Major League Soccer will enter the 2025 season with 30 clubs courtesy of the addition of San Diego FC. That’s the exception in the world of soccer, where leagues normally have between 20 clubs on the high end and 16 on the low end. As always, there are exceptions. The Scottish Premiership, for instance, has a dozen clubs. So does the USL’s League One. The Canadian Premier League has even less, with eight teams in its table. So the simple answer is no, there isn’t a standard league size. Still, like with many things across international soccer, it’s not necessarily that simple.
The European season model has each team playing one another home and away, so a 20-team league like the Premier League, Serie A, and La Liga creates a 38-game regular season schedule. While it’s easy to compare that to Major League Soccer’s 34-game schedule, where some teams don’t play each other at all each season, most European leagues don’t use playoffs to determine a champion. An MLS team that entered the wildcard round could play an additional six games if they made it to the MLS Cup.
Europe doesn’t have a set number for domestic leagues. The Bundesliga and France’s Ligue 1 are both 18-team leagues, and as expected, play four fewer regular season games per team than what we see from the topflights in England, Spain, and Italy.
That there is no set number of teams in a domestic league doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been considered. England’s old First Division, at the time the top league in the country before the introduction of the Premier League for the 1992-93 season, had 22 clubs. The Premier League kept that number through 1994-95 before reducing by two teams.
Part of the reason for that was a broader initiative to adopt a model for an optimal first division. That started with a target of 20, then 18, with rumors at the time of a further reduction to 16 teams. The reasons still resonate in the current era, fixture congestion and room on the schedule for other tournaments for club and country. Reports at the end of last season suggested a revived interest in 18-team leagues.
As it stands, France’s Ligue 1 reduced from 20 to 18 teams for the 2023-24 season. Serie A held a vote of its clubs in January 2024, ultimately deciding not to reduce to 18 teams.
Discussing league size also means considering the rest of the schedule. With the expansion of the Champions League and Europa League, alongside the UEFA Conference League, more teams are playing more games in Europe. MLS introduced the Leagues Cup, adding games to the schedule and a break to the regular season. The elite around the world add the 2025 Club World Cup. With the creation of the Nations League in UEFA and Concacaf, even more games that count became part of the schedule for players representing their countries.
It wasn’t that long ago when there were reports of a fundamental restructuring of the international calendar, exchanging multiple international match windows for fewer but longer windows. That didn’t move forward, but FIFA is merging the September and October windows in 2026 and 2027. Expanded tournaments and additional obligations create even more pressure on the reasonable number of games players can participate in over the course of a season.
In October 2024, FIFPro, the world players’ union, along with the European Leagues organization, filed a case against FIFA in Europe. At issue is the international calendar and potential constraints to address fixture congestion.
With all that in mind, the league size question becomes even more significant. If it even has an answer, it’s one that works in congruence with other issues currently under discussion across world soccer to address the number of games teams, and by extension players, are expected to play.
