TORONTO — Hours before Major League Soccer will crown a new champion, the commissioner of the league announced a number of changes, including fundamentally altering the playoff format and a potential move away from a summer schedule to an international calendar similar to the one followed by soccer leagues around the world.

“We are going to make a serious effort to investigate the steps we would need to take to determine whether or not we can change our calendar,” Commissioner Don Garber said before kick off of M.L.S. Cup. “I think this will be big news around the world, particularly as we go out to Zurich and try to bring the World Cup back to the United States. We’re basically saying to the world, ‘We’re going to do the work to figure out what we need to do.’”

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On Dec. 2, the FIFA executive committee will meet in Switzerland to award the 2018 and 2022 World Cup tournaments. The American bid for the 2022 tournament is considered a strong contender, but many FIFA officials, including President Sepp Blatter, have been vocal critics of the March to November schedule M.L.S. follows. Blatter has indicated that the league’s reluctance to play a fall-to-spring season keeps it outside the soccer mainstream and could hurt the U.S. bid.

“I’m not saying we’re doing it,” Garber said. “I’m saying we’re doing the work to see if we can.”

The commissioner, who has held a series of meetings this weekend with league’s owners, sponsors, the United States Soccer Federation and Canadian Soccer Association, said that the changes were aimed at growing the sport in North America for fans, not to appease FIFA.

“If we’re going to make the announcement six months from now, we might as well make it now,” Garber said. “We’ve been talking about it for the last year.”

The change to the schedule would mean that M.L.S. would play during colder months and would compete for attention with college and professional football in the United States. It remains to be seen if soccer fans in some markets that have struggled with attendance would turnout.

“Today will be a pretty good test,” Garber said two hours before kickoff at BMO Field, where winds were 12 miles per hour and temperatures approached 44 degrees. “This game, if we were to change out calendar, would be a regular-season game in Toronto. Today it’s our championship.”

Garber announced more firm changes for next season, including moving up the league’s start date – by days or weeks, not months – to avoid a conflict with the first round of the N.C.A.A. college basketball tournament.

As the league adds teams in Vancouver and Portland next season and in Montreal in 2012, the playoffs will expand to 10 teams from 8.

The league will continue to have two geographically organized conferences, but Garber said he wanted to avoid the embarrassing situation that occurred this year when two teams from the Western Conference — Colorado Rapids, who play F.C. Dallas in the title game tonight, and the San Jose Earthquakes — played in the Eastern Conference final.

The fourth-place and fifth-place teams in each of the conferences will have a playoff, following the regular-season schedule, to determine the conferences’ final playoff team. It remains to be seen if this will be a one-game elimination match or a two-leg aggregate goal series where each team gets to host one game.

“We’re trying to have a popular sports league that matters in local markets,” Garber said.

In addition to changes to the playoff format, the commissioner said that the league’s competition committee will try to increase the relevance of the regular season, which will expand to 34 games for each team next year.

“There are a lot of things we can do to make our regular season more relevant,” he said, without offering details.

While the changes to the 2011 schedule and the playoff changes will have to be set in the next couple of months, there is no timetable for revamping the league’s schedule more fully. Garber said the investigation will take as long as it takes and implementation could take a while.