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.
6 responses so far ↓
1 KT // Jan 8, 2010 at 3:50 pm
Thanks for the link, Dave.
I think you (and some others) are guilty of assuming that (a) the NASL really CAN dream of competing with MLS and (b) that USSF believes this and fears it.
We don’t know definitively that the NASL people legitimately have as an endgame equal footing with MLS. I have not seen that. And, just common-sense-wise, they would have to up their investment exponentially to even think about it. Let’s be honest, here – it’s RIDICULOUSLY expensive to do a DI soccer league. And the folks who DO have the wherewithal to do it have already joined MLS because their infrastructure is in place.
As for USSF being “scared” about the NASL…well, outside of the obvious appearance of nepotism with the head of USSF being tied very closely to MLS, I’m not sure there’s a lot of evidence to support this, either. USSF is surely even more privy to NASL’s plans than any of us are. I can’t for the life of me see how or why they’d believe that even Traffic is a serious threat to MLS.
Let them do whatever they’d have to do to meet whatever standards there are for a Division I league. And then we just have the question of whether or not a national governing body CAN sanction more than one Division I league (I do not believe that anywhere in the world that is the case – and the NASL folks made a huge deal about following FIFA precedent, if not letter of the law).
If they’re gung-ho to try, they can knock themselves out. Having seen this movie before, though, I can tell them how it’s likely to end.
2 Dave // Jan 8, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Kenn: You’re probably closer to the truth than I am on both counts. I still think, however, that the U.S. Open Cup (and its bid to the CCL) is a gap that a well-organized NASL club could exploit, because so few MLS clubs actually care about the competition — where else do the Richmond Kickers beat the L.A. Galaxy? — and because the current salary structure of MLS would allow NASL clubs to pay decent players more money.
Let’s say a club like A.C. St. Louis, which I think has the potential to be as well-supported as Portland in a few years, builds a team that makes a strong Open Cup run. In its bid to host the Final, that club could go to the USSF and say, “We can sell out the Edward Jones Dome for you, and we’ll give you any start time you want.” It’s a long shot, yes, but as long as MLS keeps its current salary structure in place, it’s a possibility, and I do think MLS just might be a little worried about being shown up like that — worried enough that they’ll eventually cave to the MLSPA’s demands on minimum salaries and free agency in this CBA, just to keep players’ eyes from wandering.
That said, I actually don’t think the NASL endgame is to compete on equal terms with MLS. It’s an attempt to bring pro soccer to cities where there is none and bring a little excitement with it, and that’s ultimately good for the game in this country. Perhaps this week’s negotiations helped the USSF recognize that. MLS isn’t going to go expansion-crazy and turn into the NHL — although that *could* be fun — so someone ought to be there to serve those markets that MLS doesn’t.
As for Traffic, they might look like they couldn’t run a Chick Fil A, let alone a football club, but they do have some ties to Jack Warner, thanks to their PPV service. That alone might have been cause for concern in USSF circles.
3 a different Dave // Jan 15, 2010 at 3:35 am
The “billionaire buys USL club, wins USSF Open Cup” theory has never made any sense to me. If it made any sense, someone would have done it by now.
The long term viability of NASL lies, IMO, in cooperation with MLS, both as a de facto farm league/reserve league, and as a testing ground for expansion markets for MLS, similar to how Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, and eventually Montreal, have done/are doing.
A stable NASL is in the interests of MLS. It isn’t a threat to MLS.
4 a different Dave // Jan 15, 2010 at 3:59 am
Consider also that it is pretty likely we’ll see fairly substantial increases in MLS salaries – not big by world standards, but big by MLS standards. USL/NASL owners haven’t been able to spend anything close to the current MLS standard; do we really think they can keep up?
If you’re going to spend ridiculously large amounts of money, it makes more sense, for long term viability, to aim towards getting into MLS, rather than trying to create a truly rival league. An occasional lucky run into USSF Open Cup and CONCACAF Champions League is not going to overcome the crushing obscurity of minor league soccer in the USA.
When Paulson bought the Portland Timbers, for instance, it seems likely he did so with an eye towards getting into MLS. He didn’t spend the kind of money it would have taken to compete with MLS on the field.
Similarly, the young owners of the Tampa Bay Rowdies are venture capitalists – if they are doing this for more than just the hobby of being “sports club owners” then it would be logical to assume that they eventually want to attract bigger investors. Those bigger investors would want to get into MLS eventually, not mess around trying to get into the CONCACAF Champions League as a long shot US Open Cup winner.
Traffic, I dunno. They have this weird aura of incompetence and cluelessness combined with hubris – the home office seems to think Miami is “the gateway to South America” as though that were an advantage, when it actually is a disadvantage (recent arrivals are not likely to care about US minor league soccer). Traffic would be better off reviving the Ft. Lauderdale Strikers, playing in Lockhart Stadium; for some reason even at this low ebb more people will turn up at Lockhart for a soccer game than at any location in Miami. Who knows what Traffic thinks it is doing.
Hopefully the new NASL isn’t dependent on what Traffic does or thinks.
5 a different Dave // Jan 15, 2010 at 4:09 am
I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t believe MLS sees USL/NASL as any kind of threat. This isn’t the 1970′s when rival leagues could appear overnight and large numbers of people were willing to throw around crazy amounts of money on speculative new sports leagues. Money is tight, even among the major sports – and in the USA pro soccer is still a minor sport. No one is going to risk money on a rival soccer league to compete with MLS, when MLS itself is still very much a work in progress.
I would LIKE to see the NASL force MLS to take the USSF Open Cup more seriously – but even if that does happen, it’s going to be a minor blip on the North American soccer scene. It isn’t going to change the business realities that MLS and the NASL will have to adapt themselves to.
6 Dave // Jan 15, 2010 at 9:26 am
How much more can MLS expand, though? It’s already at 18, and if Montreal makes 19, that only leaves room for one more city before it hits 20. Is this league going to decide that’s not enough and attempt to expand into 30+ cities, like other major American sports leagues? That would take decades, if it happened at all.
NASL can bring soccer to cities that don’t have it and want it, but I don’t see NASL as a test bed for MLS expansion targets — not the way USL was last decade, anyway.
Player development is another thing entirely, of course, and a very good reason to have the NASL around. And while I probably have more romantic notions about the Open Cup than most, I still think it’s a gap that a well-run NASL club can exploit.