MLR announced that the league will be focusing more on US-eligible and US pathway players in 2026. The key part of that announcement was the reduction of foreign player slots from 10 to 7, as well as the reclassification of Canadians as foreign players. All else being equal, these moves would be expected to lower the quality of play in the league as good foreign players are left out. However, it's coming at the same time as a reduction in the number of teams, from 11 down to 7, which would be expected to increase quality of play as the top players condense on fewer rosters.
There has been a lot of debate about the wisdom of these changes among fans, and I'm not going to weigh in on that here. But I do want to take a stab at answering one question: how will this affect the quality of play in the league? The short answer is we won't know until it happens, but the long answer has some interesting insights that make it worth doing the math anyway.
The first question to answer is how much this will change the quantity of various players in the league. If we see a lot more spots opening up for American players then there will have to be an increase in American talent, and that will inevitably lead to a decrease in average quality. If those players were good enough, they probably would have been in the league already.
So to start, let's add up all of the starting and bench appearances for foreign, Canadian, and American players in 2025:
| Starts | Bench | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foreign | 1,275 | 387 | 1,662 |
| Canadian | 212 | 196 | 408 |
| Foreign + Canadian | 1,487 | 583 | 2,070 |
| American | 1,155 | 818 | 1,973 |
Now let's normalize that table to the number of appearances per team, per game:
| Starts | Bench | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foreign | 7.2 | 2.2 | 9.4 |
| Canadian | 1.2 | 1.1 | 2.3 |
| Foreign + Canadian | 8.4 | 3.3 | 11.8 |
| American | 6.6 | 4.6 | 11.2 |
There are a few interesting facts to pull out here. First of all, teams used 9.4 foreign players per gameday roster, which is just barely below the 10 per team that the league allocates. That's a 94% usage ratio of foreign player slots.
The really useful number, though, is the average total of foreign and Canadian players on gameday rosters. This tells us that, under the new 2026 definition of a foreign player, the league has been effectively operating with a foreign player cap of 12, with 11.8 non-American players per gameday roster in 2025. This makes the drop in foreign talent look a lot more precipitous, going from effectively 12 down to 7, essentially cut in half.
We can now estimate the number of Americans needed for 2026. Assuming a 16 game season (this makes the normalization easier, it doesn't actually change the conclusion if the league shortens the season) and that we stay at 7 teams, the league will have 1,680 starting spots and 896 bench spots in 2026. Teams will have 7 foreign player slots, for a total of 784 throughout the season. Based on last season, 72% of those will be used for starters, leading to about 564 foreign starting appearances in 2026. 22% will be used for bench spots, so 172 bench appearances for foreign players in 2026. Roughly 47 spots are likely to go unused. The remainder of the spots will go to Americans.
Let's throw that all into a table:
| Starts | Bench | |
|---|---|---|
| Available 2026 spots | 1,680 | 896 |
| Foreign 2026 estimate | 564 | 172 |
| American 2026 estimate | 1,116 | 724 |
| Americans in 2025 | 1,155 | 818 |
As you can see, the estimate for the number of starting and bench spots that Americans will need to fill and the number of spots they filled in 2025 lines up almost perfectly. This means that the league has pretty much perfectly calculated this move so that the impact of the reduction number of gameday spots available due to the reduction in teams falls almost entirely on foreign and Canadian players instead of on Americans. For American players, the number of chances to play should remain unchanged.
By extension, we can loosely guess that there won't be an influx of new American players required - likely, we won't see too many players starting next season who didn't start last season, and that would suggest that the quality of the league won't take too much of a hit.
However, there is a deeper angle we can take here. Not all starters are equally good, and the 94% utilization of foreign player slots suggests that the foreign players being lost are probably of higher quality than the Americans who will remain.
This is a difficult thing to estimate, but we can try to stab at it using fantasy points as a rough analog for quality. Fantasy points aren't a perfect measure as the formula was designed for making an enjoyable fantasy league, but there is some evidence that they correlate with player quality and they are the best we've got.
| Fantasy Pts./Start | Fantasy Pts./Bench app. | |
|---|---|---|
| Foreign | 7.5 | 2.3 |
| Canadian | 7.0 | 2.1 |
| Foreign + Canadian | 7.5 | 2.3 |
| American | 6.1 | 1.8 |
| Total | 6.9 | 2.0 |
What this table tells us is that Americans in 2025 were already a little over represented given their production, performing about at about 82% of the level of non-Americans. Canadians were somewhat under represented based on production, performing about 15% better than Americans on average. This is likely due to the difficulty in securing visas for lower level Canadians on American teams, meaning that only high-performing Canadians could get spots in the league, even if the league wasn't restricting their numbers.
If we combine this with the estimated number of roster spots we calculated earlier, we can get an estimate for how much production could drop in 2026:
| Fantasy Pts. from Starters | Fantasy Pts. from Bench | Fantasy Pts. Total | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total fantasy point estimate under 2025 rules | 11,548 | 1,812 | 13,360 |
| Foreign + Canadian 2026 estimate | 4,210 | 391 | 4,601 |
| American 2026 estimate | 6,828 | 1,338 | 8,166 |
| Deficit from rule changes | -510 (-4.4%) | -83 (-4.6%) | -593 (-4.4%) |
As we can see, there is a drop, although it's pretty modest at under 5%. And that estimate is likely high, since the dropping of foreign players from rosters is not likely to be random. Teams are likely to drop the lowest performers, which will raise the average quality of foreign players and minimize the impact of the rule changes.
Overall, the math suggests that we won't see a massive drop in quality from the rule changes. The changes to foreign player rules pretty much perfectly offset the reduction in teams, likely an intentional calculation by the league using similar math to what I've shown here.
Of course, this is all theoretical and there are any number of assumptions going into this that could prove to be false: some Americans on defunct teams could leave the sport instead of moving to a new team, budget cuts could lead to some top foreign players leaving, and so on. However, I think we can say that if there is a dramatic change in quality, it's not going to be due to the foreign player cap or the collapsing of teams.
Even if the quality remains pretty level, things will look dramatically different. 154 roster spots are being lost due the league contraction, and that's going to be borne almost entirely by foreign and Canadian players. The number of opportunities available to Canadians and foreign players will be slashed to just 56% of 2025 levels on any given team, and to 36% of 2025 levels in the league overall.
If we see a proportional reduction in the actual numbers of players in the league, the number of foreign players could drop from 160 across the league to just 57, and the number of Canadians could drop from 47 league-wide to just 17. Meanwhile, the number of roster spots for Americans is expected to go from 217 to 196, a relatively minor 10% drop.