Soccer Countdown

What this page covers

The clock at the top counts down to the next kickoff across every competition on this page, whichever one it happens to be, and moves on as each match finishes. Below it, one card per competition shows that competition’s own next fixture with its own running clock, so you can see at a glance whether the thing you care about is tonight or three weeks away. Every card links through to a full-screen countdown you can share or embed.

Three competitions are covered here — Major League Soccer, Liga MX and the UEFA Champions League — each with a page of its own listing every club and that club’s next match.

Major League Soccer

MLS runs on a calendar year rather than the autumn-to-spring model used across most of Europe. The regular season starts in late February and runs to October, with clubs split into an Eastern and a Western Conference and playing the bulk of their fixtures inside their own conference. Most matches are on Saturday evening, which for a league spanning the continent means kickoffs are spread across four time zones.

The Audi MLS Cup Playoffs follow, taking most of November and finishing with MLS Cup in early December. Midway through the summer the league pauses for Leagues Cup, a knockout tournament played against Liga MX clubs, which is the one point in the year where the two leagues on this page share a schedule.

Liga MX

Liga MX splits its year into two separate tournaments, each with its own champion — a structure that surprises people arriving from a single-season league. The Apertura runs from July to December and the Clausura from January to May. Each is a seventeen-round regular phase followed by the Liguilla, a knockout stage decided over two legs, ending in a final played across two matches at each finalist’s stadium.

That means two title races, two finals and two sets of playoff countdowns every calendar year, with a short break between tournaments rather than a long summer off.

UEFA Champions League

The Champions League begins with a league phase in which thirty-six clubs each play eight matches against eight different opponents, spread across match weeks from September to late January and drawn into a single combined table rather than small groups. The top eight advance directly to the round of sixteen; the next sixteen contest a two-legged knockout playoff in February.

From the round of sixteen in March the rounds are two-legged — quarter-finals in April, semi-finals in late April and early May — until the final, a single match at a neutral stadium in late May or early June. Matches are played on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings in European time, which for viewers in the Americas usually means an afternoon kickoff.

How fixtures are sourced

Each competition has its own published fixture feed, and we read the next scheduled match from it rather than maintaining a hand-written calendar — a league that reschedules for weather or a cup replay is reflected here without anyone editing a file. Kickoff times are converted to your device’s local time zone.

When a competition is between seasons or on an international break, its card says so instead of showing a stale fixture. Our data sources page documents the feeds, the refresh cadence and what we fall back to when one is unavailable.

Frequently asked questions