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.
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.
MLS players are mediocre and a lot of it is the wages compared to European clubs. If the players were good enough to play in Europe and earn more, they’d move.
On the other hand, I don’t think there’s enough interest in football / soccer in the US that the clubs could actually be financially viable if they paid the wages demanded in Europe. Clubs in the UK can pay hundreds of millions in wages per year because they make hundreds of millions in revenue.
Having said that, I think MLS would be far more attractive to fans if the money paid for designated players was spread out and used to increase the overall wages for the whole team. Designated players may create buzz, but they almost never lead to significantly better matches. They may occasionally do things that end up on highlight reels, but the people who only watch highlights aren’t the ones who buy tickets and watch every game.
I want to agree with this (and there’s no question that it would produce better teams that might actually compete with the best of the Mexican league, etc), but the situation with Messi is going to be a powerful indicator of how much influence a perfect designated player situation can have on the league. It may be that Messi really does draw huge numbers of people, some of whom will become real fans, or it may be that the Messi crowds see all the mediocrity around him and decide to stick with whatever they were watching before.
The other position I would take with this is that the owners of MLS/USL should be thinking long term. Their target fanbase is people born in the last 10-15 years or earlier, who very likely play soccer themselves at some level, and whose families are likely to bring them to games. Keep the tickets relatively cheap (which they have done), keep the games at reasonable times (it’s a mix) and make sure as many teams as possible have something interesting to play for, for as much of the season as possible. Playoffs more or less mirror the race for Europe in the EPL, etc (although devaluing the team which tops the table in the regular season becomes a problem), but promotion/relegation add real stakes to the bottom of the table, and substantially more excitement to the top of lower leagues.
Or in other words, they should try to do the opposite of all the blatantly consumer-unfriendly things that teams in other American sports routinely do. They are selling an alternative product to what most Americans currently care about, with hopes of becoming a big thing with future generations. Lean into that.
And there’s a pretty good chance MLS never will measure up to the top european leagues. They have a ton of competition for national sports interest with the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL; getting on the same level as the lower two of those four would be an extraordinary accomplishment. But that’s okay, as long as they can develop enough local interest that they come to games, buy shirts, and keep money flowing that way. Any owner who jumped in hoping to cash out a multibillion dollar franchise some day will be disappointed, but I really do not care.
I can’t see how it would be anything other than option 2.
Messi is 36, he no longer can do the flashy dribbling he did at 20. Those are the things that won him Ballons D’Or and that built up his reputation. Even at his peak he spent a lot of his time walking around, not running. His sudden bursts of pace were exciting, but he was never really an “athlete”. The only thing he really still has left is his incredible touch and his ability to read the game. But, going against that will be that in every MLS game he’s going to have a much younger, much more athletic player stuck to him like glue. At PSG he was heavily covered, but his teammates were also a threat, so they couldn’t just focus on him. In MLS he’s it. So he’ll be smothered by 1 defender all game, maybe 2 of them. His time on the ball will be very limited. So, he’ll mainly have to be a passer of the ball from a range well beyond the goal. Passes aren’t nearly as flashy as dribbles or goals, and they’re harder for people who aren’t big fans to appreciate. In addition, a pass requires that you have a teammate to receive the ball. At PSG and Barcelona he had elite teammates who would make clever runs. In MLS he’ll have mediocre teammates with a poor first touch, poor reading of the game, and mediocre bursts of pace.
People who are knowledgeable will see a Messi in decline who is wasting his final years in a league that’s beneath his abilities. People who aren’t knowledgeable will see a player who isn’t living up to the hype, who maybe occasionally shows up in highlight reels for a great pass or goal, but who mostly stands around or walks. Not worth spending 90 minutes watching.
As for MLS competing with other leagues, in reality it shouldn’t compete with the NHL, or NBA because they’re largely winter sports. It will have some overlap with the NFL, but it’s an autumn / early winter sport. It’s really only baseball that fully shares a season with MLS. It also shares a season with car racing, etc. but I think that’s a pretty different audience. You would think that sports broadcasters would be eager for something to provide content for the time in the year when NFL, NBA and NHL were all off.
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.
That depends what you mean by “just fine”.
The lack of lower leagues is a big problem for US sports. It has led to universities becoming amateur leagues that develop professional athletes, however they’re “amateur” only because the labour of the athletes is exploited. The athletes aren’t paid, but the coaches are highly paid, and the athletics programs are lucrative for the universities. That has led to all kinds of problems.
Of course there are. That’s why people are having to pay hundreds of millions to get an MLS franchise. NYCFC had to pay $100m to join. FC Cincinnati and Nashville SC each had to pay $150m. MLS has announced that the 28th and 29th teams will have to pay $200m to join, and the 30th will have to pay $325m. It’s a system that benefits the existing owners. Nobody’s going to pay $325m to enter a closed league just for the vanity. They expect to make that money back, which they can do because a closed league is lucrative for the people who get in. You can bet that the owners of the team paying $325m to join the league are going to vote to milk the next team that wants to enter for half a billion if they can do it.
In a system with promotion or relegation, it can be very expensive to buy a top team, but you can buy a lower league team, manage them well, get promoted and get into the league that way. If you wanted to, you could even start a brand new team and pay nothing. You’d have to enter at the bottom of the pyramid and work your way up, but nobody could stop you.
Which they have to do, because without the danger of relegation, it’s boring! The attempt to enforce parity also makes it boring, because if a team is having a bad year, you can tune out, come back in a season, and everything will be shaken up. Nobody in European leagues needs to implement silly things to make the league more interesting because the danger of relegation (and the thrill of promotion) is enough to keep people interested.
Of course they are. That’s why so many people watch the Premier League despite the awkward schedule. If MLS were just as exciting as the Premier League, nobody would do that.
Most of that is due to the local players being significantly worse than their European counterparts, but it’s also because the league structure makes for boring, meaningless games. Yes, the threat of relegation is stressful for fans, but that stress is excitement. And, relegation can even be good for fans. For a club that is consistently near the bottom and always in danger of relegation, relegation can be refreshing. It means a season where their club is powerful compared to their rivals, not weak. It means going from a record of mostly losses, to being able to expect a record of mostly wins. Sometimes it’s better to be the big fish in a small pond (a club that’s regularly at the top of the 2nd tier league) rather than a small fish in a big pond.
The budget has a lot to do with a club’s fate in the Premier League, but it’s not everything. That’s how Leicester managed to win a few years ago. It’s also apparent in how Arsenal went from being a rich club playing in the Champions League year after year, to being a bloated, mismanaged club struggling to make any European competition at all, to then being a leaner, focused club challenging Manchester City for the title. A small club like Brighton would have to spend years building up a fanbase, expanding a stadium, etc. to have the revenue to compete with the clubs at the top of the table. But, by being well managed they’ve managed to make it into the Europa League on a budget much smaller than Chelsea and Tottenham. That’s one of the things that makes the Premier League exciting. A well run underdog club can make a run for trophies while a rich but badly run club can be in danger of relegation.
Yes, for investors it’s a bad deal. The closed cartels of American sports are much better for investors because they can’t fail too badly. Mismanage their clubs so badly that they finish last, and they get the #1 draft picks the following year. No investor would want to buy into a system with promotion or relegation if they had to choose, because then they’re in a cut-throat world where they have a real danger of failing.
Also, the whole point of a promotion and relegation system is that you don’t have to start with a 20k seat stadium. You can build some small bleachers seating a few hundred people, then grow from there. If there’s enough interest that you’re regularly selling out, you can expand. More fans in seats means more revenue. More revenue means more money to invest in the squad. More investment means more success. More success means promotion. A club can grow until they can justify a 20k seat stadium based on consistently selling out their 10k seat stadium. With a closed system like MLS the crowds need to be “MLS sized” from day one, so it’s a big risk if there simply aren’t enough people who are interested.
The people who enjoy American sports would enjoy them more if there were promotion and relegation in place. They’ve just never been lucky enough to experience that. They’re stuck watching sports run by owner-managed cartels.