MLQ 2026 Format Changes Announced

With the new year at hand, we as a league are both taking the time to reflect on the season that was and to look ahead to the one to come in 2026. 

While there were many bright spots to the 2025 season, including an incredibly exciting MLQ Championship full of competitive parity and memorable matches, we know the season had some shortcomings as well, and we share the frustrations of our players and fans when it comes to the parts of the season that were not quite up to par. Ultimately, we did not deliver our 2025 product with the level of consistency that the league—and its decade-long standard—deserves. We recognize that this fell short of the time, effort, and support so many of you invest in the league.

While we always review our seasons for potential future improvement, these setbacks forced us to spend this offseason taking a fine-tooth comb to our entire operation. In the end, we knew systemic change was needed in order to re-establish the type of consistency we aim to bring you year-in and year-out. Today, we will be announcing the core of those changes: a restructuring of our franchises and a new season format.

Franchise Changes

This past season saw extreme issues with roster numbers for both the Austin Outlaws and New Orleans Curse, leading to a cancelled season for the Curse and multiple forfeited series for the Outlaws. The Ottawa Black Bears, meanwhile, expressed a lack of comfort with international travel, leading to forfeitures of all of the franchise’s away matches. After speaking at length with the leadership of all three franchises in regards to these issues, MLQ has made the difficult decision to pause franchise operations in Austin, New Orleans, and Ottawa, effective immediately.

Austin and New Orleans have both been the victims of the increased regionalization of the sport in the U.S. The state of Louisiana no longer has a single active club or college team, leaving Curse without a pipeline of players. That fact, mixed with the retirement of a number of the team’s veterans, left it unsustainable as a franchise going forward. And while the booming player pool in the Austin-San Antonio area necessitated the addition of a second franchise in 2019, that pool has shrunk in recent years, with multiple college teams dropping in size or disbanding completely at the same time that older club players were leaving the sport. Reducing the area back down to a single franchise should allow for one strong, active program going forward.

We will remain in close contact with current and future leadership in Ottawa, but both sides are in agreement that as long as the franchise’s staff and players are not comfortable traveling to the U.S., it is not feasible for the team to continue to actively compete in the league in the same capacity. If those sentiments change in the future, we will revisit the franchise’s participation. Moving forward, Ottawa players will be eligible to play for our second Canadian franchise, the Toronto Raiders.

With the deactivation of the Austin franchise, radii will be redrawn in Texas to make sure players in the current Austin radius can continue to compete. New radii will be announced before the tryout process begins this spring.

Season Structure

With the above changes, we will be moving forward in 2026 with a 12-franchise league. We will be dividing those 12 teams into two conferences, each made up of two divisions. The teams will be distributed into this structure as follows:

Notably, Toronto is split into a division with the Minneapolis Monarchs and Chicago Prowl while Detroit Innovators and Cleveland Riff remain together in a division with a new opponent in the Charlotte Aviators. This decision was made for two important travel reasons. The first being that Cleveland to Detroit is one of the shortest drives in the league and we wanted to maintain that for the two teams. The second reason is shortening the travel time for Charlotte as they’ve been shuffled into a new division. The drive time from Charlotte to Detroit is just under that to New York and Cleveland is notably closer than Charlotte’s former opponents save for Washington.

In the first phase of the season, each three-team division will play a round robin of three game series, with each franchise hosting one series and traveling for one series. In the second phase of the season, all six teams from each conference will travel to the conference championship, a two-day event that will determine what franchise will win the conference and which five teams will qualify from the conference for MLQ Championship. The season will end, as it always has, with the MLQ Championship, which will now consist of four rounds of single-elimination, best-two-out-of-three series until a champion is crowned.

We believe the new format will lead to a higher rate of competitive games while also prioritizing travel schedules that are reasonable for our teams as our franchises become more spread out geographically. Conference Championships should also allow us to give even more games the marquee feeling of which they are deserving.

We are excited to see how our teams and fans enjoy the new format and will be taking feedback on it over the course of the year to come. We at MLQ are always looking to improve, and we can only do that with your help. We look forward to the season to come, and hope to see you all at one of our events in just a few months.

Questions about the new format? Drop us an email at gameplay@mlquadball.com.