Opinion: Please, USL, don’t add a D1 League

Thursday morning, Paul Tenorio at The Athletic reported that the USL was planning to announce the launch of a Division 1 men’s soccer league. This league would compete directly with the existing D1 league in the United States known as Major League Soccer. By midday, the report had been confirmed, as the USL and all the teams in USL, including our own local Riverhounds, sent out their own releases.

Our faithful editor John Krysinsky laid out the basics in his piece on the decision to start a D1 USL league. I’m here to provide a decidedly less rosy and more curmudgeonly approach to USL D1.

This is bad idea. It is probably bad for US soccer. It will likely fail.

It seems likely that the idea for a USL D1 league originates from a belief that MLS has decided to stop expanding at 30 or 32 teams, and that there are a dozen or more unserved markets that USL could expand into – or that a dozen of the already existing USL teams deserve to compete at the same level as MLS. Is this because USL thinks they can collect MLS-sized expansion fees? Is this because USL owners think they can afford to put a lineup on the field of the same caliber as Inter Miami, LA Galaxy, and NYCFC?

Let me say frankly: this is not so. MLS has a huge TV contract with Apple. It has a 30 year history as a successful D1 league.  MLS has star power, past and present, like David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and Chicharito; Cucho Hernandez, Lionel Messi, Olivier Giroud, and Luis Suarez. These, plus some extravagant stadiums and real corporate investment are just a few of the reasons why MLS can ask domestic billionaires to drop $400 million on the rights to an MLS expansion franchise.

USL has none of these things. The USL doesn’t have the history of (relative) stability that MLS does. USL doesn’t have the star power. USL doesn’t have a broad stable of billionaire owners. The United Soccer League’s undisclosed TV contract with ESPN+ pay just a fraction of the 10 year, $2.5 billion deal that MLS has with Apple. USL owners are overwhelmingly made of hundred-millionaires, not billionaires. Tuffy Shallenberger, based on estimates I made back in 2020, is pretty far off in wealth from David Tepper (Charlotte FC), Jorge Mas (Inter Miami), Stan Kroenke (Colorado Rapids) and Phillip Anschutz (LA Galaxy).* The Riverhounds, and similarly financially situated USL teams like Tampa Bay Rowdies and Louisville City FC, simply can’t level up their roster to compete with teams like that.

So then, what are they proposing? A USL D1 league with an expansion fee of $100 million, with total roster salaries of $2 million? How would those teams be considered ‘equal’ to MLS teams valued at $475 million and with $13 million rosters? And those are the estimates for a team like the Colorado Rapids, which is the lowest valued and cheapest roster in MLS. The big boys in MLS have franchise valuations about $600 million and roster salary totals above $30 million. USL can’t compete with that, because USL-level owners can’t compete with that.

I also want to challenge the very notion that there can be two D1 leagues at the same time. Really, there can’t.

The last time two D1 sports leagues existed at the same time successfully in the United States was in the pre-WWI era, in baseball, when the National League and the American League were two distinct, independent, more or less equal leagues. They met once a year in the World Series. Eventually, though, the two leagues simply melded into one organization we call Major League Baseball. Those two leagues, by the way, also combined in part to smother and destroy an upstart rival league, the ‘Federal League’, which is an ominous alternate way of explaining that, no, two D1 leagues really cannot ‘co-exist’ for long in the American sports ecosystem – even if the sport is popular enough to be known as the national pastime.

Other sports with two leagues ‘claiming’ D1 status were something of a farce. In professional basketball, once upon a time, the ABA was started to pose a challenge to the existing NBA. At the time, while it was true that a few players in the ABA were NBA-caliber, overwhelmingly, everyone knew that the NBA was a better product. That’s a big reason why the ABA only lasted for 9 years, ** and why most teams in the ABA folded nearly as quickly as they began. The same pattern exists in American football with the NFL and the USFL. There just wasn’t enough room in this country for two D1 football leagues. There’s really only room for one top league, per sport, per country.

In regards to soccer in America, this has all been tried before. In the 2010s, there were two sanctioned D1 leagues in the US: MLS and the NASL. The NASL was a topsy-turvy mess. Some teams flourished: Minnesota United and Montreal Impact are now MLS teams. Some teams were minor successes: the Tampa Bay Rowdies and Indy Eleven are in the USL Championship. Some were a hot mess: Puerto Rico had two teams, and both folded in a year. Rayo OKC lasted a year, and at some point mid year a minority owner came with a forklift and a truck and took away the artificial turf. In 2017, brand-new expansion team San Francisco Deltas won the Championship, and folded a few weeks later. The entire league folded soon after.

Some would say that USL adding a D1 league would be a natural extension that would ultimately lead to the American soccer dream of a league with a ‘proper’ soccer pyramid featuring promotion and relegation. Friends, I’ve heard that before, and I’ll believe it when I see it.

NISA said they would create a pro/rel structure. They never did. The NISA league is barely financially sustainable as is. NASL made similar claims in its day. A league you probably never heard of, the USPL, said the same thing almost a decade ago. Wild claims and US Soccer go together like chocolate and peanut butter.

And this history; failing teams, failing leagues, financial instability, chaos and disorder; it’s bad for soccer in America. It mades a mockery of the successful, stable, well planned teams and leagues. USL has experienced a period of relative growth and stability. It has 24 teams in the Championship, 14 teams in USL League 1, and an astounding 128 teams in USL League 2. Teams don’t come and go the way they did ten years ago – oh where for art thou, you Harrisburg City Islanders? You Wilmington Hammerheads? And especially you, our beloved Rochester Rhinos? This relative stability*** could be upended if USL starts a ‘Premier League’ that they will claim as a competing D1 league to MLS. And by the way, I’m positive that USL will call it ‘USL Premier League.’

It’s not impossible this might work. As I mentioned, baseball had two D1 leagues at the same time. That was, however, over a hundred years ago, and the two leagues were able to allow for parallel comparison because of the World Series. Would MLS countenance an end-of-year Super Bowl of Soccer with the champions of USL D1? Frankly, I doubt it.

USL is a great league. It has grown beyond many people’s wildest expectations. And for those of us in Pittsburgh, we are deeply grateful that we have a high quality soccer team in town that can scratch our local itch for the beautiful game.

But in going head to head with MLS and proposing to have a D1 league in 2027-28****, in this soccer writer’s opinion, the USL has bit off far more than it can chew.

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*- If you didn’t click the link, I estimated Tuffy to be worth, including the Riverhounds, somewhere in the $50-150 million range. I admit to having not done the research across the league, but I suspect most USL owners are in a similar range. MLS ownership groups generally start with men worth $500 million; and ofter the owners are well north of $2 billion.

**- But the ABA gave us the slam dunk contest, and the 3-point shot, and the San Antonio Spurs and NJ Nets and Denver Nuggets.

***- The last two USL teams to fold, St Louis FC and San Diego Loyal, were doomed to the grave when MLS expanded into those markets. I didn’t like that – it was better for successful USL teams to be ‘promoted’ (with a required entry fee) into MLS, which is what happened with Orlando and Nashville. And perhaps this inter-league animosity and lack of cooperation is the reason for USL’s move into D1 in the first place.

****- By the way, this proposed start date implies that maybe the league will play on the European Fall to Spring calendar, as opposed to the MLS Spring to Fall calendar. But the release held precious few details. So, will this league even compete at the same time as MLS? Nobody knows.