The USL Board of Governors voted in favor of another expansion of the USL regular season, which will now see each of the league’s teams play 34 games starting in the 2018 season. That brings the league parallel with Major League Soccer’s regular season, and will ensure more than 500 games are played in the league’s regular season for the first time in its history.

The growth of the USL regular season has mirrored the growth of the league. Only five years ago in 2012, the USL was playing a 24-game regular season schedule that concluded in the middle of August, and saw the USL Cup Final played in early September. Now, the season will grow to 31 weeks, beginning a week earlier that this season in the middle of March, with four weeks of playoffs that will see the USL Cup Final Player more than two months later than in those early years. That growth in not only the league’s size, but also the length of its season, has been achieved through he raised standards that have brought the USL to a higher level of prominence domestically and internationally in the past three seasons.