MLR Filled With Uncertainty Following Contractions, Team Mergers
The Miami Sharks and NOLA Gold will not be in MLR in 2026, while Rugby Football Club Los Angeles and the San Diego Legion have merged into the California Legion.
Major League Rugby can never have a normal offseason, it seems. Three developments have shrunk the MLR down from 11 teams in 2025 to at most eight for 2026.
On Wednesday, July 30, two announcements shook Major League Rugby, although rumors had been swirling in various circles for some time.
Earlier in the day came the first big news – and perhaps the news that was more surprising. Major League Rugby announced that the San Diego Legion would be merging with Rugby Football Club Los Angeles to form the California Legion.
A few hours later, the NOLA Gold put a message up on their team website, saying that they “do not intend to participate in the 2026 season,” but that there are apparently ongoing discussions about the team’s future in MLR.
Seven days later on August 6, the Miami Sharks reportedly let their players know that the team will not be competing in 2026.
For the immediate future, this brings the number of MLR teams for 2026 down to eight. But a Utah Warriors rumor that is still swirling raises a number of serious questions about the future of the league.
When Did This Happen?
As far as I can tell, the first public mention of any of these developments occurred on July 21, when an anonymous Reddit user posted on the MLRugby subreddit claimed that San Diego would merge with Los Angeles and that the Miami Sharks and Utah Warriors would fold. Obviously, this was deservedly met with heavy skepticism.
The first actually reliable source for either development came on July 29, when Rugby Wrap Up reported that the Gold would be out of the league for 2026. This was quickly confirmed by Bryan Ray of Americas Rugby News, who said he had caught wind of it a few days prior.
On the same day, an anonymous source claimed – with independent verification – that San Diego and Los Angeles would merge under majority ownership of the Los Angeles group, though the moderator did not share exactly how it was confirmable.
Whether or not these leaks affected the timetable of the league’s official releases is impossible to say at the current time.
As far as when these two decisions were made, it’s also hard to tell beyond the obvious that it was at some point in late July.
The Sharks, on the other hand, evidently folded late. Just two days before news of Miami’s exit from MLR broke, the league gave the newly-created MLR Executive of the Year award to Sharks CEO Milagros Cubelli. There was speculation that the award was a “please-don’t-leave” move, but it was voted on by other league members. But with the rumors running rampant, it’s an open question. In any case, the award looks more than a little bizarre now.
California Legion Logistics?
The clearest question at present is: how in the you-know-what will this multi-city Legion team operate?
RFCLA president Adam Freier – who will be the CEO of the California Legion – spoke with The Overload recently and provided some commentary on how the new team will shake out.
According to Freier, the California Legion will play twice at Torero Stadium in San Diego, twice at an undisclosed location in Los Angeles, and thrice at Great Park in Irvine, California (referred to as Orange County in most materials). That’s during the regular season, since they’ve also talked about having an exhibition game in Northern California.
That raises a whole heap of cans of worms to work out. Where will the team’s training facility be? How will they manage the leases on three home stadiums? How will fans of San Diego go to the Los Angeles games and vice versa? Does the Irvine location work for either fanbase at all?
Jennifer Tidball, the San Diego Legion Director of Marketing and Events, said during an August 2 interview with a local news station in San Diego that the team hasn’t picked out a headquarters yet. Obviously, they will need one singular base of operations for training and organizational purposes, but the fact that there is none at the current time is another indication that this was a recent move.
She maintained an optimistic tone about the merger and the multiple home venues.
“All the venues that we’re playing at are within driving distance,” Tidball said. “I’m looking forward to some road trips.”
But the traffic in Southern California is notorious, and what’s more, San Diego fans and Los Angeles fans are not known for liking each other’s teams. Not to mention the pain of San Diego’s long, unfortunate history with losing sports franchises to their neighbor up north.
The reaction from online fan groups to the merger is discernible and discernibly negative.
“Are you guys tone deaf?” reads the top comment on the Legion’s Instagram post of Tidball’s interview.
“Nope,” Tidball wrote in response on her personal Instagram account. “Just trying to save the sport.”
That comment reveals a fair bit about where Tidball and the Legion were coming from. It’s looking like it was either merge or die, though to say they could have handled it more delicately is putting it extremely lightly. San Diegans are pretty sensitive to having their teams play elsewhere, even if it’s part-time.
“I feel like I’ve been married seven years and my wife announces that she is adding three more husbands to my marriage,” writes one Legion fan on the San Diego – now California – Legion Supporters facebook page.
Another supporter, a season ticket holder since the inaugural year, typed an open letter describing his heartbreak.
“First the Clippers. Then the Chargers. And now you,” the fourth paragraph reads. “This opens up deep, familiar wounds for San Diego fans—another team we loved, slipping away to LA.”
That user declared he would no longer hold his season tickets; many others shared similar sentiments. But other Legion fans are sticking it through and continuing to support the team.
“I get fans are pissed and disappointed, I am one of them,” wrote another supporter on Facebook. “But I am still going to support and cheer on LEGION, I dedicate my season tickets purchase to the players. That’s why I am there, to see them play.”
Still, the amount of fans declaring their cessation of support for the Legion is concerning for the team. Evidently, the team is keeping different branding for the two merging cities, as there will reportedly be different color schemes for home games in San Diego and Los Angeles.
But it goes into a couple more questions: how will season tickets work? Will there be separate season ticket packages for the L.A. games, the Irvine games, and the San Diego games? Will there be joint five-game San Diego/Irvine season ticket deals and similar joint five-game Los Angeles/Irvine season ticket deals? Or will there only be one season ticket deal for all home matches? If that’s the case, I can’t imagine the season tickets will sell all that well.
The different color schemes appear like further indication that the merger was a last resort, and that they intend to break the teams back up once the financials are in better shape. Time will tell whether that plan will stay in place.
14-Game Season?
The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that Freier mentioned two games in L.A, three in Irvine, and two in San Diego. That’s a total of seven home games. But MLR teams in 2025 played 16 games, eight of them at home. So is MLR moving to a 14-game season?
Well, like a lot of the questions I pose in this article, the answer is that nobody knows right now. Perhaps the two-three-two home game structure is just the baseline for California and the eighth home game rotates between the three sites. Maybe the league itself doesn’t know at this point. But it’s a question raised from what we’ve seen.
Dispersal Draft Appears Unlikely
Typically, when a team folds in MLR, there is a dispersal draft for all the players that were on that team. That’s what happened last year with the Dallas Jackals (where the Seawolves got Dewald Kotze and Brock Gallagher), for example.
But I’ve seen some indications that there won’t be a dispersal draft. According to one source, all players from the teams closing up shop became unrestricted free agents on August 7 – and “unrestricted” would preclude all obligations to join any dispersal draft. Additionally, any contract signed past 2025 is now null and void, with each player required to renegotiate individually.
According to the same source, the current RFCLA members are retained for one more week from that point (until August 14) to negotiate their contracts first before the team meets with San Diego players to round out the squad. This was apparently a league decision, as they did not want a “super-team” to form from the two California sides.
If this source is correct, then there very well could be a mad scramble as the eight remaining teams try to pick up the players they can.
Extra Draft Round?
The contraction also changes the landscape of the upcoming MLR draft. In 2024, there were three rounds between each of the then-12 (Dallas did not fold until after the draft had concluded) sides, adding up to 36 draft slots. With eight teams at most for the 2025 draft, there would only be 24 slots for the more than 100 draft applicants for this year’s MLR.
Hence the discussion about adding an extra round. Four rounds would provide 32 draft slots – and with American universities providing USA Eagles eligibility, that would be eight more pathways for the domestic player talent that the MLR is looking to build up.
But there’s nothing at present to indicate this matter one way or the other.
Less International Slots?
One of the primary goals of the MLR is to build up American rugby in the years leading up to the 2031 Rugby World Cup. To that end, each MLR team has ten international player slots for players who are not eligible for the American or Canadian national teams, though these are tradeable. The Seattle Seawolves currently sit at eleven, for example.
But three teams are gone. That’s more than 100 potential roster spots for potential MLR talent that are no longer available. Ergo, there is discussion about reducing the number of international slots to make more room for American players.
There are problems with this idea. American fans, despite their patriotism, are probably more interested in just seeing good quality play – so from a financial standpoint, increasing the number of American players might not be much of an immediate boon. The league is also a pathway for a lot of players from other Tier 2 nations, such as Namibia and Samoa.
And therein lies another disconnect between the United States and the world of rugby union. Americans are not used to sports where the international competitions are the main events and the club competitions are less important. While MLR is a familiar club competition and World Cups are familiar enough to fans of soccer, a lot of the rest of international rugby – such as the importance of tests – is something to get used to.
On the other hand, the league does have a specific objective to build American rugby, so there needs to be some infrastructure to build up rugby in the USA. Establishing a formal American rugby pyramid is, in the long run, far more important than the number of international slots the teams have. But that is a long-term project, so perhaps we will see some restriction on international players for 2026.
The example of Japan is something that may serve as a guide. Japan Rugby League One heavily restricted the number of international slots as they focused on building up rugby as a Japanese sport, and over time, this buildup happened enough to the point where Japan is now considered a Tier 1 rugby nation. So, we could see the MLR try to replicate this success story on the other side of the Pacific.
But, as with many things MLR, we haven’t gotten any information from the league about this topic. Hurry up and wait.
Utah Warriors?
There’s one more card in the deck, so to speak. Rumors have been swirling ever since the initial late July claims about the Utah Warriors, who are also going through some degree of trouble.
The exact degree is the question. The devil is, as they say, in the details. Forbes reported on August 7 that there is “quiet confidence” in Utah’s future, but from what I’ve been hearing, it seems to be more of a tossup. Warriors CEO Kimball Kjar talked about a “hefty financial lift” but is still looking for that extra partner, according to Martin Pengelly.
In any case, MLR has stated that they are confident in their ability to continue with seven teams if need be. That was the number they had in their inaugural 2018 season, after all.
Playoff Structure?
With the league down to eight teams, the current playoff structure makes about zero sense. It was already something of an aspirational structure – with four teams in each conference making the cut for eight of 11 in total – but now that would be every team in the league.
I won’t discount the possibility of the league keeping the current playoff structure and essentially rendering the regular season a 16-game seeding contest, but I would highly discourage it. The regular season should mean something.
One likely scenario is that the league reduces the playoff spots to four in total, two in each conference. The second-place team goes on the road to face the first-place team in the conference final and the two conference winners play at a neutral location for the MLR Shield.
Alternatively, we could see a return to the “eliminator” structure, with the second and third place teams in each conference playing the eliminator game while the first-place team has a bye to the conference final.
But we shouldn’t discount the possibility that the conferences are done away with entirely. The first two MLR seasons – with seven and nine teams, respectively – had no conference structure, with the top four teams being seeded into two MLR semifinals that played for the MLR final.
League Future?
When a league loses three total teams (27 percent of the 11 total last year) over the course of one offseason, there will naturally be a lot of questions about whether that league can survive. But for rugby in the United States – and here in Seattle – losing the entire league would be far, far worse than losing three clubs.
Seawolves back rower Pago Haini recently talked with the Next Level Rugby YouTube channel about his experience watching Rugby in America grow in skill due to the MLR. Haini, who was born in American Samoa but grew up in Samoa and went through rugby programs in New Zealand and Australia, offered a lot of interesting perspective on the MLR’s current situation.
“As someone who went through club rugby back in New Zealand and Australia, whenever you get those professional guys to come back to your local club – two, three, even four of them – you always lift the standards of play.
And the standards of play in America, especially in club level – minus the best clubs where you always get the best players – if you don’t get those best players in some of the minor clubs or small clubs, the competition or the level of knowledge of rugby in America will never grow.
So I think it’s very important that we keep Major League [Rugby] around, just for the growth of the game. Not in terms of business-wise, but in terms of knowledge of the game.
…
Once Major League [Rugby] started up, and we went and coached local clubs, local high schools, local colleges, the one thing that you get out of all that, consistently around America, is great, amazing talent. Top-tier talent. Because there’s kids who have trained from when they’re eight, nine, 10, to try and crack into the NBA. Try and crack into the NFL, MLB. So, physically, they’re there.
If we keep Major League [Rugby] around, you’re going to bridge that gap of bringing in guys who are professional 24/7 and then bring them into your club rugby two times a week. And that helps your coach develop, it helps your players develop. It gives them a different perspective of the game, because sometimes when you’re playing club rugby, it’s kind of like, ‘just pick up the ball, run!’
But once you start learning the different sides of the game, how to read different positions, the outer part of it, I reckon that will help develop our youths, develop our age groups like our U16s, U18s, U20s, and then try and get that U20s team to the world cup to compete – and the vice versa with the women’s [side] – now you learn rugby from a young age instead of trying to learn rugby when you’re older.”
That building up of American rugby culture is going to be crucial – and for that, it’s crucial for the league and teams to really focus on those connections. Connections between MLR teams and local rugby clubs, connections between colleges and MLR teams, connections between colleges and local rugby clubs.
Time will tell whether or not the MLR survives. Certainly, most of the remaining teams (like the Seattle Seawolves) are on far stronger footing than the teams that went under. Whatever happens next, there is no doubt that the current moment is a massive inflection point in American rugby.