MLS says it has global ambition, but too often acts like it doesn’t. That needs to change.

As Major League Soccer begins its 29th season, the league is old enough to act its age.

Twenty-nine is a point where you’re old enough to know the world as it is, but still young enough to dream big about the future.

Sadly, this winter MLS has shown it still has an insecurity that’s it’s carried for too long.

With all that’s happening in American soccer right now, from Lionel Messi to the 2026 World Cup — and that’s just the men’s game — it’s the worst time for MLS to make decisions out of fear instead of confidence.

That deserves calling out. Here are three important examples:

Messi’s arrival has sparked an unprecedented wave of interest in MLS — not just from fans, but from big-time players who want to play here. Many of them aren’t welcome, though, because the league’s roster rules bar teams from seriously pursuing them.

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If you aren’t a Designated Player, you’re a Young DP. Or a Targeted Allocation Money player. Or an Under-22 Initiative signing. Or a Homegrown Player. But you’re rarely just a player, like you’d be in the rest of the world.

Imagine if instead, the roster system worked like this: a $20 million salary cap, a $10 million floor, three Designated Players, and all of your academy products are exempt.

If you want to spend big on stars, do it. If you want to emphasize academy products like the Union do, do it. Then let those philosophies line up against each other and compete, and let’s see who wins.

MLS’s diversity of styles is one of its greatest assets. Almost everyone likes the salary cap, because a healthy amount of enforced competitive balance is a good thing. You don’t just win trophies by spending the most money possible, as happens in most of Europe.

But MLS is mature enough now that it can dump that alphabet soup of titles and be just fine.

The league’s top officials have admitted this publicly.

Last December, I asked commissioner Don Garber if his league has too many rules.

“The time will come when we no longer need to be segmenting our spending,” he said. “And not necessarily to provide more freedom, but because all of the objectives that we were looking to achieve with all of these strategic initiatives will have been achieved.”

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Garber said he believed “you’ll start seeing, in the years ahead, some streamlining of those rules, now that we have more fans — particularly more fans that are looking outside the United States, or soccer fans of international leagues [who are] here and are looking at clubs that don’t have those restrictions.”

It’s good to know he’s feeling real pressure from the soccer world. But that didn’t stop a committee of team executives from voting down proposals to loosen the rules this winter.

“We didn’t want to put ourselves, quite frankly, in a position that if we wanted to make more sweeping changes, or do a more significant overhaul of the system, that we didn’t corner ourselves or pigeonhole ourselves with where we were thinking,” MLS’s executive vice president of player strategy and relations Todd Durbin said. “It wasn’t about resistance to the changes, and more about were they broad, deep, and ambitious enough?”

That was disappointing. There should be nothing to stop an agile, ambitious league from loosening the rules some now, and more later.

MLS has many years of research that show its teams sell the most tickets when their kickoffs are at 7:30 p.m. local time. I don’t doubt that, nor do I doubt the work done by big-money consulting firms the league has hired to survey fans over many years.

In fact, there’s a certain nobility to setting kickoff times based on ticket-buying fans’ priorities. Lots of people in England wish the Premier League would think that way.

The Premier League’s broadcasters, however — led by Philadelphia-based Comcast, which owns NBC and England’s Sky Sports — call the shots. Their money is what buys the stars, so they get what they want.

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There’s a balance to strike between fans and broadcasters’ interests. Right now, MLS isn’t there.

The league got lucky when Apple signaled it didn’t care about kickoff times. That enabled MLS teams’ business staffs to indulge in a bad habit.

When a weekend kicks off at 7:30 p.m. ET, it’s the middle of the night across Europe and Africa. That means some of the world’s most important soccer nations can’t easily watch games live.

Want more fans in England, Germany, Spain, Italy, and beyond to know just how good the players are in MLS? Want more players in Europe and Africa’s talent hotbeds to want to play here? Schedule more games that they can watch live — by having more afternoon kickoffs over here.

I don’t doubt how many fans told those consultants that they want to attend night games. I also suspect they didn’t actually mean they want all the games to be at night.

It wouldn’t be that much of a sacrifice leaguewide. The 29-team circuit has 14 games on a full weekend, so one or two afternoon kickoffs would be enough. You certainly have to account for scorching summer weather along the way. But you can get away with it in enough cities.

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If teams are worried about not filling their stands, I have two counter-arguments. The first is afternoon kickoffs should attract fans who don’t go to night games. The second is the simplest of all: if your team is winning, fans will come.

American soccer’s true national championship isn’t as widely-beloved as its devotees want to think. It also has plenty of flaws: a lack of a big prize pot, the U.S. Soccer Federation taking a chunk of gate receipts, and the travel costs for big and small teams alike.

But that doesn’t mean MLS has to throw the temper tantrum it has since last December, when it announced a plan to pull its first teams out of the tournament and send reserve squads instead.

The league showed its true intent with that announcement. It felt like a sermon thundered down from the mount, not constructive criticism. That rightly enraged countless people across American soccer’s vibrant lower leagues, many of whom disliked MLS’s closed walls enough already.

MLS’s disdain for the Open Cup has been remarkably petty. When its tied-at-the-hip broadcast bankroller Apple did a documentary on Lionel Messi’s first season with Inter Miami last year, it remarkably omitted Miami reaching the Open Cup final.

Was that because Apple didn’t have the broadcast rights? Sources at MLS insist it wasn’t. But it sure stood out.

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Invoking Apple here is actually pretty useful. You can’t put an app on an iPhone unless you get it from Apple’s own store, which the European Union recently called an antitrust violation.

When you buy an iPhone, you know you’re getting a top product, backed by Apple’s decades of proof. MLS is a great league, but it isn’t a truly world-class league yet, and it knows that just like the public does. So MLS has to prove it’s worth fans’ money — and for once, Apple does too.

What’s really behind MLS’s Open Cup grievance? A congested schedule for sure, but that’s the league’s own fault. It created the Leagues Cup out of whole cloth to profit from Mexican clubs playing here. Then it got lucky when Messi arrived just in time to make last year’s tournament about him.

Another big item is the big cut of gate receipts that U.S. Soccer takes, while not paying much for teams’ travel expenses. Many lower-league clubs have the same gripes, but have kept quiet and let MLS take the heat.

Numbers can be negotiated, though, and that’s been happening. Taking your ball and going home is a different story.

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That December fracas sparked a question that still lingers: Why did MLS not let teams have expanded rosters for the Open Cup, then allow the choice to bring up reserve players? That move would have been applauded.

“We thought being unified in that would be helpful,” one league source said.

I took that line to Durbin, who’s long been one of the league’s top power brokers.

“I prefer to use the word consensus as opposed to unanimity,” he said. “Because to be honest with you, at least in my experience, it never really seems to be quite that formal.”

From the outside, it seems to be that formal pretty often. It doesn’t need to be anymore. Every time in its history that MLS has moved with confidence instead of fear, it has gotten better. It will happen again if the league finally takes the training wheels off.

Right now, more than ever, is the time to do it.