MLS launch update - let us explain some things!

Hi, everyone!

The 2026 MLS season is up and running, and so too is Fantasy UTD. 15 games, 46 goals, countless dramatic moments… our first gameweek was one to remember!

Thousands of American soccer sickos are playing FUTD for the 2026 MLS season and it was great fun to see so many enjoying the game on Saturday and Sunday as the action got under way.

There were some teething issues. Those were expected to a certain extent. However, we thought we would explain some of the things that didn’t go to plan.

Transfer deadline issues

Those leagues with a transfer deadline a week ago on Thursday might have encountered some problems.

Our hosting partners suffered an incredibly poorly timed outage which resulted in a surge of traffic when the app started to operate fully again. This led to a second crash. We were chasing our tails from that point on, never quite able to get on top of the traffic.

From roughly 8pm ET to 10pm ET, most leagues suffered some sort of latency. Some encountered bigger issues than that for which we are very sorry.

We believed measures had been taken to prepare for high traffic. However, the traffic was so much higher than we’d expected - 18,000 transactions PER SECOND at its peak!

So it’s back to the drawing board to account for such traffic at the transfer deadline. We have some ideas.

Format flaws

We tested FUTD for a full year in 2025, operating several testing phases that even included a phase for the Club World Cup (remember that?).

However, there’s nothing like thousands of actual users to expose some of the flaws in your format, and we discovered some last week.

One thing that really crystalized was how the current format is overwhelming at the transfer deadline. We believe in the bidding format and want to protect the concept, but it’s too much when everyone in your league is bidding on all the same players at the same time.

It’s impossible to strategize. It becomes a case of grabbing whichever players you can purely to make up a squad.

To reiterate - we want to retain some of this chaos. Transfer deadline day IRL is chaotic and we want our transfer deadline to reflect that. But serious format changes are required and we have some in mind.

More on that later.

Incomplete teams

A number of users have expressed their desire for a function that removes inactive teams from leagues.

This was an understandable request. If you’re paired with an inactive team in a H2H fixture, there’s very little reason for you to remain interested for that gameweek. It’s an issue that requires a more solid solution moving forward.

For the time being, though, we have removed inactive teams with no players from all leagues and Fanzones.

This isn’t a perfect solution. H2H schedules have been reshuffled as a result, which means you might be facing the same opponent in GW2 as GW1. However, we believe this was the best option available to us.

More to come

A development update is coming soon on some of the things we have been working on.

FUTD was always meant to be a project to build the best fantasy soccer platform possible and we remain focused on that mission.

Team FUTD