Just like usual.

Except that most of the best players in the league will be gone playing for their national teams in the World Cup - Real Salt Lake has lost defender Eddie Pope and midfielder Douglas Sequeira, for example - and many fans could turn their attention away from the league during the four weeks that teams from 32 nations battle for one of the most prestigious trophies in all of sports.

"Insane," national team coach Bruce Arena once famously called it. "It shows a lack of respect for the national team."

Nevertheless, the league doesn't feel it had much choice.

It would prefer to suspend - or at least, lighten - its schedule during the World Cup, much the way the National Hockey League did to accommodate the Turin Winter Olympics in February. That would have kept teams from having to play games without their best players, and allowed fans to concentrate on the most important tournament in soccer.

But potential scheduling conflicts later in the summer made that impossible, deputy commissioner Ivan Gazidis said.

"In the world that we live in right now,

there's really nowhere else to move the games," he said.

The league insists it's not that big a deal, though.

For starters, only a relative handful of players will be gone - not quite a dozen to the U.S. team, and another handful to other teams, such as Sequeira to Costa Rica, Chivas USA's Claudio Suarez to Mexico and FC Dallas' Roberto Mina to Ecuador.

What's more, the league has similarly endured the World Cup in 1998 and 2002 - it did lighten the schedule somewhat in those years - and found that rather than distract from its games, the tournament actually has enlivened interest in them.

"Our experience with the World Cup is that, if anything, there's an uptick in soccer and an uptick in our games," Gazidis said. "It's an opportunity to pair ourselves, in some cases, with the World Cup games and have fans whose interest perhaps is piqued by the World Cup come and see an MLS game."

None of the MLS games scheduled during the World Cup will conflict with tournament games, except possibly the matchup between Houston and Chivas USA on July 8, which could begin just as the third-place World Cup game is ending in Stuttgart.

The World Cup "has proven to have helped us," Gazidis said, "and we anticipate that will happen again this summer."

Still, some of the biggest stars will be missing - Landon Donovan, Eddie Johnson and Clint Dempsey all are gone, for example - and many view the league's inability or unwillingness to alter its schedule as another sign that it's out of step with the international game.

''Ideally, the league should synchronize its schedule with the rest of the world," Arena told The New York Times in 2004, though he has since been made to apologize for criticizing the league.

The biggest problem is that MLS plays a summer schedule in the first place - weather is a major reason, Gazidis said - unlike most leagues around the world that typically play from August until May and have the summer months open for competitions like the World Cup.

On top of that, most MLS teams are not the primary tenants in their stadiums.

Although five teams own their own stadiums, the other seven - including Real Salt Lake - do not, meaning they don't have ultimate control over which dates are available for games. That could change for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, by which time the league hopes that 10 of its teams have their own stadiums.

But for now, most MLS teams run into severe scheduling conflicts by mid-August with the college and pro football teams that own the stadiums and play their own games on weekends.

So, while the league could have tried to reschedule games from during the World Cup to later in the season, that would have meant frequently trading weekend dates for less lucrative weeknight ones, when fewer fans generally attend games.

And in a league where most teams are still failing to earn a profit, that wasn't a welcome idea.

"For us, right now, it's more important that we have the fans that want to come see the games be able to do so," Gazidis said, "and capitalize on that increasing interest in the game in the middle of the summer."

The United States will play three warmup games before opening against the Czech Republic on June 12:

May 23 - U.S. vs. Morocco

May 26 - U.S. vs. Venezuela

May 28 - U.S. vs. Latvia