MLV 2027: Vegas Returns, Twelve Teams 📅
Twelve teams, two conferences and 26 matches each. Vegas comes back from a season off, and four genuinely new markets arrive.
Major League Volleyball goes to twelve teams in 2027, split into an Eastern and a Western conference, with a 26-match regular season for everybody.
The Eastern conference is Atlanta, Columbus, DC, Grand Rapids, Indy and Orlando. The Western is Dallas, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Northern California, Omaha and Vegas.
Each team plays all eleven opponents home and away, which is 22 matches, and then four more inside its own conference. MLV announced the format on 19 August and restated it on 2 September.
That is up from eight teams in 2026, and the growth comes from two different directions at once.
Four New Markets and One Coming Back
The genuinely new markets are Los Angeles, Northern California, Washington DC and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Northern California and DC were flagged as far back as the August 2025 merger release.
Minnesota's team was revealed in August as the Minnesota Forge, playing at Grand Casino Arena. LOVB is also putting a team in Minnesota for 2027, at Maturi Pavilion, and they are two different franchises in two different leagues.
Vegas is the fifth addition and the different one. The Thrill began play in 2024, sat out the whole of 2026 while the league looked for an owner, and return in January at Lee's Family Forum in Henderson.
A team that could not find an owner eighteen months ago is now one of twelve in a league that had eight. That is the clearest single measure of what has happened to this sport's money since the merger.
Michael Landier of Landier Entertainment, in the league's announcement of the sale on 3 August.
As a fan of the Vegas Thrill and a longtime supporter of our sports community, bringing the team back is especially meaningful to me.
Rachel Morris, formerly the associate head coach at Indiana, is the head coach. The previous ownership has not been named by anybody and we are not going to guess at it.
The Schedule Is the Thing Still Missing
The full 2027 schedule and the postseason format are both unpublished, and were still unpublished when MLV restated the alignment on 2 September.
The season runs January to May. The 2026 edition was eight teams and ended with the Dallas Pulse beating the Omaha Supernovas in the final, and in 2027 those two are in the same conference.
Twelve teams playing 26 matches between January and May is 156 match dates in about eighteen weeks. A league that has never staged more than eight teams at once has to fit that in without stacking midweek volleyball on top of itself, and it has not yet shown anybody how.
