MLS, players agree to new CBA and will return with tournament in Orlando

The 2020 MLS season is coming back with a tournament format to be held entirely in Orlando.

MLS will return to play with a summer tournament in Orlando, the league confirmed on Wednesday, after agreeing to a new CBA with the MLS Players Association.

“MLS Players today ratified a new collective bargaining agreement, which will run through the 2025 season,” the union said in their statement. “Today’s vote also finalizes a plan to resume the 2020 season and provides players with certainty for the months ahead. It allows our members to move forward and continue to compete in the game they love.”

The full details of the new competition – which will take place at Disney’s ESPN Wide World of Sports complex and likely start in early July – are still unclear, though it has been reported by The Athletic that there will be a group stage of three games which will count toward the 2020 regular season, followed by knockout rounds. The Washington Post reports that 16 of the league’s 26 teams would qualify for the knockout rounds, which would not count toward the regular season standings.

MLS commissioner Don Garber told media on Wednesday that the tournament will last “a maximum of 35 days.” The length that players would be quarantined in Orlando away from their families had been a point of debate during the negotiations.

MLS, like the rest of the soccer world, has been on hold since early March when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the league to stop play just two weeks into the 2020 season.

While the framework of returning to play with a quarantined tournament had seemed certain for weeks, the road to the final agreement was a rocky one. The league and the MLSPA had agreed to a new CBA before the season but it had yet to be ratified. The league used new negotiations amid the pandemic – which Garber said will cost the league $1 billion in losses – to try to extract new concessions from the players.

The MLSPA approved a set of concessions in an offer with the league on Sunday, only to have the owners reject that proposal and threaten to lock them out.

The league ended up backing down from its demand over a force majeure clause that would allow owners to back out of the CBA due to certain attendance drops. MLSPA conceded to taking smaller share of future media deals.

There is reportedly a desire for the tournament to not end up comprising the entirety of the 2020 MLS season. The Columbus Dispatch reports that the league would still like to play a short, possibly 18-game, season after the tournament in empty stadiums in the teams’ home markets.

For now at least, we know there will be MLS play of some kind again in the near future.

The NWSL, which had not begun its 2020 season yet when the pandemic hit the U.S., announced last week that it will be the first American league to return with its own tournament: the 2020 Challenge Cup in Utah.

Elsewhere in the world, where soccer leagues were nearing their end rather than starting up as the pandemic hit, nearly every major European league has found a way to get back on the field behind closed doors.

The NBA is reportedly close to announcing a plan to finish its 2020 season at the Disney complex as well, which should make for an interesting two-sport bubble under the TV cameras.