USL to vote on adopting promotion, relegation system: Sources
USL to vote on adopting promotion, relegation system: Sources
If enacted, the USL would be the first open professional league system in modern U.S. soccer history.
The USL is set for a milestone vote on the adoption of a promotion and relegation system in its lower-division men’s soccer structure, sources briefed on the plans tell The Athletic. The sources, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the vote before it takes place, are optimistic the vote will be passed, but it is not considered a certainty.
Owners will vote on whether to proceed toward the new competitive structure at the USL’s board of governors meetings, set to take place Aug. 9-10 in Colorado Springs, Colo. If enacted, the USL would be the first open professional league system in modern U.S. soccer history.
The vote will not be on a specific and finalized framework for promotion and relegation, the sources said. Rather, the topic up for a vote will confirm whether ownership at the leagues’ clubs has enough collective interest to merit further work toward implementing an open system among the USL’s professional competitions.
A USL spokesperson declined to comment when reached by The Athletic.
The upcoming vote culminates work that publicly began in earnest at the USL’s 2021 mid-year meetings, when the organization formally proposed working toward incorporating promotion and relegation between its second-division Championship and third-division League One.
Incoming rant: Pro/Rel is a very interesting way to run a sports league. It provides a lot of drama and high stakes for teams at the bottom of the table. It gives fans of lower league teams hope that they too can join the ranks of the elite, simply by earning it. For Americans, the sheer novelty of it can be intoxicating.
It would also cut American soccer off at the knees and would be terrible for the game in the US.
When you look at TV revenues, competition for eyeballs, and general awareness from generic "sports" fans or even soccer fans, it becomes pretty clear that the level of investment that MLS owners make is only sustainable because those investments are protected. For good or ill, MLS is where it is because of a top-down approach, not a grass roots one. Interest in markets has been carefully curated and nurtured, and the number of true die-hards who would stay with their club after a relegation is almost certainly tiny. This is not England where soccer is the dominant club sport by such a large degree that even cricket and rugby are basically afterthoughts, and every team in a halfway reasonable market is a sleeping giant just waiting to galvanize community pride with a "little bit" of investment. In a soccer-mad country, with a hundred clubs full of history and local ties and community engagement, maybe the churn is worthwhile, but in the US you'd just be killing clubs that are relatively healthy with ones that are deeply undercapitalized and unattractive to players anywhere near the level MLS clubs buy now, to say nothing of the media partners.
Pro/rel has its own issues even in Europe, and especially outside England. It tends to erode or preclude other parity enforcing measures as the deeper pockets want to ensure they're never at any particular risk of relegation. It can result in a mid-table liminal space that's every bit as monotonous as the bottom American teams' annual struggles and replaces the very realistic possibility of joy at an unexpected run with mere relief at survival for another year. It also still destroys rosters and erodes support, and particularly outside England it can consign a club to obscurity. Meanwhile, it hasn't stopped the intrusion of money into the game in Europe, and the only REAL way to thrive is to throw money at a promotion effort; there are no more remote factory clubs unearthing a squad of hidden gems and storming up the pyramid.
I'm under no illusions that the American model is truly the result of pure competitive spirit from the owners. American sport is a cartel, moderated by ego and mid-term thinking, not a commune. That said, European sport presents the rather grim (to an American anyway) choice of picking a "big" club to follow or giving up on any realistic hope of cheering for sporting glory. At least in the American system, the oligarchs have decided that a rising tide lifts all boats and that the fans will expect a set of rules that give any well-managed team a chance to compete for the biggest prize. We force MLS to adopt pro/rel, and we'll get a level of investment that accounts for it. That level is unlikely to be anywhere close to current state of the league, which is top 20ish in butts-in-seats, salaries, etc., across 30 teams.
TL;DR: The market for domestic club soccer is what it is in the US, and if you start throwing away huge swaths of it because NYCFC has a down year, you can't replace it by promoting Charleston, romantic as as it may sound, and the owners know that.
Then maybe this way is the best way to handle it for now. Lower leagues seem to have more fan attachment (correct me if I'm wrong, this is a super outsider view), and getting those clubs accustomed to promotion/relegation would work.
After that, in maybe 10 years, promote two best teams and relegate the worst-performing franchise. And then make the whole MLS work by the same rules.
I completely disagree. I think promotion and relegation would bring so much to every North American sport, especially soccer / football.
The "investments being protected" leads to a boring league. In a system with promotion and relegation Chicago, DC and San Jose would have been relegated, or they would have been gutted and rebuilt in a desperate to avoid relegation. Instead, they trundle along, being bad every season but in no danger.
MLS has a top-down approach, and they "carefully curate and nurture" markets, but they're bad at it.
For example, they didn't create a franchise in Atlanta until 2017 despite the obvious demand. Once they finally allowed that franchise to happen, it has consistently set attendance records and won a bunch of things and is now one of the more powerful clubs in the league. Top-down control is only good when that top-down control is better than "the invisible hand of the market". With promotion and relegation, clubs find their natural levels. If a club has a strong fanbase they have money which helps them get promoted. If a club has a weak fanbase they don't have the money and tend to get relegated. Good ownership and management can also make a big difference. A rich but poorly managed club like Everton can struggle, whereas a relatively poor but well managed club like Brighton can succeed. With the MLS structure where relegation doesn't exist, and failure is rewarded by draft picks, good management doesn't have much of a chance to do anything, and poor management isn't punished.
Relegation also doesn't mean "killing" a club, it just means downsizing. Watch the "Sunderland 'Til I Die" series. Sunderland was a Premier League club then they were relegated in 2017, then relegated again in 2018. They have the stadium and fanbase of a Premier League or Football Championship team, but they were playing in League One. The series shows just how poorly managed the club was. They had a huge and loyal fanbase, but it took the pressure of relegation to get them to fix a number of lingering management problems. But, even though they had to downsize to fit their new budget, they didn't die. Eventually they got their stuff figured out and got promoted.
The "churn" of promotion and relegation is good for clubs overall, even if it punishes badly run clubs. Clubs can't afford to get lazy, or they get relegated. When they get relegated they need to take a hard look at their budgets and cut out all the fat. When they get promoted, the fact they're well run is rewarded and they have more money to spend in the next higher league. Sure, the owners hate it. But, who cares about the owners?
The baseball setup in North America shows how there's room for multiple levels to sports. MLB teams have stadiums with roughly 40k seats. AAA teams have about 10k seats. AA teams have about 7k seats. At each level the revenue is smaller, so the budget is smaller, but they can still bring in an audience.
As for this "mid-table liminal space", occasionally there are clubs that are not in danger of relegation, but also too low to have a realistic chance at a European competition. But, that's very rare, and only crystalizes in the last few weeks of the season. Last season Chelsea was mathematically in danger of relegation for most of the last half of the season. West Ham won a European competition, but they were in danger of relegation until the last couple of weeks. It's pretty rare that there's a football match in Europe where there's nothing on the line for either team aside from pride.
Meanwhile in US sports, sometimes there's nothing on the line for a club for months on end. There's no relegation to worry about, but also no chance of any kind of meaningful success. The playoff system in US sports makes it even worse. In many sports, more than half the league makes the playoffs. There's a little bit of value in getting a high playoff seeding, but to play the entire season just to get a seeding into a playoff leads to a lot of apathy about the vast majority of the games. You frequently see that in discussions of US sports. People who are casually interested don't ask "how is the club doing?" but "will the club make the playoffs?" If the club is anywhere in the top half of the table, the answer's yes. Otherwise it's no. Boring.
If NYCFC goes down, it means a big shakeup is likely at the club. Someone's getting fired. That's good for supporters of the club, and interesting for supporters of other clubs. If they come back next season, they will likely be a changed club. If Charlestown gets promoted, that's great for the league. It gives people an underdog to cheer for against the big clubs. It's huge for long-term Charlestown fans who finally get to see their club up against the big dogs.
As for the oligarchs deciding a rising tide lifts all boats... the tide lifts their boats. That's all they care about. It's a cartel where they don't compete against each-other. Instead they collude against the players and the fans so that their cartel can bring in the most money.
In a league with promotion and relegation, it's harder for those cartels to form because promotion and relegation means the cartel keeps changing. That means the owners are competing against each-other, not colluding with each-other against the fans and players.
Promotion and relegation is good for the sport, good for the clubs, good for the players, good for the fans, it's just bad for the owners.
As for the oligarchs deciding a rising tide lifts all boats… the tide lifts their boats. That’s all they care about. It’s a cartel where they don’t compete against each-other. Instead they collude against the players and the fans so that their cartel can bring in the most money.
This happening in all American sports leagues is a big part of what has driven me to fallowing european soccer almost exclusively (with the exception of my local USL2 and baseball Futures League clubs, of course). Sports teams shouldn't be investment vehicles, they should be vanity projects for these disgustingly rich people to spend money on, money that would otherwise be hoarded away. There is no reason why we should give a damn about "protecting their investment", we should be forcing them to fight each other for safety, promotion, and silverware. Same as the european clubs.
We're here for the players. I don't watch MLS because those players mostly suck, because MLS does not provide salaries competitive with european clubs, because they are run by people who are used to simply having a cartel of the best players in insert-sport-here and totally unaccustomed to genuine competition from comparable or better players (funded by comparably deep pockets) in other leagues abroad. This kind of genuine competition for top players is sorely needed in all sports, especially baseball, but soccer seems to be the only (semi-)major sport in the US where it exists at all. Relegation is the mechanism by which intra-league competition is enforced, and that competition is necessary to keep these owners from collectively investing the absolute minimum and scraping as much profit off the top as they can get.
I can see where you're coming from, but I disagree. I think it's a solution in search of a problem. American sport has developed just fine without it, and for MLS in particular there is no massive surplus of clubs and investors itching to to take a crack at that sweet MLS AppleTV money. Many of the issues you point out, like drafts (almost irrelevant in MLS these days, btw) and playoffs are the particularly American solutions to maintaining interest throughout a season, and honestly they work better than you're implying for the intended audience. There are issues, true, and the specific structure of playoffs and relative incentives can be part of that, but the American leagues are no more "boring" than the EPL is a needlessly cruel exercise in hopelessness, where your budget is your fate, and the only excitement comes from dodging the existential terror of a relegation. I don't actually believe that about either paradigm, but you've got a 120 years of cultural inertia in both markets, and it's unfair to the people who do enjoy American sports to say they've got it all wrong.
Pro/Rel is the expectation in Europe, and it has a lot going for it, but it there are pros and cons, and there is no groundswell of clubs and investors across the US itching to build 20k seaters just to see the fans immediately abandon them in droves when they're relegated. MLS is successful, but operating as the fifth most popular team sport and in the shadow of the NFL leaves it more brittle than other leagues at its level.
Minor League baseball is also a rather limited example. As a spectator sport, it's largely a relic of the pre-TV era, and even then once the Dodgers formalized the "farm club" system in the 40s, it was a subsidized exercise in player development, passive entertainment, and brand extension. It's even more true these days, with a significant contraction of teams and a reorganization to put the higher level minor league clubs closer to their parent clubs, sometimes just a half-hour drive up the highway. It's basically practice but they keep score and sell tickets. No one is passionate about minor league baseball for its own sake.
There is very little history of Americans supporting lower level pro sports in anything like the same way they do the "big leagues." The bizarro world of college (gridiron) football and basketball are exceptions, but even they are effectively U23 and are viewed as something culturally distinct from the NFL or NBA.
There are things that soccer leagues in England and elsewhere in Europe do better than the US leagues, and you point out how it can work well, but in many cases what they do is not really better or worse, just different, and promotion and relegation would be a poor fit for the realities of running a league in the US. Similarly, the Super League is a terrible idea for Europe. Horses for courses.
This means that the MLS stays unchanged for now though, right? It's a step in the right direction but probably still not ideal.
Yeah. MLS and USL are very different entities. They used to be much more entangled when the MLS reserve sides played in USLC, but now with MLSNP, there's basically no connection. I wouldn't be surprised to see MLS implement pro/rel from an MLS1 <-> MLS2 once the league gets to 40 teams, but I think it's gonna take intervention from an outside party like FIFA to force pro/rel between USL and MLS.
My understanding is that the pro/rel is only between USL1 and USLC, so my beloved Ballard FC wouldn't be eligible for promotion. Kinda makes sense, though, since USL2 isn't sanctioned and they only play for like, two and a half months a year, and can't even pay real salaries, but it would whip if we made USLC!
I would assume that as the league grows from this that they would eventually include USL2 and below.
Why do they only play for two and a half months a year?
My guess would be money
The league is mostly focused on filling the gap for college players between school years, so they only play in the summer. Ballard's regular season this year was 5/21-7/16; if they make the final, they'll play until early August. We had trouble in the playoffs last year because some of the players had to depart early to return to their college teams.
Yeah USL2 isnt included in this, but there is going to be another division between USL1 and USLC probably consisting of teams from both the divisions. Maybe Ballard and a couple other USL2 teams will move up to make the third division, but that depends on if they meet the financial and stadium requirements
Up the Bridges!
But yes, I think that there may also be issues with the college eligibility of players if the league were a mix of professional and pre-professional players (?). I can't imagine how it would work to include USL2. Though I think that Ballard FC could certainly generate the fan support needed. Would probably need to move out of Interbay, though ...
I didn't realise even football doesn't have a proper league system in the US. I know your hoen grown sports like Yankie Hand Egg and Mens Netball don't.
Seems like a boring way to do sports to me having the same 20 teams at the top all the time. You're never going to see something amazing like Leicesters Premier League win in 2017.
Honestly, the Prem seems like a boring way to do sports to me. You play 38 games and then Man City wins it. The enforced parity of American leagues means you can't have a story like Leicesters, because all of the teams are roughly equal quality, so it's not a huge surprise when any team wins it all. You come into every season believing your club has a real chance.