Supercomputer · MLS

Plays the rest of the season 10,000 times and shows how often each club wins.

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How to read the MLS projection: Shield, seeds and play-offs

MLS has no champion at the top of its table. What the regular season decides is the Supporters' Shield, awarded to the best record across all 30 clubs, and the seeding within each conference. Nine teams from the East and nine from the West reach the play-offs, 18 in total, and nobody is relegated.

MLS Cup is then settled in a separate bracket: a single-game Wild Card between the eighth and ninth seeds, a best-of-three first round, and single-elimination conference semi-finals and finals. This projection covers the 34-match regular season, so a high top-four probability here means a good seed, not a trophy.

MLS projection: what readers ask

Does the MLS projection account for the play-offs?

No. The simulations run the remaining regular-season fixtures and return final positions, points ranges and the odds of reaching a play-off place. The Wild Card game, the best-of-three first round and MLS Cup itself all sit outside what the model calculates.

What is the difference between the Supporters' Shield and MLS Cup?

The Shield goes to the club with the best regular-season record across both conferences and carries a Concacaf Champions Cup berth with it. MLS Cup is the championship won through the December play-offs. This page projects the first directly and can only inform the second.

Why does the 2026 season look unusual?

Two reasons. The league paused for around seven weeks from late May while the World Cup was played across North America, and 2026 is the last full February-to-December campaign before MLS switches to a summer-to-spring calendar in 2027. Fixture density since the restart has been high.

▸How does the supercomputer work?

Every remaining fixture is simulated with a Poisson model: each club gets an attack rating and a defence rating from the goals it has scored and conceded this season, and the expected goals of a match come from combining one side's attack with the other's defence, plus a moderate home advantage.

Before a ball is kicked the model does not start from zero: each club begins with a prior strength built from last season's finish and the market value of its squad, with the tails capped so no extreme is absurd. That starting point hands over weight to real results as they arrive, and by around matchday ten only the actual goals are talking.

The remaining season is played 10,000 times in a separate browser process, so the page never freezes. The title, top-four, top-six and relegation percentages are simply how often each outcome happened across those 10,000 seasons, and each club's points range covers the central 90% of its simulated finishes.

What the model does not know: injuries, transfers, sanctions, European fixtures or motivation. It uses goals and only goals — which is why it is in beta.