Frequent flyers: How Sporting KC's travel miles stack up against the rest in 2018

The magic number is 34,359.

That's approximately how many miles Sporting Kansas City will travel throughout the regular season, which will see the club play 17 road matches in 17 different cities.

This number compares relatively well to the rest of the league, ranking 14th out of 23 teams per MLSsoccer.com's computation. Vancouver Whitecaps FC will travel the most, logging 51,178 miles, while defending MLS Cup champion Toronto FC will travel a league-low 25,891 miles.

Of the 12 clubs in the Western Conference, only the Colorado Rapids (33,788) will travel fewer miles than Sporting KC.

Not surprisingly, Western Conference teams will travel more on average than Eastern Conference teams. After all, there are only a few hundred miles between most clubs situated in the East. There is a big difference, for example, traveling from Los Angeles to Seattle as compared to Philadelphia to New York. This is reflected in the table below, as the seven teams traveling the most in 2018 all reside in the West.

Due to Kansas City's centralized location in the U.S., their interconference trips to the East aren't nearly as long as the trips West Coast teams will have to make.

So how did MLSsoccer.com compute total mileage traveled for each club? They calculated the number of miles between each team's stadium as the crow flies and then multiplied by two, making it round trip.

This math was not used every time, however, as teams who play multiple games on the road in a week do not typically travel home between matches. In this case, a club'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.

How far MLS clubs will travel during the 2018 regular season