Major League Soccer broke with tradition this season as the league removed its long-running, entirely free fantasy game from the official MLSsoccer.com website.
MLS Fantasy had been around in various forms for well over a decade, a mainstay offering from the league that proved popular with hardcore MLS fans and followers.
Now, the fantasy MLS game as we knew it is dead, and in its wake, three new options have stepped forward looking to capture the fantasy soccer-playing audience abandoned by the league and its website.
Below, we'll go over each of the three new fantasy MLS games – Kickbase, Fantasy United, and Sofascore – that hope you'll choose them in your quest to play pretend Chief Soccer Officer. It's an attempt to lay out the pros and cons of each game while highlighting which fantasy offering is right for whatever level of MLS fantasy player you might be, from novice to seasoned veteran.
Kickbase: The confusing (and pricey) successor
This is the new fantasy game and app officially backed by MLS, though it's a departure from the open and free version of fantasy soccer MLS produced itself for many years.
Kickbase is restrictive in how its players face off, since there is only one big global season-long league every fantasy MLS player can join, the 2026 Season Challenge, something the game-makers introduced after their initial launch in response to complaints from prospective game-players.
You can't easily join a league full of managers who said New York City FC is their favorite team, which you used to be able to do at sign-up in the previous MLS version of fantasy. There simply isn't a mechanism to allow for creation of one big league that can be joined by all members of a fanbase or fandom.
Kickbase only allows players to create seasonal leagues open to 18 players maximum, so as an example, the many interested subscribers of Hudson River Blue couldn't join one league and compete together for fantasy MLS glory, but would have to be dispersed across multiple and possibly tracked in an overall HRB table offline in some sketchy Google Sheet.
Instead, Kickbase puts an emphasis on their gimmicky (six-player squad, one player per team, 1-2-2 formations!) global weekly challenges which offer prizes to the Top 3 managers, prizes which range from $100 in cash to free access to Kickbase's premium subscription tiers.
Premium subscription tiers, you say? Therein lies the main rub with Kickbase: It's technically a free to play Fantasy MLS experience, but it also finds lots of ways to up-charge its players once they've entered the game's universe.
You can't see the scoring done by your chosen fantasy players live and in real time unless you either watch a 10-15 second advertisement in their app, or if you pay to become a Pro or Member subscriber.
Since Kickbase is the official partner MLS has chosen for the immediate future of its fantasy game, those who become "premium" Kickbase subscribers are also the ones who get access to official player images and likenesses, rather than faceless avatars, and paid subscribers are also given access to more statistics and data to inform their fantasy decision-making than those who stick with the free tier.
Kickbase doesn't ask managers to build deep squads – you only need to sign 11 players with a salary budget of $250M, so there are some big salary numbers floating around this game for the star players of MLS.
Kickbase does feature a very deep and complex points-scoring system, as seen in the game's Points Table, which the company publishes here.When handing out fantasy points, their game accounts for 100 in-game actions made by players, so Kickbase at its core does offer a comprehensive and robust free game you can play.
You're just asked to pay up if you want to get all the available bells and whistles from this game, something users were never asked to do for the years MLS hosted its own fantasy game.
Fantasy UTD: The next-gen upstart
This isn't a fantasy MLS game for a beginner or a fantasy-sports novice. Fantasy UTD is the most in-depth free version of a Fantasy MLS game that you'll likely find.
Fantasy UTD asks managers to bid at auction to sign the players they want to add to their squads, and prioritizes more of a holistic Sporting Director-like approach to overseeing a large 25-player roster for the duration of a lengthy MLS season.
The player movement universe in Fantasy UTD closely mirrors how it works in the real world, as fantasy managers can make cash bids for players on opposing teams and can negotiate transfers with opposing managers, since you can list your own players as available for transfer and maneuver the transfer market as you see fit.
Budgets begin at $150M, and you need a minimum of 11 players to field a lineup, but can own up to 25 and fill out a bench as much as you'd like. Auctions and bidding for players in a more competitive market setting are at the core of Fantasy UTD, but once the player auction deadlines have passed ahead of a round of matches, managers are able to essentially hit a "buy them now" button to add unsigned players immediately to their squads, though at higher set prices than what they were previously listed at for auction.
Unlike Kickbase and Sofascore, Fantasy UTD does offer a wide variety of publicly-accessible leagues – what they call Fanzones – which are organized around many of the big MLS blogs (like Hudson River Blue, join our Fanzone!) and podcasts.
It's not quite an exact replica of the "NYCFC league" in the old fantasy game, but anyone can join any of the Fanzones, with hundreds of competitors already signed up in the Soccerwise and Backheeled Fanzones, as examples. You don't use the same squad in each Fanzone, though, so the more you join, the more times you're agreeing to try to build out a 25-player roster via auction.
Your squad always gets a head-to-head matchup with another manager's, and Fantasy UTD then tallies up points in that matchup to determine a winner, with winning teams getting three points, and one point each getting handed out in the event of a draw, just like in the real world.
This game is a far cry from what the old, simple fantasy MLS game used to be, and it might have the steepest learning curve for someone coming into playing a fantasy MLS game for the first time. That said, Fantasy UTD also has the potential to be highly engrossing and might be the most in-depth free fantasy soccer game out there at the moment.
Sofascore: The true heir to MLS Fantasy
If you wanted an almost exact replica of the now-defunct Fantasy MLS game offered by the league itself these past years, Sofascore now has just that. Their new free game is also the only one of the three covered in this article that you can play on a desktop computer, not exclusive to the world of apps, so bonus points for their game if you prefer that user experience.
Sofascore fantasy managers create 15-player squads on $100M budgets, limited to three players from a given MLS team. There's not a need for long-term squad building in Sofascore's game, as they give you a whopping five free transfers to use for each round of MLS matches, though those transfers don't roll over so you can't stockpile them.
This game has the more traditional season-long league setups familiar to MLS or Premier League fantasy players. Creating a team gets you in the global MLS league (currently with around 19,000 registered players), and you can join a public league based on your country of origin – like a USA one, for example. Private leagues aren't forced to limit the number of members and are easy to create, then also easy to get would-be players into, since creating a private league generates a unique code you can distribute to any people you want to potentially join your league.
Sofascore says their game utilizes 30 statistical categories to hand out points to players, and one of them is the algorithmically-generated Sofascore Rating given to each player for their real-world performance in a given match. Players can even register negative points for their fantasy managers if their Sofascore Rating is too low, putting some serious weight on the stats app's in-house player rating system.
This game has no frills and is the most straightforward option for someone looking to play fantasy MLS this year, and it's already seeming like the most popular of the three, at least based on the number of players in that global MLS league.
Because of that, Hudson River Blue started a Sofascore league, which you can join here or by using code KHUAG.
