Real Salt Lake’s February home game could soon be the norm. What that means for fans and players.

When Real Salt Lake plays its home opener on Saturday afternoon, the calendar will still say February.

While the start of the Major League Soccer season has inched earlier and earlier in recent years, this weekend’s game against the Seattle Sounders will be the earliest RSL has ever played an MLS game at America First Field.

The forecast? Unseasonably warm, with highs near 60 degrees.

With the league planning to shift to a fall-spring calendar in 2027, though, February games in Sandy might soon be the norm. And that could mean some chilly moments for players and fans alike.

The Claret and Cobalt are no strangers to cold weather, with snow games in Sandy as late as March and freezing temperatures on the road in cities like Minneapolis.

So why is MLS making the move? And is Real Salt Lake worried about the weather?

Transfer window alignment

The 2026 season will proceed normally through the summer, before a transition “mini-season” from February to May 2027, featuring a 14-game regular season. The newly-structured 2027-28 MLS regular season will then begin in mid-to-late July 2027 and conclude in late May 2028, split by a midseason break in January with no games scheduled.

The move is being made to “align the league’s schedule with the world’s top soccer leagues,” according to MLS. Those top leagues include the English Premier League, German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A and Spanish La Liga.

In particular, the new calendar lines up the leagues’ primary transfer windows, with the MLS offseason historically taking place right in the middle of the European soccer calendar. RSL has utilized the summer transfer window often in recent years, but that timing presents its own challenges, coming just a couple of months before the MLS Cup playoffs.

“The summer window, even though it’s always in everybody’s head like a half-season thing, it’s really more of a two-thirds of the way through,” RSL chief soccer officer Kurt Schmid said. “So, you know, it hasn’t been ideal to bring guys in and then their impact is limited.”

RSL went all-in on the winter window this time around, flipping six rotational players for new additions ahead of the start of the 2026 season.

Most of those new additions were not available for the season-opening loss in Vancouver last weekend, but the club is optimistic that Danish defender Lukas Engel, Uruguayan wingback Juan Manuel Sanabria and Guinean forward Morgan Guilavogui will make their debuts in Saturday’s home opener against the Seattle Sounders.

In keeping with Utah’s mostly dry winter, Saturday’s opener will likely feature mild weather with kickoff conditions around 60 degrees and cloudy. Certain infrastructure changes will be taking place at America First Field in the coming months, however, to prepare for the worst that a fall-spring calendar can bring.

Infrastructure changes

The RSL schedule has typically only extended into November and December when the team makes a deep playoff run, but those games will become more frequent starting in 2027.

The most recent snow game in Sandy occurred on March 2, 2024, in a 3-0 win over LAFC. Before that, it was a Decision Day blizzard against Sporting Kansas City on Nov. 8, 2020, which RSL lost 2-0.

Both dates will be right in the thick of RSL’s schedule starting in 2027, urging the club to add a heating system beneath the grass at America First Field between now and the calendar change.

That’s not the only infrastructure change coming to America First Field, however, with talks of new, expanded seating at both the field and concourse levels. In fact, an estimated 800 seats are currently being installed on the north concourse in anticipation of Lionel Messi and Inter Miami’s visit to Sandy on April 22.

“I think it’s just the infrastructure concerns and making sure that the grass is ready to go a little bit earlier in the year,” Schmid said of the priorities moving to a new calendar. “Apart from that, I mean, we train outside in the cold and the rain, and, you know, we can train outside as long as it doesn’t get below freezing and nobody’s getting frostbite.”

Frostbite footy?

It might not be frostbite, but several RSL players experienced “hypothermic conditions” and had to come off at halftime during an away match at Minnesota United last season in late March when icy rain sank temperatures below freezing.

Especially if Utah’s mega-drought continues into 2027 and 2028, the real problems with the new calendar will likely arise in road games in cities farther north than Sandy, such as Minneapolis and Montreal, which also play in open stadiums like America First Field.

“(The odds of) us having a home game in late November and early December are a lot higher in the new schedule,” Schmid said. “But I think it’s not something that’s going to drastically make any individual game worse than now.”

RSL kicks off against the Seattle Sounders at 5:30 p.m. MST on Saturday at America First Field, looking for its first win of the season.