Puerto Rico's teams--Puerto Rico United, River Plate PR and Sevilla FC PR--have been withdrawn from USL Pro competition, and will now only play in the Puerto Rico Soccer League. Games played up until now will still count. Games not played yet will be rescheduled with USL Pro teams. This means our home draw with United will count, but it affects a June 24 away date at River Plate PR, and a June 29 home date against Sevilla FC PR. Maybe we'll get a game against the LA Blues now? My thoughts: an away game with LA Blues on July 29, and home game against FC New York on either June 24 or the originally-scheduled June 29.
They're going to have to do a major overhaul to the schedule for the remaining teams. Best thing to do probably is just drop LA and Antigua into separate divisions that are left and try as best as possible to rebalance the remaining games for everyone. That would be the fairest thing from an on the field and travel expense perspective. But would it be feasible logistically? Would the league office consider it too much hassle and just half-arse something a la the USL way? More than likely the latter....... My sincere hope is that what effect this bungling of the league operations does is make Mr. Rawlins think long and hard about which division he wants his team playing in next year.
Can someone give me the low-down on what happened here? Was the travel too expensive? Too bad...I was looking forward to the rematch with PR United. That was an interesting game..
How much travel costs doesn't matter if you don't even make enough to make payroll. Or you're like United, who allegedly couldn't pay their players at all.
Can we sign up their #3 central midfielder - the tall guy who held up the ball like a monster? There was class to his game that was missing in his teammates ... and we could use someone in the middle of the field to hold the ball and stiff-arm some people.
I think the plan these teams have is to just focus on their domestic league, so I'm not sure we'll see a mass exodus of players from the teams other then the international ones that cost a bit more. I think the IMS article said that River Plate released all of their non-Puerto Rican players. These teams just weren't ready organizationally to go into USL Pro.
from what I've been told, the teams were expecting some government subsides. That didn't happen. sponsor started backing out, and things started snowballing. Then the owners of two of the teams got very ill. playing in neurtral stadiums, poor attendence, broken promises to players. All they needed was a natural disaster to crap on them and it would have been the perfect storm.
Whether owners were expecting government subsidies, as we've been told, is a completely moot point. The illnesses were unforeseeable, but if USL had done their due diligence, they'd have found out pretty quickly that these teems were not financially stable. If USL were really dedicated to anything that could be construed as "stability," they'd have told these teams to sit out the season and wait till they had those government subsidies in hand. It's obvious, though, that they're not dedicated to anyone but themselves. So instead of doing what was best for their league and for soccer on the islands in general, they just took expansion fees from two sick dudes. Class.