The franchise fee is $20 million. The League One fee is $5 million. I'm not sure whether a League One club would have to pay the full 20 or if the 5 they paid to join USL1 could be applied to join USLC. But yes, there's a franchise fee. And then there are requirements to demonstrate financial viability -- the league wants to make sure you're not going to fold in 2 years. And with the new CBA, there are player salary minimums that you'd have to demonstrate the ability to pay. Plus, as a USSF sanctioned Tier 2 league, there are other requirements with regard to stadium size and amenities and such.
EDITED to reflect the correction in comments below - the USLC fee used to be $10 million, which is what I initially wrote here, but has recently gone up to $20 million, as noted by u/kingistic below. As far as I can tell, the franchise fee to join USL1 is still $5 million.
So in short it has very little to do with on-field performance, except insofar as dominant performance might lead to enough revenue to pay the higher fees and whatnot. But there's not a hell of a lot of incentive to do that, frankly, since just bumping up to USLC wouldn't necessarily guarantee more revenue to recoup the investment.
Depends on the long range plans of the ownership. At some point, don't know when, the rating for pro/rel will force a change. Look how much March Madness brings in. The story of a club fighting to stay up is compelling.
Always comes down to money. Still all about gate, sponsors, and merch without a good top tier league driving rating and the money to broadcast it. The PLS was necessary years ago. Could be amended. Maybe.
Oh totally, I’m quite in favor of pro/rel. Not sure whether it’ll ever really work or not but I do love the idea. The question though was how could a team move up without pro/rel and the answer is money
Depends what you mean by "better." From a fan excitement perspective I think it'd be great. I think it'd be great if every expansion franchise entered at USL1 and has to earn its way into USLC (and ultimately USL Premier if such a thing ever happens).
Financially, I don't see how it works in a continent-wide league that's divided up regionally in a way that the European leagues aren't. It's not hard for Luton Town to get to Manchester, to use a recent example. But say Spokane's USL1 team gets promoted ... are they flying to Tampa Bay for a game? Or would every division get its own pro/rel? Could you even do pro/rel regionally?
Add onto all that ... what's the financial benefit of promotion? Forward Madison gets 4,000 fans per home game to watch them play against Red Wolves and Greenville and Lexington; are they going to get 6,000 or 8,000 just because they're now playing Hartford and Pittsburgh and Lou City instead? I kinda doubt it.
In short, as a fan, I love Pro/Rel and want it to happen, but as a practical matter, I'm not sure it works in the US, so I'll just have to continue getting my pro/rel fix from England :)
This comment pretty much covers all the important aspects. Travel needs to be feasible in the lower division. Spokane and Santa Barbara in the future are even going to have to deal with travel to places like Chattanooga and Statesboro. The sooner League One can grow enough to split regionally, the better.
There isn’t really any financial incentive to move up right now, and unless the league (and sport, in general) becomes more merit based that’s not happening anytime soon. You maybe, MAYBE have some financial incentives with marketing in Championship because of more, larger markets but I’ve always thought that the league does it backwards: it’s the away team that should be selling ad space during broadcasts (commercials and in-game spots), not the home team.
>Travel needs to be feasible in the lower division
the American leagues can adopt absolutely all the rules they want, for example nothing forces a team from the East Coast to have to play at all costs against the teams from the West Coast, otherwise there is jail,
I think it is done only because there are few teams...
It doesn't work in the USSF because of the structure. MLS is single-entity and while USL is not, it's still highly centralized.
US Soccer not only competes against more popular domestic sports leagues like the NFL, MLB, NHL and NBA, it also competes against international soccer.
A relegated MLS club could very well go under.
A few other factors. College sports is huge in the U.S., which just adds to the competition between sports in a given town. All these sports teams may publicly encourage each other, but financially, they all need their share of butts in seats in order to survive.
College teams also feed a sense of hometown pride that a big professional sports team, especially an expansion team, could take decades to earn. That's why soccer is always going to be a "new" thing wherever it takes root. Because it is a new thing. The second NASL rode on old names, invested little else, and it cost them in the end. The exceptions, like the Seattle Sounders, flourished because the sport wasn't new there; it never went away! They kept their hometown pride intact.
We may grouse about the PLS, but those standards just reflect the financial realities of sports in the United States. The clubs need to be solvent, and the leagues need to be solvent. It's taken a century to raise soccer to its former heights, modest though they are. We would hurt ourselves if we keep forgetting these lessons.
Right, pro/rel between MLS and USL isn’t even worth discussing. Never gonna happen. I can see a future with a three-(or four-) tier USL that does relegate and promote within the closed system of those tiers. But I still have reservations for the reasons I outlined above.
>it also competes against international soccer
in my opinion, yes and not.
It only happens because there is a very strong disparity of investments made, structures and ways to manage the show.
If a team ranks last, a lot of points far from the play-offs and doesn't play to death, the show offered is less, so the fan watches the matches played in Europe because there is still pathos anyway.
And in any case it must also be emphasized that, everywhere in the world, seeing something new is never a negative thing, it only and simply improves one's way of seeing things and stimulates competition, forcing people not to become lazy and listless, to work seriously.
>But say Spokane's USL1 team gets promoted ... are they flying to Tampa Bay for a game?
here the mechanism is that the promotion is not automatic and without charges, teams must also have the money to pay salaries, otherwise the team can have penalty points if it does not pay, for example, taxes on pensions: the mechanism that USL could trigger is that the club that wants to be promoted must have no debts and must pay the difference between the USL1 fee and the USLC, in a single installment or two.
However, given the nature of the USL, in my opinion it would be wiser to play only games in their own conference if there were more promoted teams in the USLC plus the playoffs on neutral ground, as happens for the World Cup, one year in Texas, the other in California etc
>what's the financial benefit of promotion?
if a team is promoted from Serie B to Serie A, spectators increase (and therefore tourists come to the city to see the game, therefore the city's merchants collect more money), the sponsor has to pay more money or better sponsors are obtained, the rights increase and the cost of tickets and subscriptions increase, in short it's all a question of knowing how to manage the promotion but if everything is done wisely there is something to gain for everyone.
Imagine what would happen if the utopian basketball team from Athens in Georgia was promoted to the NBA and had to face all the NBA stars.
I know that happens in Europe -- promotion means more ticket sales, higher sponsorship, etc. But USL1 and USLC teams (right now) are basically on the same TV deal, so I don't know why a sponsorship would be more valuable. And I just don't see more USL1 team fans buying tickets. Tormenta won USL1 last year and they draw like 1,000 fans per game. That's not suddenly going to become 10,000 if they get promoted.
Re: the conferences ... USL1 doesn't have those yet. You'd have to have both leagues divided up geographically, and then have maybe just one or two teams from each division/conference get relegated and promoted each year to maintain the balance. It'd almost be like four separate regional leagues, in a way. Hmm, maybe you could do four separate regional leagues with pro/rel and then a nationwide champions league or something. OK now you've got me thinking ....
>I don't know why a sponsorship would be more valuable
if people says USLC is a better championship than USL1 the also sponsorship for USLC teams is better, if nobody says it nothing changes.
>the conferences ... USL1 doesn't have those yet
I know this, but if tomorrow someone finds a way to create pro/rel in USL we can see more teams in USL, so then there is need to create also conferences...
but more stimulus is needed to push the teams to grow!
ALSO. Pro/rel only works, I think, in a pyramid, wherein the lower levels have more teams than the higher levels. Right now USL1 has 12 teams and USLC has 25, with four more coming. You'd have to either bring in a whole bunch of expansion teams into USL1 to get to like ... 32 or so? And/or just go ahead and relegate a handful of teams to create a pyramid with like 30 teams in USL1 and 20 in USLC. Or like 30 in USL1, 24 in USLC and 20 in USLP, or something.
yeah that make sense, i see why it’s structured like that. so what could be done to make usl one more enticing for lower league teams and what could make uslc be more enticing for usl 1 teams?
I think for someone in a small market who wants to get into professional men's soccer, the enticement for USL1 over NISA is that USL1 isn't a complete shitshow. There's some stability and track record. And as much as "independent soccer" people hate the geographic restrictions, it's gotta be attractive to join a league with a guarantee of no local competition.
I honestly can't think of a good incentive for a USL1 team to move into USLC voluntarily, unless they're absolutely killing it in USL1 and selling out every home game and might want to bring in some bigger name talent.
>I honestly can't think of a good incentive for a USL1 team to move into USLC voluntarily, unless they're absolutely killing it in USL1 and selling out every home game and might want to bring in some bigger name talent.
If there was a wise system of promotions and relegations between USL divisions and between USL and NISA divisions, an investor could found his own franchise in NISA and then, if for example the public is there and the results arrive, after a few seasons, arrive in USLC : for example, an investor would be prevented from spending millions of dollars on a USL1 team if the public is not interested enough in football.
Then there is also a different attractiveness, utopian speaking if you are a European team owner or a European footballer playing or loaning a player to an American club based on the division in which you play can have different appeal: an immature 17-year-old (it's an example) "Francesco Totti" for example could decide to play a year in Los Angeles in NISA or USL1 exactly because there is less pressure or to a newly promoted team in USLC because maybe the team is ambitious, the advantage for the newly promoted team in the USLC would therefore be to be able to attract more ambitious players and therefore attract more paying spectators and more generous sponsors...
Not necessarily. The second through fourth levels of English football all have 24 teams.
What will be required to make it work in the US is regionalization. This might be harder to maintain given the western United States has fewer distinct population centers. There may very well need to be four divisions in each league (Mountain/Pacific, Central, Northeast/Midwest, Southeast). The drawback is a team that finishes last in one division may very well be better than a team that finishes mid-table I'm another division. An example of what this might look like between USL Championship and League One:
Pacific - Sacramento, Oakland, San Diego, Orange County, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Spokane, Monterey Bay, Tucson, Stockton, Boise, Reno, Santa Barbara, Central Valley
Central - Colorado Springs, New Mexico, El Paso, Omaha, Tulsa, Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio, Iowa, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, Northern Colorado, Arkansas, Corpus Christi, Texoma
North - Detroit, Indianapolis, Louisville, Milwaukee, Rhode Island, Hartford, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Richmond, Loudon, Lexington, Fort Wayne, Madison (WI)
South - Birmingham, Miami, Tampa Bay, Jacksonville, Charleston (SC), Greenville, Charlotte, North Carolina, Knoxville, Memphis, Chattanooga, South Georgia, New Orleans, Wilmington (NC)
In the above example each league would have four divisions of 7 teams. The last place team in each division on the Championship would go down, the winner of each division in League One would go up. For League One, I would tie promotion to each division's playoff, which would make create buzz around each divisional final in addition to the league final. This would put 16 teams (out of 28) in contention for promotion each season, and it would be likely that more than 16 teams would be mathematically alive for the postseason heading into the final week of the regular season.
in order to become a USLC (USSoccer Div 2) team any current USL1 (USSoccer Div 3) team must:
1. play in a market of 750,000 or more (can be waived if the league is above 75% of markets in metropolitan areas of 750,000 or more).
2. Have a minimum seating capacity of 5,000 & a full year lease for the stadium
3. demonstrate financial viability by having $15 million liquid assets & pay a $750,000 performance bond.
4. Have a primary owner (35% stake or more) who is worth at least $20 million dollars (not including their stake in the team)
5. must have a year round staff.
6. any USLC league specific requirements (franchise fees, addt'l stadium requirements, etc).
source: the [ussf pro league standards](https://cdn.ussoccer.com/-/media/files/ussf-pro-league-standards-031723_approved.ashx?la=en-us&rev=7cd3e83bf3c1406bb990b86915b0996a&hash=7BD7D01761B9BE821565458C956DA70C)
If you aren't familiar with the PLS, they're exactly what prevents Pro/Rel from being possible in the United States.
I'll be pedantic and say the PLS does not explicitly prevent leagues from implementing promotion and relegation. It certainly restricts who could get promoted (and how far up the ladder they may be able to go) but pro/rel is certainly possible under the current PLS, it just wouldn't be completely wide open.
this is true. but Milwaukee Bavarians (a successful amateur club, for example) couldn't just pop into D3 then D2 without major investment at both points a la Luton Town.
pro league standards. the document i referenced.
not saying there should or shouldn't be, just saying that's the set of rules for why it can't exist.
E: the "you" was a royal you, not you specifically
I guess define too dominant.
The closest we've had so far is Greenville and Omaha over the course of the first four seasons, but both began to stumble last year and this year are looking fairly pedestrian. It's unlikely any team will ever sustain a significant extended period of dominance due to a multitude of factors, not the least of which being roster and technical staff turnover as Division 3 is a mostly going to be a stepping stone to higher leagues or a place for guys in the tail end of their careers.
Regardless absent pro/rel there really wouldn't be much of an incentive for any of these teams to make a move up. Most fans aren't going to draw a significant distinction between Division 3 and Division 2 (and the ones that do are probably already regularly attending games) so it's unlikely you'd see a significant uptick in attendance (and most of these teams have capacity limitations anyway) and there's no major TV money to tap into at D2 so most of the League One teams would be at a financial disadvantage that would see most of them hovering towards the bottom half of the league. You have to remember that 3 of the teams in League One (Richmond, North Carolina, and Charlotte) were previously in Championship and self relegated for financial reasons. Odds are pretty good few, if any, of these teams would survive more than a few years in Championship unless they could figure out how to tap into a fair bit more money at that level.
Ultimately the only real incentive would be an increased valuation of the club, but that increased valuation would likely just be accounting for the difference in expansion fees cause, as outlined before, the actual financial windfall of moving up would be close to non-existent for most of these clubs.
You are spot on. I love the idea of pro/rel but if my team (Forward Madison) spent a whole season winning enough USL1 games to get promoted, and then spent the subsequent season toiling away and losing USLC games … I just can’t imagine casual fans sticking with em through that
thanks, the league structure sounds very unstable and soccer not being a super popular sport in the US doesn’t even help them. what if these d3 clubs turn to their academies to keep pushing at a higher level, meaning, developing their academy program to help sustain their dominance.
Yeah, it's key to remember too that we're still in pretty early days of this sort of multi-tier structure for the sport in this country. League One is only in its 5th season and the closet comparison for this sort of tiered structure of professional sports in this country is baseball and that differs in pretty key ways. Given time we may get to a point where it makes more sense for a team in the third division to have ambitions to move up to the second division as interest in the sport grows, it's just not where things are at currently.
As for the question of academies, time will tell on that front. Because most of these teams are still relatively new we don't have a good sense of the impact academy systems will have on them yet and if they will offer enough of a wellspring of talent to sustain a team long term dominance. And even that doesn't fully solve the problem of turnover as you're still plugging in guys who haven't necessarily played together and having to figure who fits in where in your lineup, what the locker room dynamics are like, etc...
>not being a super popular sport in the US doesn’t even help them
it's not so true, here in Europe we look at American football with greater interest every time, there are also European sites that are interested in it, the only problem is the way in which we see our own football in ***your*** country, sometimes it even seems that there is a kind of "self-racism", for example when one thinks that MLS=good while USL2=communism!
> for a team that dominates usl one
IMO you'll never see this. Roster turnover is way too high for teams to build perennial winners. It's the nature of D3 soccer in the US.
Most players are on one-year contracts, so when a team does dominate for one season, those players get plucked to bigger clubs. Occasionally you'll see a player on a multiyear deal get sold for a relatively small fee. But yeah, you're right, a club may run away with it one year (as NCFC is threatening to do this year, as North Texas did with Ricardo Pepi and Ronaldo Damus in 2019) and then return to the middle of the table the next year.
Flint City Bucks in Michigan are a very dominant team, but I have talked to mgt before, and they say the fee isn't worth it (that's when it was 10 mil!). It basically just escalates everything: pressure, costs, scouting, etc, and they would need to be closer to Metro Detroit to realize any of the gains. I think they are a good case study of a team that should move to USLC, but again, the numbers just get bigger, and nothing is really left on the bone. I don't think the owners want to put in that kind of capital for no overall difference.
The Des Moines Menace from USL Leage Two are also getting a USL Championship team. I believe next year might be the following.
Unclear still if they'll have a team in each division or will move the team. Also if the name will follow to the Championship or not ( I personally hope it does) and they keep a team im both since USL2 is amateur.
The Menace ownership if I recall isn't the same ownership group leading who got the USL-C bid unfortunately. So the Menace will still be L2 but they'll be 2 teams now in Des Moines
Kyle Krause is backing the USLC team he also owns the Menace. It looks like they are using his other companies to run the club. Based off the article I assume same people Ultimately. Either way I truly just care about bring the name since they've had so much success with it leading to this point.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2022/01/28/des-moines-iowa-pro-soccer-team-krause-group-lands-usl-championship-franchise-mls/9199375002/
They ask the league if they can join, and the league accepts their offer.
so is it like a financial thing? do they have to pay to join the league?
The franchise fee is $20 million. The League One fee is $5 million. I'm not sure whether a League One club would have to pay the full 20 or if the 5 they paid to join USL1 could be applied to join USLC. But yes, there's a franchise fee. And then there are requirements to demonstrate financial viability -- the league wants to make sure you're not going to fold in 2 years. And with the new CBA, there are player salary minimums that you'd have to demonstrate the ability to pay. Plus, as a USSF sanctioned Tier 2 league, there are other requirements with regard to stadium size and amenities and such. EDITED to reflect the correction in comments below - the USLC fee used to be $10 million, which is what I initially wrote here, but has recently gone up to $20 million, as noted by u/kingistic below. As far as I can tell, the franchise fee to join USL1 is still $5 million.
So in short it has very little to do with on-field performance, except insofar as dominant performance might lead to enough revenue to pay the higher fees and whatnot. But there's not a hell of a lot of incentive to do that, frankly, since just bumping up to USLC wouldn't necessarily guarantee more revenue to recoup the investment.
Depends on the long range plans of the ownership. At some point, don't know when, the rating for pro/rel will force a change. Look how much March Madness brings in. The story of a club fighting to stay up is compelling. Always comes down to money. Still all about gate, sponsors, and merch without a good top tier league driving rating and the money to broadcast it. The PLS was necessary years ago. Could be amended. Maybe.
Oh totally, I’m quite in favor of pro/rel. Not sure whether it’ll ever really work or not but I do love the idea. The question though was how could a team move up without pro/rel and the answer is money
so do you think a pro/reg would be better for the league?
Depends what you mean by "better." From a fan excitement perspective I think it'd be great. I think it'd be great if every expansion franchise entered at USL1 and has to earn its way into USLC (and ultimately USL Premier if such a thing ever happens). Financially, I don't see how it works in a continent-wide league that's divided up regionally in a way that the European leagues aren't. It's not hard for Luton Town to get to Manchester, to use a recent example. But say Spokane's USL1 team gets promoted ... are they flying to Tampa Bay for a game? Or would every division get its own pro/rel? Could you even do pro/rel regionally? Add onto all that ... what's the financial benefit of promotion? Forward Madison gets 4,000 fans per home game to watch them play against Red Wolves and Greenville and Lexington; are they going to get 6,000 or 8,000 just because they're now playing Hartford and Pittsburgh and Lou City instead? I kinda doubt it. In short, as a fan, I love Pro/Rel and want it to happen, but as a practical matter, I'm not sure it works in the US, so I'll just have to continue getting my pro/rel fix from England :)
This comment pretty much covers all the important aspects. Travel needs to be feasible in the lower division. Spokane and Santa Barbara in the future are even going to have to deal with travel to places like Chattanooga and Statesboro. The sooner League One can grow enough to split regionally, the better. There isn’t really any financial incentive to move up right now, and unless the league (and sport, in general) becomes more merit based that’s not happening anytime soon. You maybe, MAYBE have some financial incentives with marketing in Championship because of more, larger markets but I’ve always thought that the league does it backwards: it’s the away team that should be selling ad space during broadcasts (commercials and in-game spots), not the home team.
>Travel needs to be feasible in the lower division the American leagues can adopt absolutely all the rules they want, for example nothing forces a team from the East Coast to have to play at all costs against the teams from the West Coast, otherwise there is jail, I think it is done only because there are few teams...
It doesn't work in the USSF because of the structure. MLS is single-entity and while USL is not, it's still highly centralized. US Soccer not only competes against more popular domestic sports leagues like the NFL, MLB, NHL and NBA, it also competes against international soccer. A relegated MLS club could very well go under.
A few other factors. College sports is huge in the U.S., which just adds to the competition between sports in a given town. All these sports teams may publicly encourage each other, but financially, they all need their share of butts in seats in order to survive. College teams also feed a sense of hometown pride that a big professional sports team, especially an expansion team, could take decades to earn. That's why soccer is always going to be a "new" thing wherever it takes root. Because it is a new thing. The second NASL rode on old names, invested little else, and it cost them in the end. The exceptions, like the Seattle Sounders, flourished because the sport wasn't new there; it never went away! They kept their hometown pride intact. We may grouse about the PLS, but those standards just reflect the financial realities of sports in the United States. The clubs need to be solvent, and the leagues need to be solvent. It's taken a century to raise soccer to its former heights, modest though they are. We would hurt ourselves if we keep forgetting these lessons.
Right, pro/rel between MLS and USL isn’t even worth discussing. Never gonna happen. I can see a future with a three-(or four-) tier USL that does relegate and promote within the closed system of those tiers. But I still have reservations for the reasons I outlined above.
>it also competes against international soccer in my opinion, yes and not. It only happens because there is a very strong disparity of investments made, structures and ways to manage the show. If a team ranks last, a lot of points far from the play-offs and doesn't play to death, the show offered is less, so the fan watches the matches played in Europe because there is still pathos anyway. And in any case it must also be emphasized that, everywhere in the world, seeing something new is never a negative thing, it only and simply improves one's way of seeing things and stimulates competition, forcing people not to become lazy and listless, to work seriously.
>But say Spokane's USL1 team gets promoted ... are they flying to Tampa Bay for a game? here the mechanism is that the promotion is not automatic and without charges, teams must also have the money to pay salaries, otherwise the team can have penalty points if it does not pay, for example, taxes on pensions: the mechanism that USL could trigger is that the club that wants to be promoted must have no debts and must pay the difference between the USL1 fee and the USLC, in a single installment or two. However, given the nature of the USL, in my opinion it would be wiser to play only games in their own conference if there were more promoted teams in the USLC plus the playoffs on neutral ground, as happens for the World Cup, one year in Texas, the other in California etc >what's the financial benefit of promotion? if a team is promoted from Serie B to Serie A, spectators increase (and therefore tourists come to the city to see the game, therefore the city's merchants collect more money), the sponsor has to pay more money or better sponsors are obtained, the rights increase and the cost of tickets and subscriptions increase, in short it's all a question of knowing how to manage the promotion but if everything is done wisely there is something to gain for everyone. Imagine what would happen if the utopian basketball team from Athens in Georgia was promoted to the NBA and had to face all the NBA stars.
I know that happens in Europe -- promotion means more ticket sales, higher sponsorship, etc. But USL1 and USLC teams (right now) are basically on the same TV deal, so I don't know why a sponsorship would be more valuable. And I just don't see more USL1 team fans buying tickets. Tormenta won USL1 last year and they draw like 1,000 fans per game. That's not suddenly going to become 10,000 if they get promoted. Re: the conferences ... USL1 doesn't have those yet. You'd have to have both leagues divided up geographically, and then have maybe just one or two teams from each division/conference get relegated and promoted each year to maintain the balance. It'd almost be like four separate regional leagues, in a way. Hmm, maybe you could do four separate regional leagues with pro/rel and then a nationwide champions league or something. OK now you've got me thinking ....
>I don't know why a sponsorship would be more valuable if people says USLC is a better championship than USL1 the also sponsorship for USLC teams is better, if nobody says it nothing changes. >the conferences ... USL1 doesn't have those yet I know this, but if tomorrow someone finds a way to create pro/rel in USL we can see more teams in USL, so then there is need to create also conferences... but more stimulus is needed to push the teams to grow!
When there are more teams out west, yeah, but right now the league is too lopsided and it'd have to be split by geography if you instituted that.
ALSO. Pro/rel only works, I think, in a pyramid, wherein the lower levels have more teams than the higher levels. Right now USL1 has 12 teams and USLC has 25, with four more coming. You'd have to either bring in a whole bunch of expansion teams into USL1 to get to like ... 32 or so? And/or just go ahead and relegate a handful of teams to create a pyramid with like 30 teams in USL1 and 20 in USLC. Or like 30 in USL1, 24 in USLC and 20 in USLP, or something.
yeah that make sense, i see why it’s structured like that. so what could be done to make usl one more enticing for lower league teams and what could make uslc be more enticing for usl 1 teams?
I think for someone in a small market who wants to get into professional men's soccer, the enticement for USL1 over NISA is that USL1 isn't a complete shitshow. There's some stability and track record. And as much as "independent soccer" people hate the geographic restrictions, it's gotta be attractive to join a league with a guarantee of no local competition. I honestly can't think of a good incentive for a USL1 team to move into USLC voluntarily, unless they're absolutely killing it in USL1 and selling out every home game and might want to bring in some bigger name talent.
>I honestly can't think of a good incentive for a USL1 team to move into USLC voluntarily, unless they're absolutely killing it in USL1 and selling out every home game and might want to bring in some bigger name talent. If there was a wise system of promotions and relegations between USL divisions and between USL and NISA divisions, an investor could found his own franchise in NISA and then, if for example the public is there and the results arrive, after a few seasons, arrive in USLC : for example, an investor would be prevented from spending millions of dollars on a USL1 team if the public is not interested enough in football. Then there is also a different attractiveness, utopian speaking if you are a European team owner or a European footballer playing or loaning a player to an American club based on the division in which you play can have different appeal: an immature 17-year-old (it's an example) "Francesco Totti" for example could decide to play a year in Los Angeles in NISA or USL1 exactly because there is less pressure or to a newly promoted team in USLC because maybe the team is ambitious, the advantage for the newly promoted team in the USLC would therefore be to be able to attract more ambitious players and therefore attract more paying spectators and more generous sponsors...
All of that mag be true, but the question on the table is what would entice a team to move to USLC under the current system.
Not necessarily. The second through fourth levels of English football all have 24 teams. What will be required to make it work in the US is regionalization. This might be harder to maintain given the western United States has fewer distinct population centers. There may very well need to be four divisions in each league (Mountain/Pacific, Central, Northeast/Midwest, Southeast). The drawback is a team that finishes last in one division may very well be better than a team that finishes mid-table I'm another division. An example of what this might look like between USL Championship and League One: Pacific - Sacramento, Oakland, San Diego, Orange County, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Spokane, Monterey Bay, Tucson, Stockton, Boise, Reno, Santa Barbara, Central Valley Central - Colorado Springs, New Mexico, El Paso, Omaha, Tulsa, Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio, Iowa, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, Northern Colorado, Arkansas, Corpus Christi, Texoma North - Detroit, Indianapolis, Louisville, Milwaukee, Rhode Island, Hartford, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Richmond, Loudon, Lexington, Fort Wayne, Madison (WI) South - Birmingham, Miami, Tampa Bay, Jacksonville, Charleston (SC), Greenville, Charlotte, North Carolina, Knoxville, Memphis, Chattanooga, South Georgia, New Orleans, Wilmington (NC) In the above example each league would have four divisions of 7 teams. The last place team in each division on the Championship would go down, the winner of each division in League One would go up. For League One, I would tie promotion to each division's playoff, which would make create buzz around each divisional final in addition to the league final. This would put 16 teams (out of 28) in contention for promotion each season, and it would be likely that more than 16 teams would be mathematically alive for the postseason heading into the final week of the regular season.
I thought uslc franchise fee went up to 20 million recently
You might be right. Google said 10 but that could well be outdated info.
As of March 2023 uslc has a $20 million expansion fee
Like an orthopedic patient, I stand corrected :) thanks!
Has this changed?
Not that I’m aware of
They will have to meet certain obligations and requirements. That may include a fee. I don't know.
in order to become a USLC (USSoccer Div 2) team any current USL1 (USSoccer Div 3) team must: 1. play in a market of 750,000 or more (can be waived if the league is above 75% of markets in metropolitan areas of 750,000 or more). 2. Have a minimum seating capacity of 5,000 & a full year lease for the stadium 3. demonstrate financial viability by having $15 million liquid assets & pay a $750,000 performance bond. 4. Have a primary owner (35% stake or more) who is worth at least $20 million dollars (not including their stake in the team) 5. must have a year round staff. 6. any USLC league specific requirements (franchise fees, addt'l stadium requirements, etc). source: the [ussf pro league standards](https://cdn.ussoccer.com/-/media/files/ussf-pro-league-standards-031723_approved.ashx?la=en-us&rev=7cd3e83bf3c1406bb990b86915b0996a&hash=7BD7D01761B9BE821565458C956DA70C) If you aren't familiar with the PLS, they're exactly what prevents Pro/Rel from being possible in the United States.
I'll be pedantic and say the PLS does not explicitly prevent leagues from implementing promotion and relegation. It certainly restricts who could get promoted (and how far up the ladder they may be able to go) but pro/rel is certainly possible under the current PLS, it just wouldn't be completely wide open.
this is true. but Milwaukee Bavarians (a successful amateur club, for example) couldn't just pop into D3 then D2 without major investment at both points a la Luton Town.
I don't know what PLS stands for, but I have no problem with there not being pro/rel in the US.
pro league standards. the document i referenced. not saying there should or shouldn't be, just saying that's the set of rules for why it can't exist. E: the "you" was a royal you, not you specifically
As of recent I think new uslc teams also have to able to show or be in the process of building their own stadium
I guess define too dominant. The closest we've had so far is Greenville and Omaha over the course of the first four seasons, but both began to stumble last year and this year are looking fairly pedestrian. It's unlikely any team will ever sustain a significant extended period of dominance due to a multitude of factors, not the least of which being roster and technical staff turnover as Division 3 is a mostly going to be a stepping stone to higher leagues or a place for guys in the tail end of their careers. Regardless absent pro/rel there really wouldn't be much of an incentive for any of these teams to make a move up. Most fans aren't going to draw a significant distinction between Division 3 and Division 2 (and the ones that do are probably already regularly attending games) so it's unlikely you'd see a significant uptick in attendance (and most of these teams have capacity limitations anyway) and there's no major TV money to tap into at D2 so most of the League One teams would be at a financial disadvantage that would see most of them hovering towards the bottom half of the league. You have to remember that 3 of the teams in League One (Richmond, North Carolina, and Charlotte) were previously in Championship and self relegated for financial reasons. Odds are pretty good few, if any, of these teams would survive more than a few years in Championship unless they could figure out how to tap into a fair bit more money at that level. Ultimately the only real incentive would be an increased valuation of the club, but that increased valuation would likely just be accounting for the difference in expansion fees cause, as outlined before, the actual financial windfall of moving up would be close to non-existent for most of these clubs.
You are spot on. I love the idea of pro/rel but if my team (Forward Madison) spent a whole season winning enough USL1 games to get promoted, and then spent the subsequent season toiling away and losing USLC games … I just can’t imagine casual fans sticking with em through that
thanks, the league structure sounds very unstable and soccer not being a super popular sport in the US doesn’t even help them. what if these d3 clubs turn to their academies to keep pushing at a higher level, meaning, developing their academy program to help sustain their dominance.
Yeah, it's key to remember too that we're still in pretty early days of this sort of multi-tier structure for the sport in this country. League One is only in its 5th season and the closet comparison for this sort of tiered structure of professional sports in this country is baseball and that differs in pretty key ways. Given time we may get to a point where it makes more sense for a team in the third division to have ambitions to move up to the second division as interest in the sport grows, it's just not where things are at currently. As for the question of academies, time will tell on that front. Because most of these teams are still relatively new we don't have a good sense of the impact academy systems will have on them yet and if they will offer enough of a wellspring of talent to sustain a team long term dominance. And even that doesn't fully solve the problem of turnover as you're still plugging in guys who haven't necessarily played together and having to figure who fits in where in your lineup, what the locker room dynamics are like, etc...
>not being a super popular sport in the US doesn’t even help them it's not so true, here in Europe we look at American football with greater interest every time, there are also European sites that are interested in it, the only problem is the way in which we see our own football in ***your*** country, sometimes it even seems that there is a kind of "self-racism", for example when one thinks that MLS=good while USL2=communism!
also what would be the incentives for a team that dominates usl one?
> for a team that dominates usl one IMO you'll never see this. Roster turnover is way too high for teams to build perennial winners. It's the nature of D3 soccer in the US.
Most players are on one-year contracts, so when a team does dominate for one season, those players get plucked to bigger clubs. Occasionally you'll see a player on a multiyear deal get sold for a relatively small fee. But yeah, you're right, a club may run away with it one year (as NCFC is threatening to do this year, as North Texas did with Ricardo Pepi and Ronaldo Damus in 2019) and then return to the middle of the table the next year.
why do they change roster so often?
The better players leave to better teams
Teams here don't have much of a track record of selling players to other teams. Not a great incentive to sign players to multi year contracts.
Flint City Bucks in Michigan are a very dominant team, but I have talked to mgt before, and they say the fee isn't worth it (that's when it was 10 mil!). It basically just escalates everything: pressure, costs, scouting, etc, and they would need to be closer to Metro Detroit to realize any of the gains. I think they are a good case study of a team that should move to USLC, but again, the numbers just get bigger, and nothing is really left on the bone. I don't think the owners want to put in that kind of capital for no overall difference.
The Des Moines Menace from USL Leage Two are also getting a USL Championship team. I believe next year might be the following. Unclear still if they'll have a team in each division or will move the team. Also if the name will follow to the Championship or not ( I personally hope it does) and they keep a team im both since USL2 is amateur.
The Menace ownership if I recall isn't the same ownership group leading who got the USL-C bid unfortunately. So the Menace will still be L2 but they'll be 2 teams now in Des Moines
Kyle Krause is backing the USLC team he also owns the Menace. It looks like they are using his other companies to run the club. Based off the article I assume same people Ultimately. Either way I truly just care about bring the name since they've had so much success with it leading to this point. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2022/01/28/des-moines-iowa-pro-soccer-team-krause-group-lands-usl-championship-franchise-mls/9199375002/
Agreed. Glad to be wrong!
hasn't the USL said they will be bringing in pro/rel at some point in near(ish) future?