Whether you're setting up a soccer fantasy league, building a bracket for MLS Cup playoffs, quizzing your friends on which teams are in each conference, or just trying to remember if Austin FC is East or West - an alphabetical list of MLS teams saves you a trip to the league website. Below you'll find all 30 franchises from Atlanta to Vancouver, plus a full data table with conferences, stadiums, cities, and founding years. The sorting tool above handles any custom team list you want to alphabetize.
Major League Soccer has grown from 10 teams in 1996 to 30 as of 2025, making it one of the fastest-expanding leagues in professional sports history. The league runs from late February through October, with playoffs continuing into December. Unlike the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL, MLS doesn't use divisions - just two conferences, Eastern and Western, with the top teams advancing to the postseason.
Eastern vs. Western Conference
MLS splits its 30 teams between the Eastern Conference (15 teams) and Western Conference (15 teams). The playoff format sends the top seven teams from each conference to the postseason, with the first round played at higher seeds' home stadiums. The conference finals produce two teams that meet in the MLS Cup final, typically held in late November or early December at the higher seed's venue.
Geography drives the conference split, though not always neatly. Nashville and Atlanta are in the East, which makes sense. But the Western Conference stretches from Vancouver in the northwest all the way to Houston and San Diego in the south. Minnesota, which shares a latitude with Wisconsin and Michigan, sits in the Western Conference rather than the East - partly to balance team counts as the league expanded westward. Columbus, just across Lake Erie from Canada, is firmly Eastern.
The Eastern Conference has historically been more competitive in the regular season, stacking up high point totals, but the West has produced more MLS Cup champions in recent years. Teams like Portland, Seattle, and LA Galaxy have built strong dynasties that tilt the trophy count westward.
The Founding Teams - 1996
MLS kicked off its first season in 1996 with 10 charter clubs. Eight of those original franchises still play today under various names: the Colorado Rapids, Columbus Crew, D.C. United, FC Dallas (founded as Dallas Burn), LA Galaxy, New England Revolution, New York Red Bulls (originally NY/NJ MetroStars), San Jose Earthquakes (who folded and reformed), and Sporting Kansas City (as Kansas City Wizards). The original 10 also included the Tampa Bay Mutiny and Miami Fusion, both of which folded in 2001 during a financial crisis that nearly ended the league.
D.C. United dominated the first few years, winning four MLS Cups in the league's first six seasons. The LA Galaxy became the marquee franchise through the late 1990s and 2000s, winning five championships and signing international stars including David Beckham in 2007 - a signing that signaled MLS was becoming a legitimate destination for elite players.
The founding teams share one thing: they all chose generic, marketable names over local identity. "Galaxy," "Revolution," "Crew" - names that could play in any market. Later expansions went the opposite direction, often adopting European-style naming conventions like FC, United, and SC to signal soccer authenticity. That shift reflects how dramatically American soccer culture changed over the league's first 30 years.
Expansion: From 10 to 30 Teams
The league nearly collapsed in 2002 when the Tampa Bay Mutiny and Miami Fusion folded the same week, cutting MLS to eight teams. Ownership consolidation - with a single entity controlling multiple clubs - kept the league alive while it rebuilt. Real Salt Lake and Chivas USA joined in 2005, followed by Toronto FC in 2007 (the first Canadian club), and the Seattle Sounders in 2009.
Seattle's arrival changed everything. The Sounders averaged over 36,000 fans per game in their first season, more than many NFL markets, and immediately became one of the best-supported clubs in North America. That success accelerated expansion. Portland and Vancouver joined in 2011. Montreal, New York City FC, and Orlando City followed. Then Atlanta United arrived in 2017 and broke MLS attendance records, drawing over 70,000 fans per game to their shared NFL stadium.
The 2020s brought a wave of new clubs with strong local ownership and purpose-built stadiums: Inter Miami CF (2020), Nashville SC (2020), Austin FC (2021), Charlotte FC (2022), and St. Louis City SC (2023). San Diego FC joined in 2025, bringing the league to 30 teams. Each new club came with serious investment, soccer-specific venues, and ownership groups willing to spend on Designated Players - the league's mechanism for signing players above the salary cap.
MLS Cup and How the Season Works
The MLS regular season runs from late February through mid-October, with each team playing 34 games. The top seven teams from each conference qualify for the MLS Cup Playoffs, which starts in late October. The first round is a single-elimination game at the higher seed's stadium. The conference semifinals and finals are two-leg series (aggregate score). The MLS Cup Final is a single match at a predetermined venue, usually the home stadium of the higher-seeded finalist.
There's also the Supporters' Shield, awarded to the team with the best regular-season record across both conferences. It doesn't come with the league title, but it's a real trophy with serious prestige among supporter groups. NYCFC won it in 2021 before winning MLS Cup the same year, a rare double.
MLS also participates in the Concacaf Champions Cup, where league clubs compete against top clubs from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. The Seattle Sounders became the first MLS club to win that tournament in 2022, beating Liga MX's Club León in the final - a watershed moment for American soccer that helped silence the long-running debate about whether MLS was truly competitive against its Mexican counterparts.
Lionel Messi and the Turning Point
David Beckham's 2007 arrival at the Galaxy is the moment most people point to as when MLS became an international story. But Lionel Messi signing with Inter Miami CF in July 2023 was a different magnitude entirely. Messi - widely considered the greatest player of all time and a World Cup winner with Argentina just months earlier - chose MLS over Saudi Arabia and the chance to return to Barcelona. It sent shockwaves through global soccer.
The effects were immediate. Inter Miami sold out Chase Stadium. MLS viewership spiked dramatically. Apple TV+, which had signed a 10-year broadcast deal with MLS in 2022, saw subscriptions climb every time Messi was on the schedule. Cities across the country sold out stadiums for regular season road games. Messi brought Carlos Busquets and Jordi Alba with him, turning Miami from a mid-table Eastern team into an entertainment spectacle regardless of results.
But Messi's arrival also pointed to something bigger: MLS had quietly become a viable landing spot for elite international talent, not just aging stars looking for a farewell tour. Lorenzo Insigne at Toronto, Xherdan Shaqiri at Chicago, Gareth Bale at LAFC, Riqui Puig at Galaxy, Federico Bernardeschi at Toronto - the talent level in MLS rose steadily through the 2020s. Messi was the most visible piece of a league that had genuinely matured.
Soccer-Specific Stadiums
One of MLS's defining characteristics in its second decade has been the move toward purpose-built soccer stadiums. In the early years, most teams played in cavernous NFL venues where a crowd of 15,000 looked tiny in a 70,000-seat bowl. The atmosphere suffered. The sight lines weren't right for soccer. Supporter sections felt isolated.
Starting with Colorado's Dick's Sporting Goods Park in 2007, clubs began building compact, intimate venues designed specifically for the sport. Portland's remodeled Providence Park has some of the best atmosphere in North American soccer. Subaru Park in Chester, Pennsylvania - tight, close to the field, filled with standing supporters sections - feels more like a European stadium than anything else in the country. Children's Mercy Park in Kansas City helped stabilize what had been a struggling franchise. TQL Stadium in Cincinnati seats about 26,000 and has been praised as one of the best venues in the league since it opened in 2021.
The trend continued with GEODIS Park in Nashville (opened 2022, the largest soccer-specific stadium in the US at over 30,000 seats) and Q2 Stadium in Austin. Each new expansion club now expects to have its own venue within a few years of joining the league, a shift from the early days when sharing with the NFL was the default.