The USL made a couple of announcements this week that provide us with some initial information as to how the 2026 season will look.
First, on Wednesday the league announced how the conferences will line up and how the schedule will be filled. With North Carolina FC bowing out and Brooklyn FC and Sporting Jacksonville SC coming in, the Championship will have 25 teams, meaning the conferences will be uneven. The East will have 13 teams and the West 12.
The NCFC exit means that the Legion will not, as generally expected, be moving to the Western Conference. Lexington SC remains unfairly stuck in the West. League play will again consist of 30 games. All Western teams will play conference opponents twice, leaving 6 games against Eastern teams each. That’s a total of 72 games. With 13 teams in the Eastern Conference, that works out to 5.54 games per Eastern team.
Obviously, that doesn’t fly. If all 13 Eastern teams play 5 games against the West, that adds up to 65 games. 7 Eastern teams will play an extra game against the West; the other 6 will play an extra in-conference game. That could make things interesting, given that in-conference games play a role in tiebreakers.
The playoffs will remain as previously with the top 8 teams in each conference participating.
Second, yesterday the league announced the home openers for every team. The first weekend of the season will be March 7th and 8th. That’s the same weekend as this year. That’s a bit surprising given that the World Cup is here this summer.
As in 2025, the Legion will kick off at home, this time against the Tampa Bay Rowdies. The Rowdies finished 10th in the East this year but have easily been the most active team in upgrading its roster for 2026. Notable additions are winger Russell Cicerone from Sacramento Republic, striker Karsen Henderlong from FC Naples and midfielder Pedro Dolabella from NCFC. This will make for a big early test for what hopefully will be totally revamped Legion side.
5 teams will not play at home until March 28th. Those are Hartford Athletic, Las Vegas Lights, Miami FC, New Mexico United and the defending champions, the Pittsburgh Riverhounds. Hartford I can understand but the rest don’t make a great deal of sense and keeping the Hounds on the road just strikes me as rude to them and their fans.
The Legion will not be the opponent for any home opener in the extra weekends of March. That doesn’t mean the team will be at home all month, although that would be great. For a start, at least one team will be on a bye every week with an odd number of teams in the league, so they may skip a week or two. Second, they could be playing away against teams who have already played at home.
There’s no indication of when the remaining schedule will be announced, so stay tuned.
One Comment
Unfortunately the best the Legion could hope for is back-to-back home games since Supercross and Monster Jam have Protective booked out for March 21 and 28th. Still glad to see a March home game especially since splitting weekends with the Stallions will come into play in April. Optimistic for no World Cup break too, that’ll be a good momentum booster for the club as fans can have affordable soccer matches to go to while the World Cup is ongoing.