Major League Soccer announced it will cap expansion at 28 teams, closing the door after four more franchises join the 29-team league that begins play in 2025. Commissioner Don Garber confirmed the roadmap during a league event, setting a formal application window and signaling that franchise fees—last pegged at $500 million for San Diego FC in 2023—will continue climbing as bidding groups compete for final slots.
The league currently operates 29 teams including San Diego FC, which debuts in 2025. That leaves four remaining expansion slots under the new ceiling. Garber did not name target markets, but Phoenix, Las Vegas, and a second team in a major metro have drawn the most ownership interest. The application window opens in early 2025, with decisions expected by year-end. Franchise fees will be set individually based on market size, stadium commitments, and ownership strength, not published as a fixed number. Groups that presented informal pitches in 2023 and 2024 now face a compressed timeline to finalize stadium deals and local broadcast partnerships before formal bids.
The 28-team cap matters because it turns expansion from a rolling opportunity into a finite inventory problem. Family offices that spent two years on diligence now compete directly. The last franchise awarded, San Diego FC, paid $500 million in expansion fees—up from $325 million for Charlotte FC in 2019 and $200 million for Atlanta United in 2014. MLS keeps 96.5% of expansion fees, distributing the remainder to the players' union. At $500 million per slot, four franchises would inject $2 billion into league reserves, used primarily for academy infrastructure, stadium co-investments, and international player acquisition funds distributed across all clubs. That's distinct from local team revenue, which includes sponsorships, tickets, and broadcast.
The scarcity also reshapes sponsor and media positioning. MLS's current Apple TV deal runs through 2032, paying the league a reported $250 million annually with additional performance incentives. Expansion into Phoenix or Las Vegas would add two of the top 20 U.S. television markets, giving Apple more local subscriber density and MLS more leverage in the next cycle. Separately, Adidas holds the league's kit rights through 2024, with a renewal decision expected this summer. Adding four teams before that negotiation gives Adidas or a competing bidder four more SKU lines and local retail partnerships to price into the deal.
Ownership groups watching this include Phoenix Rising's existing USL operation, backed by a local investor consortium that has held informal MLS talks since 2021. Las Vegas drew interest from two separate groups, one connected to Sphere Entertainment and one to casino operators exploring sports adjacency after the Raiders and Golden Knights proved the market. San Diego FC's ownership, led by Mohamed Mansour and the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, spent 18 months negotiating a stadium lease with the city before MLS approved the bid—a model other groups will need to replicate under the compressed timeline.
The formal application window forces groups to move from exploratory to committed. That means locking stadium term sheets, naming lead investors publicly, and presenting three-year sponsorship projections MLS can underwrite. Groups that can't produce those packets by late 2025 lose the slot to a rival market. The league has historically favored ownership with adjacent sports holdings (Arthur Blank in Atlanta, the Wilf family in Minnesota) or local political capital (Mansour's San Diego partnership). Blank's group paid $70 million in 2014; the franchise is now valued above $850 million in private secondary sales, according to Sportico's latest estimates.
Garber's 28-team ceiling also closes the door on speculative bids from Sacramento, Detroit, and Indianapolis—all markets that presented formal interest but lacked the stadium or ownership clarity MLS required. Sacramento Republic FC, which came closest to a deal in 2022, saw its lead investor group collapse after failing to finalize a downtown stadium lease. The slot went to San Diego instead.
Watch for formal bid announcements from Phoenix and Las Vegas groups by summer 2025, likely timed ahead of MLS's mid-year Board of Governors meeting. Adidas renewal talks will also clarify whether the league prices in the four expansion teams or negotiates a separate addendum. Stadium groundbreakings in awarded markets typically follow 12 to 18 months after franchise approval, meaning the last MLS expansion team would debut no earlier than 2028.
The $500 million entry price is no longer theoretical. It's the floor, and the countdown is public.
The takeaway
MLS caps at 28 teams, making four remaining slots a **$2B+** auction with a 2025 application deadline.
Two hundred brands. Eight months on the desk. $0.003 an impression.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — imprinting on real authorized stock for Nike, YETI, Patagonia, The North Face, Carhartt, Stanley, Peter Millar, TUMI, Montblanc, Moleskine, Waterford, and 190 more. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign: The Stash Edge, Markets Edge, Sports Edge, Voyage Edge, Black's Edge, House Edge, the Article Engine, Ramen, and Fending.
$0.003per impression · vs ~$0.007 digital CPM
8 monthson the desk · vs 0.8s for a digital ad
200+authorized brands · Nike · YETI · Patagonia
9 deskspublishing daily · since 1997
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.