Major League Pickleball Competition Changes For 2025

After two days of owner meetings in Dallas earlier this week, representatives from Major League Pickleball (MLP), which previously had announced its high-level event schedule for 2025, met with members of the media on Wednesday 1/122/25 to answer questions prior to releasing details related to the forthcoming season. There are a slew of interesting changes coming to the league from season’s past; let’s get into them and provide some analysis/opinions on what the impact may be. Here’s a discussion of Major League Pickleball Competition Changes For 2025.

The press release with all the details on the new season is here and a detailed document describing the 2025 Competition Rules is here. I won’t delve into every single rule, but will discuss some of the major items that are new for 2025.

February 15th Deadline for Player Eligibility for 2025 Season

Last season, players could be picked up in waivers or drafted prior to having signed a MLP contract. The rules stipulated that the player had to sign something “before they stepped foot on a court.” No longer; in 2025 this loophole has been eliminated. Players who want to be eligible to play in the MLP this season have to be signed to contracts BEFORE the transactions occur.

Impact: this eliminates a major issue Challenger had in 2024, when five solid female pros (aka “the Big Five”) opted out prior to the draft, then made themselves eligible at the first waiver period, which drastically (and unfairly) changed the dynamics of the challenger season. The top four 2024 Challenger finishing teams all swapped out a lesser female for one of these big five players, a competition-altering issue that needed to be addressed.

There’s another elephant in the room regarding this rule, and it relates to a handful of notable players who ended 2024 under one-year deals and who have major question marks about their 2025 eligibility. The UPA is pursuing contracts with certain players that fall into this category, with one major signing already being announced in Gabe Tardio. Furthermore, these contracts are being pushed as combined PPA/MLP exclusive contracts, ending the APP carve-outs that were frequently part of the Aug 2023 initial MLP deals. Look for a few more notable players being announced between now and mid-February.

Another side-effect of this deadline is, players who do NOT sign prior to 2/15 will not be eligible to play the 2025 season, per the current thinking. This rule may be relaxed, especially if a marquee player pops up who owners petition for and is signed, but for now, the same competitive issues that plagued challenger are of concern.

We hope to get an official list of eligible players once the 2/15 deadline passes, since it will feed directly into the next set of dates. This may not help with the fun “who will every one drop” piece I will write in a few weeks, but we’ll do the best we can with the information at hand.

MLP Premier Teams Expanding to Six Players for 2025

This is big news, and is something the league has teased in the past, but now it is official; all 16 premier league teams will maintain Six-person rosters for 2025. They will be three men and three women on each team. Challenger Teams shall remain at four players. These six-man teams also mean that the IR concept for an event is going away (IR will now be season-long), the Player Loan concept is going away, and the use of on-site reserve player pools will be severely limited, at least in premier.

Impact: there’s a couple of major impacts right off the bat. First, the player pool of females will be severely challenged. We’ll now have 16 premier teams at three females each; that’s 48 female pros just in Premier. We know thanks to known contract issues going on that a slew of females who played challenger last year are not going to be eligible this year, which drains the pool of a slew of names that would have naturally moved up. This talent drain will be seen more distinctly in the challenger level; we may see some really interesting ladies on challenger rosters this season.

Acquiring two more players will involve some interesting strategy on draft day; do you splurge for your “top 4” and then go cheap on your bench? Do super teams pack their rosters with six top players and throw costs to the wind? Thanks to the contract restrictions, we’re not going to see complete unknowns or high schoolers drafted and stashed; these have to be signed players.

Going forward, how will teams select who plays? These rules have yet to be finalized, but the league has gotten feedback from its sports betting partners that lines cannot be declared for matches unless there’s firm certainty about who is playing. So, the league is leaning towards teams declaring the four active players for each competition day and not adopting a free-substitution methodology that some have advocated for. Specifically, “you have to play doubles to play singles,” so there’s not going to be a concept of having a singles specialist on your bench to call up for a DreamBreaker.

Key Player Transaction Dates announced

One of the big off-season MLP items we’re all waiting for is the drop period. We’ve known for months the rules: in short, MLP teams must drop at least one player from their roster prior to the 2025 draft, and must pay half the original acquisition fee to retain existing players. Players who were waiver claims cannot be kept, and any player who was an original draftee on draft day in 2024 is keeper eligible.

Here’s the player transaction schedule for this spring:

• Jan 22, 2025: Pre-season Trade Window Opens
• Feb 15, 2025: Pre-season Trade Window Closes
• Feb 15, 2025: All eligible players must be under contract
• Feb 16, 2025: All MLP declare their keepers, sending players to draft pool.
• Mar 2, 2025: Premier League Free Agency Period
• Mar 3, 2025: Challenger League Free Agency Period
• June 11 & 12: Waiver Period
• July 14th: In-season Trade Deadline

Impact: So, as of this writing teams can trade players. I can’t imagine too many trades occurring between premier teams, since teams have to stay at their 2024 structures (two men and two women) until the keeper deadline. However, it’s possible some challenger teams that are faced with multiple drops thanks to frequent waiver moves last year could look to acquire a player that another team plans to drop anyway, in order to net a few dollars. California BLQK bears GM Jimmy Miller already reports that his phone is ringing off the hook with trade discussion, so maybe we’ll see some moves.

Just one Waiver Period in 2025

June 11th and 12th (for Premier and Challenger) will be the sole waiver periods for the season. Last year, just a handful of waiver moves were made all season by Premier teams, while challenger teams made a slew of moves throughout the season’s multiple waiver periods (12 of the challenger’s 40 players at season end were waiver claims).

Impact: the premier league already barely used the waivers with 4-person teams: with 6-person teams there will be zero need for them, and I’d be surprised if there’s a single waiver claim in Premier in 2025. Meanwhile, the Challenger teams are going to be forced to draft more efficiently, since they’ll have to play half the season with their draft-day format.

I sense this may end up being a real “challenge” (no pun intended) for the Challenger teams. The reason being something we have already discussed; the talent pool in Challenger is going to be much thinner than it is in Premier thanks to the move to 6-person rosters.

Player Acquisition Bidding will lead to Major Financial outlays

There are three primary details that were disclosed that had been unknown or up in the air for the new season:

• Both Premier and Challenger are using the Slot Bidding system: Last season, MLP introduced the “slot bidding” system to acquire players, where premier teams bid dollar amounts on a draft slot, then drafted the player they sought. But, Challenger still used a Fantasy sports-style snake draft. This year; both sets of teams are using the same system.
• All player acquisition values are “real money” in 2025: there’s no “draft points” pool in use here like in 2024: all dollar amounts are real dollar amounts that teams will have to pay to acquire players.
• There are no salary caps or limits on player acquisition: Last year teams operated on a $1 million draft point/dollar budget to acquire players. This year, there’s no team salary cap.

Impact: There are several items to unpack here, and several significant impacts on a certain element of the league. First, the movement to the slot bidding for especially the challenger teams may have an outsized impact on some teams, especially teams that are not owned by deep-pocketed individuals committed to spending money. We already saw several teams last year “go cheap” on the draft in premier, which impacted their play on the field. With no “draft points” this year, every player acquisition will be a check a team has to write. Furthermore, premier teams have to buy at least three players each to get to the 6-man roster. The league specified a minimum dollar bid of $10k, which means in theory a cheap team could wait until the very end and get three $10k players to fill their roster, but they’d be at a massive disadvantage.

The lack of a salary cap is troubling. The MLP runs a very real risk of having “super teams” willing to spend millions of dollars putting together a multi-million dollar team and basically buying the title. I felt as if the teams should have factored in the “buy back” dollars as part of the player drop decisioning, forcing teams to really make calculated moves (do we really want to spend $300K to retain Player A or do we want to run the risk of re-buying that player for less on the open market)?

One thing is for sure; MLP owners are about to write some serious checks to the league. Let’s say you are title-winning Dallas: they’re going to write a check worth north of $400 thousand to retain their core, then they’re going to have to spend money on a fourth player that is just as good as the one they’re dropping, then additional funds on a bench. Is that going to be another $1 million? It’s a badly kept secret that the MLP doesn’t have self-sustaining revenues right now; how long will these owners continue to underwrite the league’s operations based on charging themselves to buy their own players back? Can teams with individual/small business owners even compete in this market? Are we going to see a challenger team populate their entire 2025 roster purposely while spending as little as possible?

MLP Doubles going to Side-Out Scoring

For the first time, MLP will go away from rally scoring in the competition, instead converting to conventional game-to-11 scoring in use on the PPA tour. The change is being initiated because, paraphrasing an MLP official, “we were tired of having to explain rally scoring to a pickleball-watching public that, 99% of the time, plays side out scoring.” The DreamBreaker will keep 2024’s rules: rally scoring to 21, win by two, and teams have to win on their own serve.

Impact: On the one hand, I totally understand the reasoning. They’re now going to a scoring system everyone understands, and one that proves to be a truer test of a player’s ability on the court. The big challenge with rally scoring has always been the inability for a team to fall behind and then “play defense” and “get stops” to get back into a game. However, they’re now changing a key differentiator for MLP in the rally scoring, one that guaranteed a frenetic, fast paced play style that appealed to many.

No New MLP teams for 2025

The league had a neat 12 and 12 team league system structure in 2023, but bought out two teams just ahead of the 2024 season. Heading into 2025, the league will operate a 16-team premier league and a 6-team challenger. Even though there’s financial opportunity in selling the two franchises from a fundraising standpoint. the league is standing firm for now, not wanting to rush the selling of the two franchises.

Impact: A six-team league is, frankly, too small. I also suspect that the value of a MLP franchise has taken a significant hit over the past year and a half since the Dude Perfect guys bought into the Frisco Pandas in a deal that put MLP valuations at $5 Million. The UPA reportedly paid $4 Million to buy out the franchises last year, though that number was never officially disclosed. However, the MLP representatives have consistently stated they wish to sell these two properties and get back to 24 teams. At this point, given that the six remaining challenger teams will auto-promote at the end of 2025, a new buyer may be enticed by the promise of going straight into the premier league.

Other Items worth noting

• Ten (10) of the 16 premier teams will make the playoffs, while all six of the challenger teams will make the playoffs. It remains to be seen what the incentives will look like for Challenger; the original plan from two years ago was to have all teams in Premier by 2026, but now new factors are in play that could delay that unified promotion to 2027.
• There might be some interesting change of pace events at the season-ending MLP Cup, since it is essentially a post-season exhibition. Maybe we’ll see an “all-star game” type competition, or player-picked teams competing.
• Seven of the 10 MLP events will also feature amateur competitions, which should greatly improve the attendance and atmosphere at those events.
• All 16 premier teams will be at the opener in Orlando, and the Orlando Squeeze owners are planning (as event hosts) a big kickoff event.
• Premier teams will play 25 match schedules across five events each. So, still not a true “home and home” where each team plays the rest of the league twice. I’m not a fan of the imbalance; one more event could have solved it.
• The Mid-season Beer City event will count in the Regular Season standings: I like this as an added benefit.
• Regular Season schedules come out next week for all teams

For MLP nerds, if you’ve read this far, I hope you’re as excited as I am to see what happens next. We’ll be back with a transaction prediction ahead of the 2/16/25 keeper deadline.