time soon if at all.

Measuring whether or not MLS’s rapid expansion has harmed the quality of the soccer itself isn’t easy. Last season saw Los Angeles FC set a regular season points record with Carlos Vela setting a new record for goals scored in a single season just one year after Josef Martinez did the same. That could be seen as a sign of a decline in quality, particularly defensive quality, but could also be taken as a sign of a swell - are the league’s strikers just getting better?

There is no doubting the value expansion has brought to MLS. Without it soccer probably wouldn’t have taken hold in Atlanta, ‘Safe Standing’ might not have become such an integral part of the matchday experience and Wonderwall wouldn’t be a Saint Paul anthem. Most of us likely would never have heard of Timber Joey. But as MLS stretches further across the map the prospect of overreaching also grows.