Welcome to the Weekly /r/MLS Questions/Free Kick Thread. This thread is designed to house questions/discussions users might have including:

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• Help you decide which team to follow if you're new to the league

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• Provide information about how to watch MLS matches, and whether or not you should buy ESPN+

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• Understand the CBA, league roster rules, drafts, waivers, or other MLS concepts

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• Learn about some of the unique qualities of the US Soccer pyramid

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• Allow discussion of dead-horse topics that would typically be removed (pro/rel, re-alignment, etc.)

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• And other basic/frequently discussed topics

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Our usual ground rules:

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1. Questions that are covered in the FAQ, Newcomer's Guide, or league site are fair game, even if they are marked as "dead horse topics".

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1. Questions can be about MLS, lower U.S. or Canadian divisions, USMNT/USWNT, or any club or domestic competitions those teams could play in. Questions about how soccer works as a sport are fine too! Questions solely about the European leagues or competitions, on the other hand, are not.

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1. If you're answering a question, be extra sure to follow our community guidelines: thought out and rational comments, backed up with supporting links. Try not to "take a guess" at an answer if you're not sure about the answer. Do not flame, troll, attack fans of other teams, or attack opinions of others in this thread. If you can't be friendly and helpful, don't post in this thread.

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1. This is meant to be a helpful Q&A/Discussion thread. This is not a place to practice your comedy bits; avoid asking joke questions or providing joke answers. This is also not a place to dump random articles, links, or opinions about the league.

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1. Despite us posting these on Fridays, the thread stays up all week. If it's Wednesday and you have a question, you don't have to wait until Friday to ask it.

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Even though we want you to ask questions, here are some resources that we always recommend reading because they can also help:

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• /r/MLS Newcomers Guide

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• /r/MLS FAQ

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• MLS Competition Rules and Regulations

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• MLS Roster Rules and Regulations

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• History of MLS on Wikipedia

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• All Weekly /r/MLS Questions/Free Kick Threads

Hi y'all!

Hope everyone had a ton of fun this past month and a half watching that amazing World Cup, congratulations to Spain on the victory! While we had a brief teaser of a few games last Thursday, MLS action returns in full and Leagues Cup begins next week as we head into the second-half of the season.

With league play getting back underway, the mod team wanted to check in with a few small updates and reminders before things get going!

TL;DR

• New Scoreboard is permanent, will have matches for all of MLS, NWSL, CPL, NSL included to mirror Old Reddit, but only MLS and US/Canada national team matches will generate match threads
• Welcome new users! Please familiarize yourselves with our rules, especially those around remarkability, and interest/fairness for all.
• Free Talk Thursdays start this week (July 23) and will be held weekly moving forward. To participate and ensure automod doesn't eat your discussion post, you need to include [Free Talk] in the title of your post, the same way you have to do [Meme] for those posts on Mondays!

New Scoreboard/Match Threads

During the World Cup, we trialed the Global Scoreboard Reddit app created by one of our counterparts over on r/LigaMX, u/GamersWant. This app enables the mod team to set clubs and competitions to automatically generate a schedule and create corresponding match threads half an hour before kickoff. We've been thrilled with the functionality during the World Cup and have received a ton of positive feedback, so we're formally implementing the app as our primary scoreboard/match thread generator moving forward! This greatly lessens the load on the mod team to manage the schedule on the sidebar and ensure match threads are getting generated.

While the app primarily functions on new Reddit and the official Reddit app, u/GamersWant has been extremely receptive to feedback and working hard to provide upgrades that added live, upcoming, and previous matches to display on Old Reddit as well, ensuring it has functionality regardless of which way you use Reddit. This was a major pain-point of ours, so we're very grateful for the updated functionality.

Additionally, after user suggestions, the app was updated to include the feature to 'Hide' scores! On the bottom-right of the scoreboard is a small button you can press to hide all scores to avoid spoilers! You can also do this on each individual match thread if you want to avoid spoilers for a specific game only.

After some discussion, the mod team agreed it would be best to have the app scoreboard mirror the Old Reddit sidebar scoreboard, including not only MLS, but each first-division men and women's league in the U.S./Canada - including the NWSL, Canadian Premier League, Northern Super League. However, in the interest of keeping MLS our primary focus and avoiding a deluge of match threads drowning other content, match threads will only be generated for MLS, USMNT, USWNT, CanMNT, and CanWNT matches. We feel this lets folks know about games across both countries, while keeping things manageable on the subreddit feed.

If you have feedback, please still leave it on the main, pinned Scoreboard post at the top of the subreddit! The developer is actively working on it and feedback is invaluable to them!

Small note: We had a bug where the app was generating game-threads for everything on the schedule, which we're ironing out - so for the moment, it only has MLS on it. Once we get it ironed out, it'll display as described above.

Welcome New Users/Reminder of Discussion Rules

We've seen a healthy influx of new users posting on the subreddit in the wake of the World Cup. To all of you, welcome! We're glad to have you here and hope you find as much fun and passion in the club side of the sport in our countries as you did with the World Cup!

As you might expect, this has also led to an influx of rule-breaking posts as folks get acclimated to our community, so we figured this would be a great time to re-hash some rules for our newcomers! A few things to note as you read our rules

• Posts should be remarkable content, because it informs, entertains, or is educational. Posts driven by emotional states are not generally allowed, such as rants, complaints, or vague, low-effort discussions.
• Questions with concrete answers: "Who should I root for?", "What are designated players?", etc. will be removed and redirected towards our weekly questions thread - that's where anything like that belongs.
• We generally have a few dead-horse topics that are removed on-sight. These tend to be things that have been discussed ad nauseum in the community generally, such as individual ideas for league structure, expansion ideas, pro/rel talk, etc. Everyone has an opinion, and with nearly 1M users, we don't need everyone's hot takes flooding the subreddit. But there is a solution to allowing some discussion on these topics coming up, read below for more!

We're not perfect, and we may miss a thing or two, or automod may get overzealous, or you may simply want an explanation on something. For all moderation concerns, please utilize the 'Message the Mods' feature. We only answer mod concerns via modmail, so that we have a transparent, permanent record of any interactions that all mods can access. We will not answer mod concerns in private chats. This transparency is better for everyone so we can do our best to keep this community a fair, vibrant place!

Free Talk Thursdays Start This Week!

On the last bullet point above, you all voted in our recent State of the Subreddit questionnaire back in June to implement a looser discussion day each week, where we relax our rules and let things that would typically be removed have some breathing room. Between Tuesday and Thursday, you all voted for Thursday, and so we're going to begin our Free Talk Thursdays this week (July 23) and will hold them weekly moving forward. We typically do this during the off-seasons and those are well-received, so we're excited to expand them a bit into the in-season period as well.

We know not everyone has been a long-term member of the soccer community, and maybe some of our dead-horse topics may not be so exhausted to you. This is your chance to discuss things like league structure, expansion discussions, and fun discussions like who's the best striker in MLS history (Chris Wondolowski)? How did you choose your favorite team? Who's your favorite player? Etc. It's a day where those more mundane, well-covered topics can breathe a bit, and we hope it's a good way to let those topics come around without hearing them every single day.

In order to help our automod work nicely with these looser enforcement days, we're going to require a tag in the title of each post, similar to Meme Mondays. In order for automod to ignore your discussion post, you will need to add [Free Talk] to the beginning of your post title. (E.g. '[Free Talk] What superstar players should MLS target to sign?'). The mod team will be around to try and help if any issues arise, but we've seen a lot of success with the [Meme] tag on Mondays, so hopefully this is an easy adjustment too!

We're looking forward to seeing and participating in some of your more fun discussions on these relaxed days!

We'll Talk Soon!

That's all we've got for right now. Again, welcome to all you newcomers, and welcome back to all you veterans! We hope you enjoy the new features, functionality, and weekly events, and we'll check back again later to see how things are going!