Major League Soccer’s board of governors voted to install Larry Berg as the league’s next commissioner, handing LAFC’s co-managing owner the job that Don Garber has held since 1999. The decision came in a closed-door meeting at league headquarters in midtown Manhattan.
The vote gives MLS a clear successor line at the top of a 30-year-old league, but not a clear departure date. Berg will replace Garber only after the commissioner officially steps aside, and it is still unknown whether that will happen after the 2027 sprint season, in the middle of the 2027-28 season, or at the end of that first fall-to-spring campaign.
Owners heard presentations from Berg and David Nathanson earlier in the day before voting. Berg is a senior partner at 26North, and his path into MLS has been unusually deep for a future commissioner: he first invested as a limited partner in the league’s second attempt to launch a second club in Los Angeles in 2014, then became one of LAFC’s managing owners in 2016 after an internal buyout.
That background matters because Berg is not arriving from sports media or league administration. He has spent time in private equity at 26North and Apollo Global Management, chaired McGraw-Hill Education, and built a profile inside MLS through ownership. LAFC first took the field in 2018 with Bob Bradley as coach and Carlos Vela as the headliner, later earning recognition as MLS operations club of the year in 2023 while John Thorington was named MLS sporting executive of the year in 2024. Forbes estimated the club’s valuation at $1.32bn in May 2026.
The unresolved piece is the one that will matter most inside the league. Garber’s contract runs until the end of 2027, but the owners’ vote did not settle when he will actually leave. That leaves MLS with a chosen successor and an open handoff window, a transition that will shape the league’s next phase more than the vote itself.
Berg has already signaled how he thinks about that phase. In February 2020, he said MLS was already “a league of choice to a certain extent,” and added that becoming a top five or top three league would come down to money and the ability to compete for players. If he takes over on the far side of Garber’s exit, he will become only the third commissioner in MLS history, inheriting a league that has grown under one leader for a generation and now has to prove it can change cleanly.
