During his introductory news conference, MLS commissioner Larry Berg was asked about the potential of promotion and relegation.While Berg said it wasn’t on the table, the league’s incoming leader insisted they were exploring ways to replicate pro-rel’s competitive jeopardy.“The great thing about promotion and relegation for fans is the jeopardy is quite severe,” Berg said. “But I think there are other ways to create jeopardy during the regular season, to get into the playoffs (and) during the playoffs, to get to the next round. In the World Cup, we all enjoy knockout games after the group stage. I call those ‘games of consequence’ or ‘games of jeopardy.’ And I think that’s what we’re more focused on than specifically relegation.”Berg is right. MLS faces the very real problem of a regular season in which games feel like they don’t matter, while its playoff games are competitive and entertaining. The task Berg and owners face is changing the equation to create more games where the stakes and consequences feel present on the day, not in retrospect.Kristoffer Velde and his Portland Timbers teammates celebrate in front of supporters. (Soobum Im/Getty Images)MLS has yet to vote on its new postseason structure, but as The Athletic reported in November 2025, it is in the final stages of approving a structure loosely equivalent to Australian Rules Football — “double chance” games for higher-seeded teams and more single-elimination games.The Athletic can confirm that MLS is finalizing a format that will expand its postseason from 16 to 20 teams — which would seem to run counter to the idea of introducing more games of jeopardy during the regular season. The Guardian first reported details of the expanded format. The hope, though, is that the structure and incentives within that larger postseason field will make regular season games matter more.Maybe that works, but it will place an enormous onus on the league to sell the benefits of a tiered postseason. Additionally, it will require full buy-in from the fans to learn and acknowledge those advantages.What’s difficult to stomach, though, is that while the league finally fixes one problem — simplifying rules to allow teams to build better rosters for the money they are spending and more transparency for the fans to follow along and engage with the product — it is building a behemoth of a competition structure that could bog down those same avenues for engagement. (While also continuing to pause league play for Leagues Cup, the MLS-Liga MX commercial production.)