Patrick Vieira, the New York City FC coach and former Arsenal star, likes to tell stories about travelling across the United States by plane with his team. Major League Soccer teams are allowed to charter private aircraft just four times per season, so players and staff usually travel to away games on commercial airlines with the rest of us.

One time, Vieira’s team was stuck at New York’s LaGuardia airport for eight hours when a flight to Kansas City was cancelled. Anyone who has ever flown from LaGuardia will know an hour at its overcrowded gates is almost enough to dissuade most people from ever flying again. After their long wait at the gate, Vieira’s team was told to come back the following morning. A replacement plane had been found – but there was no crew to fly it. Another time, for a game in Montreal, the NYC FC entourage spent 90 minutes getting through Canadian customs.

The 2017 Major League Soccer season kicks off on Friday night, but the bad news for Vieira as he prepares for New York City’s Sunday opener against Orlando City in Florida is that if it all goes well this season he will have to endure nine months of waiting at airport gates to make December’s MLS Cup final. For MLS and its season schedule, the demands of television broadcasters take priority over any travel challenges.

“Each TV partner has their own wishes and priorities,” explains Brad Pursel, MLS vice president of club services and scheduling. “We build the season schedule with them, and ultimately they sign off when they’re very comfortable with the draft schedule before we go to a final schedule. Our broadcast partners are part of the process and it is a very collaborative process.”

Pursel is already working on scheduling MLS’s 2018 season, a complicated exercise that not only involves ESPN, Fox and Univision in the US, and TSN and TVA in Canada, but also has to take into account the calendars of Concacaf, the US Soccer Federation, and Canadian Soccer Association. Clubs submit preferred dates for home games and any potential home stadium scheduling conflicts but are down the pecking order when it comes to having input on the schedule.

“The teams don’t have a tremendous amount of say in the ultimate outcome,” says Pursel, who has scheduled the past 12 seasons for MLS. “Imagine having 22 teams telling you all the things that they want – it would be an impossible process.”

Juggling paperwork and calendar dates, Pursel pours his parameters into a computer program that spits out draft schedules. MLS executives and broadcasters tick their boxes to deliver a final schedule. The result, in part: on Friday night Portland Timbers host MLS newcomers Minnesota United for this season’s first game.

“It is a long, complicated process,” says Pursel.

He’s not wrong. This season, with Atlanta United and Minnesota United joining the league, will see each team play 34 games – 17 at home and 17 away. To complicate things a little, Pursel has to manage MLS’s two geographical conferences. The result is that clubs play each of their 10 conference opponents at least twice – home and away – and play each team in the opposite conference at least once: five or six games at home and five or six away. If you’re not yet confused, the schedule is then rounded out with clubs playing three additional intra-conference matches. One team in each conference will play one extra non-conference match.

After all that, the top six teams in each conference qualify for the playoffs. It’s worth noting the 12 teams that qualify for the knock-out competition aren’t necessarily the best teams over the season. In 2016, Portland Timbers of the Western Conference would have finished 12th in an all-league table, but the two mini-league system saw the East’s Philadelphia Union squeak into the playoffs instead.

Importantly, the playoff system also means a slow start to a season isn’t the death knell it would be for a team competing in a traditional winner-takes-all league format as seen in most of Europe. Across eight months, a mediocre regular season can be quickly forgotten if a club’s coaching staff, luck, and some good timing, sees a team peak in late summer.

Last season, Seattle Sounders started the season with three losses, dumped coach Sigi Schmid in July, lost star players Clint Dempsey and Obafemi Martins to a heart problem and China respectively, rode into the playoffs with 14 regular-season losses and still went on to win MLS Cup.

Early-season malaise is apparently a thing for champions. In 2015, eventual title winners Portland won just twice in its first 11 games. In 2014, LA Galaxy didn’t fire up until the end of spring while Sporting KC chalked up just five wins from their first 11 games during their championship season in 2013 season but lost just twice in their final 13 games.

In MLS, time apparently heals all wounds and a season can seem like a race between a tortoise and a hare. Beginning in March and ending (last season) in frozen Toronto in December, soccer overlaps at one point with every other major league in the country – as well as Fifa and Concacaf (and in 2016, Conmebol) summer tournaments.

On the other hand, former US national team coach and professional contrarian Jürgen Klinsmann raised ire when he suggested the MLS season was too short. Klinsmann wanted national team players in competitive action for 11 months of the year and players engaged in more competitive matches over that time.

European leagues usually play 38 games plus cup competitions. A top player in a successful European team can expect to be involved in between 50 and 60 matches over a season. By contrast, a top player in the best MLS team will play around 40 games a season when playoffs, US Open Cup matches, and an All-Star game are included. MLS has a large footprint but fewer matches over a calendar year. There are reasons for that: geography and time.

“We have debated this, but I think we have found the sweet spot of where our season can start and end,” says Pursel. “It’s based on the climate and when fans will turn out to games and the right number of games within our season – 34. The schedule allows for mostly weekend games but also about five midweek games per team.”

Major League Baseball and the NBA might fill shorter seasons with more games but they also don’t have to figure in cup competitions and international breaks, says Pursel: “Once you have all those other competitions occupying dates, we have pretty much maximized everything we can within that footprint from March to December.”

Which neatly brings us to November, aka the interminable playoffs that in 2016 took 50 days to play six rounds of matches. Mid-month World Cup qualifiers saw a 16-day pause in MLS play that was an aggravation for, well, everyone.

“It is challenging to have that November Fifa window fall in the middle of our playoffs, and it is something that we look at each year,” Pursel says. “It is something that we have to deal with and we are seeing if there is another way to approach it and not affect the flow of our play-offs so much.”

If Vieira’s New York City FC are still alive by October when the playoffs kick off, he will still be dealing with airports and Canadian customs agents, an issue that is unlikely to ever go away. MLS is the only major professional sports league in the US whose teams don’t take charter flights. Most teams save their allotted four charter flights for playoff games later in the season. Taking commercial airlines, LA Galaxy flew more than 38,000 miles in 2016 and Vancouver Whitecaps, Seattle Sounders and Houston Dynamo racked up more than 40,000 miles.

Former Galaxy coach Bruce Arena, now at the helm of the US men’s national team, told the LA Times last year he had ordered his players to not wear Galaxy-branded clothing while traveling.

“I’m embarrassed that we travel that way. I don’t think it helps the reputation of our league. It’s time for our league to get into the modern days of professional sports. Travel impacts the competition.”

The MLS commissioner, Don Garber, has said charter flights are low on the league’s list of priorities. Pursel says America’s geography – even with the league’s conference system minimizing cross-country travel – is part of the competition’s make-up.

“It is complicated in the US because it is such a large country and we have four time zones,” he says. “Inevitably there is long distance travel, cross-country. It is a factor we put in to limit difficult travel situations but it impossible to avoid entirely.”

With this weekend’s kick-offs, Pursel can emerge from beneath his calendars and computers – but only briefly. Next season will see the MLS arrival of Los Angeles FC, another team to fit into the season schedule, and potential tweaks to the ever-evolving league format.

“As we expand we’re looking at whether 34 games is the right amount of games to play or do we adjust the number of teams and the number of games that we get,” he says. “It is about the right competition format that makes sense.”