The 2018 MLS regular season schedule was released on Thursday and with that comes travel plans.
Team administrators are starting to pore over their schedules and trying to plan flights all across the country. Every team has 17 games away from home, but not all road trips are created equal. There's a big difference going on a New York to Philly trip and a New England to Seattle one.
Eastern Conference teams will always have an advantage when it comes to travel, with the majority of the cities only a few hundred miles away. This is reflected in the actual numbers when calculating the distances teams will travel throughout the course of the season.
The seven teams who will travel the most in 2018 all reside in the Western Conference while the seven teams who will travel the least all reside in the East. Vancouver resides at No. 1 in part due to their trips to Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and New York City.
The Process
The process used to to determine these distances was to calculate the number of miles between each team's stadium as the crow flies and then multiplying by two, making it round trip. However, this was not used every time as teams who play multiple games on the road in a week do not typically travel home between matches. In this case, a team's travel from their home stadium to the stadium of their first road match was added to the distance between the two road stadiums and the distance between the second road stadium and the team's home stadium.
