Second-division soccer in the U.S. has been saved. Sort of.
After opting not to sanction either the USL or the breakaway NASL for 2010, the U.S. Soccer Federation quietly grabbed everyone by the ear, yanked them into a smoke-free back room, knocked their heads together and said, “Okay, this is how it’s going to be this year.” The end result is a strange stopgap hybrid league with six USL clubs in one conference and six NASL clubs in the other.
And no more lawsuits. That was kind of a big deal.
Kenn Tomasch liveblogged the USSF conference call on the matter, which was dominated by USSF boss Sunil Gulati, and as expected, Gulati sounded like he was the only one satisfied with the arrangement. Tomasch wrote that acting NASL commissioner Jeff Cooper didn’t sound all that sincere when he said the temporary league was “A fair resolution for USSF, for the teams, the players and most of all for the fans.”
Here’s how it breaks down:
USL Conference: Austin Aztex, Minnesota Thunder, Portland Timbers, Puerto Rico Islanders, Rochester Rhinos, Tampa Bay Rowdies
NASL Conference: Carolina Railhawks, Crystal Palace Baltimore, Miami FC, Montreal Impact, A.C. St. Louis, Vancouver Whitecaps
Presumably, the league will run a 32-game schedule, with 20 in-conference ties and 12 inter-conference ties, and the conference champions will compete in the finals. Schedules and TV deals are expected to be announced before the end of the month.
It’s worth noting here that the dividing line here is not geographical, but political. It’s fairly clear which clubs took which side — save for Rochester and Tampa Bay, two of the clubs USL sued for breach of contract when they bolted to the NASL. Crystal Palace was also named in that lawsuit, but for whatever reason, they swapped places with Minnesota in this arrangement. The Atlanta Silverbacks and FC New York are also missing from this league, though the press conference revealed that neither club would be ready until 2011 — something nobody was really certain about until now.
The end result is a clear fork in the road for 2nd-division soccer in North America. The NASL is going one way, the USL is going another way, and once this hokey hybrid year is complete, they won’t cross paths again, except maybe in the U.S. Open Cup. The NASL will continue to push for full sanctioning in 2011, as Railhawks majority owner Selby Wellman said in this spin-happy interview with Triangle Offense’s David Fellerath:
“This is nothing more than a 2010 transition. After two and a half years of work, we are going to launch North American Soccer League for 2011. And during this transition year we will launch our league. It’s a lot of work to launch a league and that’ll be our focus at the league level, to launch a league this year. The transition is nothing more than a way to compete on the field. There are nine NASL teams and three USL teams. Three of the NASL teams (Rochester, Minnesota and Tampa Bay) will play in the USL Conference, but they are members of the NASL body and they will be playing in the NASL in 2011.”
Wellman makes it clear there won’t be much to stop this league from getting sanctioned next year, especially if the league owners continue working closely with the USSF on the matter.
“What (Gulati and the USSF) discovered in this process is that the standards for Division 2 need to be tightened up a little bit. There’s a piece of work that’s going to take place at the federation level very quickly to tighten up those standards in terms of league needs to be in order to be sanctioned a Division 2 league. The day after they revise those standards-we will apply the following day. We already have enough information to know that we will pretty much qualify already…
“I would expect to see stadium standards. For example, one of the major problems we had in the past with USL was stadiums: playing high-school football stadiums on not-properly sized soccer fields with football lines. That’s not proper. We need to make that a standard: You’ve got to be on a soccer field in a soccer stadium.”
If nothing else, that’s going to raise the bar of entry to the NASL. However, it might not do much to allay USSF fears that the NASL will attempt to compete with MLS in the long run. After all, it costs $40 million just to join MLS. That money could be put toward building a stadium — Saputo Stadium in Montreal seats more than 13,000 and cost $14 million to build — and paying quality players more than MLS could, and the U.S. Open Cup is still a gateway to the CONCACAF Champions League. On the flip side, though, that sort of thinking might encourage the kind of reckless spending that eventually killed the original NASL in the early 1980s. I doubt the current league owners wish to see that history repeat itself.
Meanwhile, what becomes of USL is still anybody’s guess. The USL Second Division appears to be operating this year with only six clubs: Charleston, Charlotte, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Real Maryland and Richmond. Do Austin, Puerto Rico and FC New York join them in 2011 to form one single pro league? And can they manage to obtain Division II sanctioning when several of these clubs probably won’t meet updated stadium guidelines?
There are tons of questions left to be answered about the future of American soccer below MLS. That said, this is the setup we have for one year, so we might as well make the most of it. I can’t wait to see how Fox Soccer Channel ends up advertising this. “The USSF Second Division! Only on FSC!” Doesn’t sound so hot, does it? Here’s hoping they find a sponsor for this mess. I hear Coca-Cola may have a few extra bucks to spend these days.
