LONDON — England’s Premier League and the United States’ Major League Soccer are comparable at the most fundamental levels. The rules of the sport are the same on both sides of the pond, teams play on similarly sized pitches, and each league is the highest level of club soccer in their respective countries.
Off-field aspects, however — such as season formats, player salaries and fan customs — distinguish the EPL and MLS from one another. Compare and contrast the two leagues with The Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism and Capital News Service.
MLS vs. EPL: Histories
MLS featured 10 teams during its inaugural 1996 season. Thirty years later, that number has tripled.
Soccer, in its modern form, was built in 19th-century England. First-division English football dates back to the 1880s, making it the oldest organized professional soccer league in the world.
The Premier League, as it is now known, is just a few years older than MLS. It was created in 1992 to be a top division, effectively a rebranding of the First Division, but the new EPL retained historic teams and their storied pasts.
Manchester United and Liverpool both have won the first division a record 20 times. Liverpool was the dominant club in the United Kingdom from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, then Manchester United overtook that mantle in the 1990s and 2000s.
Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham are also considered iconic teams, alongside Manchester City, which has captured six of the past eight league titles.
MLS clubs lack EPL’s history and traditions but have developed a foundation of strong rivalries. D.C. United won three of the first four titles upon the league’s inception, but LA Galaxy has claimed a league-best six MLS Cups.
MLS vs. EPL: League formats
As with many American sports leagues, MLS is divided into geographic conferences — in this case Eastern and Western. That’s not necessary in the EPL because England is similar in size to Alabama.
The MLS regular season runs from late February to mid-October. The standings at the end of that season seed the 18-team playoff, which culminates in the MLS Cup final — a single-elimination match between the Western and Eastern Conference champions in early December.
The league’s calendar will shift in 2027, though, with MLS starting in July and ending in May — comparable to the schedule that most European leagues follow.
England’s 20-team Premier League starts in mid-August and stretches through late May, with the league trophy awarded to the team that accumulates the most points. The bottom three finishers get demoted to the second division.
Promotion and relegation, a system in which top teams move to a higher division and finishers at the bottom move down, connect leagues across the nation in what’s known as the English football pyramid. In the system, the top team in the top league — the Premier League — is considered the champion of the entire country.
MLS has rejected promotion and relegation to this point, in part because uncertainty about where a team will play year to year can complicate team valuations and scare off investors. In March, however, the United Soccer League announced it was becoming the first pro sports league in the U.S. to move to promotion and relegation.
MLS commissioner Don Garber, at his state-of-the-league address on December 4, declined to rule out a move to promotion and relegation, but such a change remains unlikely in the near future.
MLS vs. EPL: Financials
The original owners of MLS teams paid just $5 million. In 2023, owners of San Diego’s expansion franchise bought into the league for $500 million. Three decades after MLS’s first season, 19 of its 30 clubs are among the world’s 50 most valuable soccer teams — more than any soccer league, according to Sportico, with the LA Galaxy said to be worth $1.25 billion, according to Forbes.
International players have become a major feature of the league, with more countries represented last year in MLS (79) than EPL (62).
The league’s biggest star, Argentina’s Lionel Messi, joined Inter Miami in 2023 on a league-high $12 million base salary. An average MLS player salary is around $580,000, according to Capology. In contrast, the average player salary in the Premier League is more than $4 million, according to William Hill and ProSport.
Premier League’s lowest-paid player in 2024 earned more than $240,000, according to Sports Boom. That’s more guaranteed compensation than nearly half (409) of MLS players listed on October’s Players Association data records.
Messi’s 2023 arrival to MLS sparked rapid growth for the South Florida club and MLS overall. U.S. sign-up subscriptions to Apple TV’s MLS Season Pass rose by 110,000 in one day that summer and the club gained more than 10 million social media followers in several months, according to Sports Business Journal and MLS Multiplex.
Despite that growth, MLS hasn’t approached the worldwide popularity of its British counterpart. In 2025, Premier League’s revenue exceeded $7 billion compared to $1.85 billion for MLS, according to Profluence founder Andrew Petcash.
The Premier League remains the highest-grossing soccer league and fourth-highest professional sports league worldwide, behind the National Football League, National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball.
MLS vs. EPL: Fan and stadium culture
Individual tickets for EPL matches can be costly.
Ticket broker SeatPick notes that the average ticket to a Liverpool match on its site is $1,137. EPL season tickets tend to carry more moderate price tags than fans can find on the secondary market. West Ham boasts the cheapest Premier League season ticket in 2025-26, at just £345 — equivalent to $463.89 for 38 games.
MLS fans benefit from even bigger bargains. According to the website SportsHandle, a ticket to an Austin FC at Vancouver Whitecaps match in 2024 could be bought for just $4.50.
Hot dog prices at EPL and MLS venues are relatively similar. MLS’ Inter Miami charged a league-most $42.68 for four hot dogs in 2024, according to Scarves and Spikes. That’s over $10 per hot dog — compared to $12.75 for a “Cobble Lane” hot dog at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium and Manchester United’s $7.76 hot dog.
Fourteen EPL clubs raised their beer prices this offseason — headlined by a 51% increase from Manchester United, according to The Mirror.
Two slices of pizza at the New England Revolution’s Gillette Stadium cost $39.98 in April 2025. Seattle’s Lumen Field charges $17.99 for a smoked chicken sandwich on King’s Hawaiian sweet rolls and a whopping $48.99 for a pork rib slider platter, according to the Seattle Times.