On Friday 10 October, Landon Donovan played his final game for his country. As a packed Connecticut stadium gave him a standing ovation, Donovan slowly left the field, 40 minutes into the game. Meanwhile, as the greatest player in modern American soccer history begain his slow stroll into the sunset, Sporting Kansas City was playing the Chicago Fire. Donovan himself only played part of the game because his club (the LA Galaxy) required his services that Sunday.

All these games were taking place during an officially designated “international” break – those periods when national leagues pause play in order to allow national teams to play in tournament qualifications and friendlies. Not every league pauses play; but Major League Soccer is the most high-profile league to keep playing during the break.

That MLS plays on a different calendar from virtually every noteworthy league is, at best, an uncomfortable reality for many fans of the league. It governs everything from the training and preparation for teams in the league to player acquisition – the league’s transfer windows also differ from other leagues, which means that players coming over in the summer are joining teams in mid-season, making a difficult adjustment even tougher.

The usual response is that playing a fall/winter schedule, like most European leagues, would be decidedly difficult. We got a glimpse of that during the last MLS Cup final. No matter where you went in Kansas City’s Sporting Park last 7 December, you couldn’t escape the cold – a paralysing, brutal chill that sucked the breath from your lungs and made it painful to take another. Any refuge was temporary at best. The cold weather reduced two teams used to playing attractive, possession-oriented soccer to shadows of themselves.

The weather is also a concern at the beginning of the season. Teams in Colorado, Chicago and Toronto, among other northern cities, regularly play their first games of the season on snow-covered fields, with games postponed till later in the season. The Montreal Impact, in fact, tend to play the first month of the season in an indoor stadium, before moving to their home at Stade Saputo when the weather improves.

How do you address this conundrum? In speaking with league sources, three options stood out:

• Lengthening the window of the season: that is, extending when MLS plays league matches. Currently, the league starts play in March, and ends the season with the MLS Cup final, which will be played on 7 December.

• Adding more midweek matches. Right now, the majority of midweek games are played at the beginning of the season.

• Changing the number of regular-season games. MLS plays a 34-game season at this time, and because the league has 19 teams, the schedule is “unbalanced”, meaning that a team doesn’t just simply play it’s opponents home-and-away, but might play two away matches and one home match.

All three of these options are imperfect. Lengthening when MLS plays league matches means that league would potentially start playing in February. It would mean more games like last year’s MLS Cup final – in places like Chicago and Toronto, temperatures are consistently freezing during February, with lows in the teens and twenties; in cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia and even as far south as Washington, the temperature will seldom be above freezing point.

What about adding more midweek matches? Historically, MLS midweek matches have been sparsely attended, since they take place in the evening after work. As a result, teams end up losing money at the gate, which is where MLS teams make their money. For that reason, MLS owners are loth to add more midweek matches.

Finally, changing the number of regular-season games. While most people – including my sources – think this means adding more games to the schedule, there is no reason it could not mean the opposite.

Speaking on a Dallas-based soccer talk show, sportscaster Adrian Healey mentioned seeing a preliminary broadcast schedule for ESPN next year that has clear Fifa breaks in June, September and October. That’s notable because ESPN will be one of two networks broadcasting the league’s games next season (Fox is the other one). While my sources declined to comment on Healey’s remarks, they did say that the league would make a real and concerted effort to align the league schedule with the international calendar, once the schedule was finally crafted.

That’s intriguing, because two teams (New York City FC and Orlando City) are joining the league next year, and one is reportedly going on hiatus (the ill-starred Chivas USA, which is owned by the league). That gives the league 20 teams – which not only is a nice, round number, but also makes scheduling a lot less complicated, particularly if you’re playing the teams in your conference home-and-away, and the teams in the other conference just once.

This results in fewer games – 28 in total. Cutting back on the number of games would give the league the flexibility it needs in order to comply with the international calendar. It especially makes sense given that the league finally has a television deal with specifically designated national broadcast days – Fridays and Sundays. And as it turns out, we know that the league considered cutting the schedule as recently as last year. That speculation was quickly rubbished by the addition of Orlando City, which gave the league 21 teams, but with Chivas USA going on hiatus, this is no longer a concern.

We’ll know more in a couple of months – the league generally releases the following season’s schedule before the MLS Cup final – but as it stands, the circumstantial evidence points very strongly to a shortened schedule that is much more in sync with the international calendar.