IMO removing the salary cap while rapidly expanding would cause a ton of teams to end up folding.
Absolutely. What makes TONS OF MARKETS interested in MLS is that it’s a “Major League” product to sell to fans (as the top league in USA/Canada. But it comes with MINOR LEAGUE EXPENSES (because the salary cap is $4 million. Raising it slightly would be fine. But you drop the salary cap and MLS is going to have problems.
There’s is not nearly enough popularity of the sport yet to have 40 teams.
Because of that Major League status with Minor League expenses, there absolutely is the potential for MLS to have a ton of teams.
Italy has 60 million people and 109 teams in their top levels of pro soccer. The country is the square mileage of Arizona. Italy has 8 markets with 1 million people. The USA has 53, plus another 6 in Canada.
Of course soccer is No. 1 in Italy and not in the USA/Canada. But because of our population and the number of cities — which are spread out over a much larger land area - we’re big enough to have an MLS that total number of teams that the top two levels of SOCCER NATIONS that are smaller in size/population than us have.
I personally think that instead of expanding like MLB/NHL/NBA/NFL teams expand, they should have sold 20+ MLS-2 teams, and gradually expanded MLS via promotion over a 20-year period… (adding teams to MLS-2 too, or even forming MLS-3) before finally reaching a set capacity in MLS (24 teams) and having PRO/REL.
But the idea of a 40-team MLS split into two divisions, where you play 38 games against your league and then have some playoffs (Like W1 vs E4, E2 vs W3), is totally plausible for MLS.
In the event that MLS moves to a “World Calendar” and Capless transfers, THEN it would need to “shrink” by splitting in two financially and having PRO/REL.
But in a closed system with a cap, MLS could be enormous and be just fine under its current structure.
Comparing the number of teams to NHL or NBA is silly, because they’re playing less than half the number of games, so you need half the financial commitment of NHL/NBA teams - and the expenses right now are about 15 to 25 times smaller than NHL/NBA.