The USL story is exploding.
First, the league is unexpectedly sold to someone other than the group that was undergoing due diligence after apparently having its purchase offer accepted.
Now, several teams – Carolina, Minnesota, Miami and the suspended Atlanta franchise – are talking about walking … possibly even setting up a new division-one league to directly challenge Major League Soccer.
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
This is far from a simple story. But the odds are almost hopelessly against them.
Here’s a few key points:
- MLS’s salary cap and roster restrictions hugely handcuff the league’s teams, but have also kept the league – and all its franchises – in business for a decade and a half, including through one of the worst recessions in a century.
- The USL teams are not rich. Miami’s on life support and subject to an ongoing deathwatch. Atlanta doesn’t even have a team, and while the Carolina Railhawks are kicking butt up and down the continent, they simply cannot presently compete head-to-head financially with MLS teams.
- There are many, many North American soccer fans – myself among them – who would love to see the pro game in Canada and the United States busted out of the MLS straitjacket.
- The MLS collective bargaining agreement is expiring. Without a salary-cap increase – or a two-tier system where the league actually lets ownership groups pay extra money for players – we could be looking at years and years of continual bureaucratic life support and limitation.
- If that happens, a rival league would be a very enticing possibility.
Unfortunately, however odd and small MLS may be on the global soccer stage, it dwarfs and hugely outclasses the USL. USL’s biggest contribution to the world really isn’t its top division, USL-1. The real hook is the sprawling and pleasantly productive Player Development League, which is doing a vastly better job of finding talent, developing it, and selling it on down the line – quite often to Europe.
So … we have MLS teams that are not able – or allowed – to compete for players with real soccer set-ups. And we have a battered, divided USL-1, continually losing top teams to MLS, where a lot of the owners are disgusted, and apparently want out.
I would love – LOVE! – to see them start a new league, free of all financial restriction, and show MLS how it could be done. But I see no chance – NONE! – that meaningful competition can actually happen. Not now, and not like this.
As much as they drive me crazy on a weekly basis, the MLS restrictions are still keeping Our Little League in business. Meanwhile, the present split in USL could be disastrous for the lower layers of the North American soccer pyramid – unless the PDL can find ways to stay alive and operating, all but on its own.
Right now, the USL split is a boardroom stare-down, rather than a revolution. And it’s not the peg on which advocates for a free-market MLS can hang our hats. That’s a far bigger fight, for a much later date.
(Darn and drat it all.)
Onward!