Charlotte is hosting the MLS All-Star Game tonight, but the bigger story this week might be happening in the boardroom instead of on the field. MLS owners are set to hear a proposal that could blow open the league's salary cap structure for good, and it is the kind of change that shapes the next decade more than any one match will. We've got that, plus Roberto Mancini's messy return to Italy, FIFA's plan to sell a piece of the World Cup, and a hard new discrimination report out of English football.

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The MLS board of governors gathers in Charlotte this week, and for once the All-Star Game itself might not be the biggest thing on the agenda. According to reporting from The Athletic's Paul Tenorio and Tom Bogert, the league's sporting and competition committee is set to present owners with a preliminary proposal that would fundamentally reshape how MLS teams build and pay for their rosters.

The broad strokes: a more open salary cap structure that strips away many of the current spending restrictions, while still preserving a lane for designated players. Tools like general allocation money and targeted allocation money, the mechanisms that have long capped how teams could pay non-DP players without those players effectively becoming DPs themselves, would be on the way out. In their place, teams would get more freedom to spend across the entire roster rather than concentrating money on a handful of marquee names. There's also discussion of keeping some form of incentive for signing younger players, whether through a young DP carve out or an evolved version of the current under-22 rule.

This has been building for a while. The league started chewing on structural change back in late 2023, not long after Lionel Messi's arrival in Miami pushed MLS toward faster evolution. That thinking became what the league now calls MLS 3.0, the same push that gave us the coming switch to a summer-spring calendar and a revamped competition structure. Roster spending is the piece that's been left. Commissioner Don Garber put it plainly to The Athletic before the World Cup final: "It's a must-do; it's not a maybe-do."

The timeline matters here. Some owners want these changes locked in before the calendar flips in the summer of 2027, but any real rework will likely need to run through a new collective bargaining agreement with the players' association, since the current CBA runs through January 31, 2028. The framing from around the league has been less about whether MLS teams spend enough and more about whether they're spending what they already have efficiently, a sentiment echoed anonymously by chief soccer officers who've told The Athletic in past surveys that they'd prefer an open cap system with a DP carve out intact.

That's the piece worth sitting with. A salary floor paired with a real ceiling, not just a soft cap teams can quietly work around, would do more than clean up the accounting. It would let teams actually diverge in how they build. Keep designated players in the mix, maybe even expand what that bucket looks like, whether that's more DP slots outright or clearer young DP and U-22 style pathways, and you preserve the ability for a club to take a real swing on a transformative signing without gutting the rest of the roster to pay for it. A structure like that rewards clubs with different theories of how to win, and it opens the door to types of players who never quite fit the current buckets.

There's real competitive pressure behind the urgency too. European leagues are angling for a bigger foothold in the American market, Liga MX is looking at its own commercial evolution, and FIFA keeps bringing tournaments to North American soil. MLS is also staring down a new media rights negotiation in 2029 when its current Apple deal expires, which makes the ratings and product questions tied to roster quality even more pointed. All of this lands as the league prepares for its first commissioner change in almost 30 years, with LAFC co-owner Larry Berg and former Fox executive David Nathanson as the two finalists to eventually succeed Garber.

FIFA confirmed this week that it wants to sell a minority stake in a new subsidiary called FIFA Forward Enterprise, the entity that would house the commercial operations behind the World Cup and FIFA's other competitions. The federation says it would keep majority control and full authority over "football governance, competitions, match calendar, and all regulatory and sporting decisions," while raising roughly $4.2 billion this year from long term investors. FIFA is pricing the whole venture at an initial equity valuation near $20 billion.

The lead investor is expected to be Thrive Capital, the firm run by Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner, with the process led by JP Morgan Chase. Each of FIFA's 211 member associations has been offered a one time $20 million stake, with FIFA president Gianni Infantino setting a September 19 deadline for federations to accept. Turn it down, and the letter states federations would instead receive $10 million spread across the next four years.

None of this surfaced through FIFA's own channels first. The plan leaked to The Times before FIFA confirmed it, and the reaction from UEFA was immediate. "The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade," the confederation said in a statement, adding plainly that the World Cup "is not FIFA's to sell." CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation both raised concerns about being left out of the process before it went public. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham weighed in too, saying "football belongs to the fans" and that FIFA had already sold out the moment any piece changed hands.

Selling a slice of future commercial revenue to private capital isn't some radical invention. Leagues in multiple sports have explored bringing in outside investment in one form or another as a way to fund growth without waiting on ticket and broadcast revenue alone. So the instinct to treat this as instantly disqualifying probably oversimplifies it. The real question is whether the World Cup, coming off a tournament that already pushed FIFA's 2026 revenue past seven billion euros, actually needs this money, or whether this is simply an opportunity being seized because the number is large and the door is open.

The more interesting tension is what investors get in exchange for writing that check. FIFA insists sporting and regulatory decisions stay untouched, but The Times has reported the arrangement could create pressure to expand or schedule competitions more often to maximize returns, exactly the kind of dynamic FIFA has already shown some appetite for. This isn't FIFA's first run at private investment in its competitions. A 2019 proposal for a $25 billion investment in an expanded Club World Cup, backed by SoftBank and Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, was rejected by FIFA's own stakeholders' committee. FIFA expanded that tournament to 32 clubs anyway in 2025, without needing outside capital to do it. That history is worth sitting with when FIFA says private money is necessary this time.

Then there's Infantino himself. Reporting has tied him to a future role as commissioner of FIFA Forward Enterprise once his presidential term ends, which could be as early as 2031, a claim FIFA has denied. Whether or not that specific arrangement holds, it's a fair question to ask whether a structure like this gives Infantino a path to stay attached to the World Cup even after he's no longer FIFA president. That's not a small detail in a plan built around who ultimately has a say.

UEFA is expected to hold an emergency call with its 55 member federations, likely Thursday. Where this goes next probably depends less on the size of the number FIFA is offering and more on how much transparency it's willing to give up to get it.

FIGC president Giovanni Malagò confirmed Tuesday that Roberto Mancini will return as Italy's head coach, just three years after resigning from the same job to take over Saudi Arabia's national team. It caps off one of the stranger stretches in recent Azzurri history, a rollercoaster that started with Paolo Maldini signing on as technical director on July 12 and ended with Maldini out the door 17 days later.

The chain of events reads almost like farce. Maldini and his advisor Leonardo first courted Pep Guardiola, who turned them down, then set their sights on Andrea Pirlo. That fell apart when Pirlo's role as a global ambassador for the Russian betting company Fonbet became public and set off a political firestorm inside Italian football. With Pirlo blocked and no clear path forward, Maldini and Leonardo resigned Monday, and Malagò moved quickly to install his own preferred candidate. Mancini and Malagò have a long personal relationship, including membership at the same private sports club in Rome, and Mancini has reportedly been Malagò's top choice from the start. Claudio Ranieri steps in as the new technical director, tasked with pushing through reforms in youth development.

The résumé still speaks for itself. Mancini led Italy to the European Championship in 2021, its first continental title in more than half a century, built on a style of play that made the Azzurri fun to watch again after missing the 2018 World Cup. But the way he left is exactly why this homecoming isn't landing cleanly. In August 2023, with Euro 2024 qualifiers just weeks away, Mancini resigned remotely from a holiday in Mykonos to take a reported €20 million a season deal in Saudi Arabia, bringing ten members of his Italy staff with him. Fabio Capello didn't hold back in Tuesday's Gazzetta dello Sport, saying he wasn't questioning Mancini's ability but calling the exit "really bad."

Serie A clubs have their own grievance, and it's less about Mancini and more about process. Multiple reports out of Corriere della Sera, Tuttosport, and Gazzetta dello Sport describe Lega Serie A presidents who preferred Antonio Conte, who was available after leaving Napoli, and who were reportedly willing to help cover part of his salary. Their frustration is that Malagò made the call largely on his own, without bringing Serie A into the conversation, even though those same club presidents backed Malagò's election as FIGC president in June. Serie A has since issued a statement welcoming Mancini and Ranieri, but the message underneath it was clear: they wanted a seat at the table and didn't get one.

None of this changes the calendar. Italy opens this chapter with Belgium, Turkey, and then France in the Nations League between late September and early October, about as demanding a re-entry as Mancini could ask for. Whatever goodwill or skepticism surrounds his return, it won't take long to find out which one wins out.

Kick It Out, the UK's leading anti-discrimination charity in football, released its annual report Tuesday, and the numbers tell a hard story. The charity received 1,744 reports of discriminatory behavior across professional, grassroots, and online football during the 2025-26 season, the highest total it has ever recorded. Every category tracked, racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, ableism, and Islamophobia, hit its highest mark in at least five years.

Racism remained the most common form reported, accounting for 792 incidents, or 45 percent of the total. Grassroots football saw its fifth straight year of rising reports, up to 248. Abuse directed at match officials climbed to 98, matching the combined total of the previous three seasons, with more than a third of those reports involving sexist abuse toward women officials. Kick It Out also flagged a sharp rise in anti-immigrant chanting, with 39 reports of phrases like "stop the boats" and "send them back" heard across all levels of the game, more than the previous two seasons combined.

The online abuse cases read like a season long pattern rather than isolated incidents. Chelsea's Wesley Fofana and Burnley's Hannibal Mejbri both shared screenshots of racist messages in February. Wolverhampton's Tolu Arokodare and Sunderland's Romaine Mundle were targeted the following day. Tottenham reported racist abuse of Kevin Danso to London's Metropolitan Police in April. England Women defender Jess Carter went public about the abuse she received during last year's European Championship, and a man was later given a suspended sentence for sending her offensive messages. Bournemouth's Antoine Semenyo has also spoken out about racist abuse he faced, with a related case scheduled for trial in September.

Kick It Out chief executive Samuel Okafor connected the rise to what he called a broader climb in hate crime and divisive political rhetoric across Britain, while pointing to something more encouraging underneath the numbers. He said the willingness of players and supporters to report abuse when they see it is "encouraging," and credited professional players for setting that example this season. The Premier League and the FA both issued statements reaffirming their commitment to tackling abuse, citing programs like the Matchday Observer initiative and tougher sanctions in the grassroots game, though Kick It Out continues to push for greater accountability from social media platforms specifically.

The record number is a hard thing to sit with, but it is also, in its own way, the point. More reporting means more people trusting that speaking up matters. What happens with that trust next season is the real test.

A new deal to keep Mauricio Pochettino in charge of the U.S. men's national team is close but not finalized. Telemundo's Andrés Cantor first reported Tuesday night that a renewal was nearing completion, with the new deal reportedly running four years through the 2030 World Cup. Pochettino's original contract ran only through this summer's tournament, and while both sides expressed early interest in extending the partnership, formal talks were tabled until after the U.S. run in the World Cup ended. That run included a strong group stage, a first ever first place finish through just two matches, and the program's first knockout round win since 2002, before a 4-1 loss to Belgium in the round of 16 ended things short of where the U.S. hoped to be.

Whatever the final scoreline in Belgium, Pochettino earned this next cycle. He built something at the U.S. that had an identity, a style of play that showed up consistently and fits the talent actually available in the player pool, not a system borrowed from somewhere else and forced onto it. That matters more than one result in a round the U.S. hadn't reached since 2002. It's also encouraging to see his fingerprints on decisions beyond just the senior team, including input on Steve Cherundolo's hiring to lead the 2028 Olympic team, the kind of long view a federation needs from its head coach. The one thing that has to be settled if this deal gets signed is Pochettino's focus. He's flirted with the Premier League more than once and held talks with AC Milan right before the World Cup even started. If he's committing to this cycle, that needs to mean committing to it, no lingering one eye on a club job through 2030. If managing a club again is what he actually wants sooner than that, U.S. Soccer is better off knowing now and finding a coach who wants to build toward 2030 without the distraction.

USA U-20s roll past El Salvador 3-0: The U.S. Under-20 men's national team beat El Salvador 3-0 at the Concacaf Under-20 Championship, its second straight 3-0 win to open the tournament. Dino Klapija and Ruben Ramos converted penalty kicks before Christopher Cupps added a late goal, marking the second consecutive match in which two of the team's goals came from the spot.

Müller and Evander headline MLS All-Star Skills Challenge: Thomas Müller and Evander each set a new all-time high with 79-point rounds in the Shooting Challenge at Truist Field in Charlotte, with Evander matching Müller's mark by hitting the moving target on his final shot to force a tie. Charlotte FC's Tim Ream won the Passing Challenge, Orlando City goalkeeper Maxime Crépeau took Goalie Wars, and Necaxa's Javier Ruiz won the Crossbar Challenge before helping the Liga MX All-Stars capture the Relay Challenge.

Concacaf Champions Cup heads to Paramount+ in 2027: CBS Sports has acquired U.S. English language rights to the Concacaf Champions Cup, the Concacaf Central American Cup, and the Concacaf Caribbean Cup through 2030, with the Champions Cup moving to Paramount+ starting in 2027. Select matches will also air on CBS Sports Network and CBS Sports Golazo Network.

NYCFC brings in Brazilian forward on loan: New York City FC acquired forward Luighi Hanri Sousa Santos on loan from Palmeiras through the 2026 season, with an option to buy at season's end. The 20-year-old scored five goals in 45 appearances across all competitions for Palmeiras over the last three seasons, including a run to the Round of 16 at Copa do Brasil this year.

Houston Dash sign Khyah Harper on a free transfer: The Dash signed forward Khyah Harper for the rest of the 2026 season on a free transfer from Gotham FC. Harper made her NWSL debut with Gotham in March 2025 and was part of the club's 2024/25 Concacaf W Champions Cup, 2025 NWSL championship, and 2026 NWSL Challenge Cup winning squads, and could make her Dash debut as soon as Saturday against her former team.

SDH AM: Live now on the SDH YouTube and Twitch channels: Jon Nelson sits down with Marc Spiegel, founder of Innovatio Capital and owner of Querétaro in Liga MX, MLSsoccer.com's Dylan Butler, and Bristol Rhythm goalkeeper Noé Delmotte fresh off the NPSL title game, a rare mix of ownership, national coverage, and a champion's perspective all in one segment.

SDH Live: Tonight from the Brewhouse Cafe in South Downtown: We're on site ahead of the MLS vs Liga MX All Star Game in Charlotte, breaking down the match itself and the bigger conversation about where the league goes from here.

Germany eyes a return to World Cup hosting: Eintracht Frankfurt CEO Axel Hellmann told The Athletic that Germany is positioning itself to bid for the 2038 or 2042 men's World Cup, citing existing stadium, transport, and hotel infrastructure. FIFA's confederation rotation rules make a North American return more likely for 2038, leaving 2042 as Germany's more realistic target, according to Hellmann.

Football overtakes hockey as Canada's favorite sport among young adults: A new Abacus Data survey found football is now the most popular sport among Canadians aged 18 to 29, and the top choice among Canadians not born in the country. The survey also found 54 percent of Canadian adults now have at least some interest in the sport, up six points since May.

Chelsea closing in on Danny Welbeck: Chelsea are finalizing a deal to sign striker Danny Welbeck from Brighton on a two year contract, with a medical expected by the end of the week. The 35-year old scored a career-high 13 Premier League goals last season and joins a summer in which Chelsea have shifted toward pursuing experienced players.

Gvardiol signs through 2031 at Manchester City: Croatia defender Josko Gvardiol has signed a new five year contract at Manchester City, keeping him at the club until 2031. Gvardiol joined City from Leipzig in 2023 for 90 million euros and has won five major trophies since arriving.

Internacional defender suspended until injured opponent returns: Brazil's Superior Court of Sports Justice has suspended Internacional's Víctor Gabriel until Cruzeiro forward Gabriel Pec recovers from a broken tibia sustained in a challenge from Gabriel on July 22. The suspension is capped at 180 days and can be appealed.

Wolves retain Category One Academy status: Wolverhampton Wanderers have kept their Category One Academy rating for 2026-27 after reaching a last-minute agreement with the Professional Game Academy Audit Company, avoiding what would have been the club's first downgrade since 2012. The reprieve is tied to a £10 million facilities upgrade at Compton Park expected to finish by summer 2027.

Tunisia hires Moin Chaabani: The Tunisian Football Federation has appointed Moin Chaabani as head coach on a four year contract, succeeding Hervé Renard. Chaabani takes over after Tunisia lost all three of its matches at the 2026 World Cup and left Moroccan club Renaissance de Berkane following a domestic title and CAF Confederation Cup win.

Suriname taps Henk Fraser to lead 2030 qualifying campaign: Suriname has named Dutch born coach Henk Fraser, a Paramaribo native, to a four year contract through the 2030 World Cup. Fraser previously served as an assistant during Suriname's playoff run for the 2026 tournament.

Monaco monitoring Cruz Azul's Erik Lira: Monaco are exploring a possible move for Mexican international Erik Lira as a potential replacement for Lamine Camara, who is expected to leave this summer. Lira, 26, is under contract with Cruz Azul through June 2029 and has played four matches at this year's World Cup.

MLS does not get a summer like this very often. A World Cup that carried the sport into living rooms all over the country, an All-Star Game closing things out in Charlotte, and now a real conversation inside the league's boardroom about letting teams build rosters that look different from one another. The roster rules are the last piece of this stage of MLS’ evolution, and if the league wants this summer to have a huge impact five years from now instead of just being a good few months, this is the step that makes it stick.

We'll be right there for the last of it tonight, live from the Brewhouse Cafe in South Downtown ahead of kickoff in Charlotte. Come talk about what comes next for the league with us.

Song of the Day: "Begin the Begin" by R.E.M. The Athens, Georgia band's call to start again fits a league that finally looks ready to rewrite its own rulebook.

Jason