I don't know that throwing up their hands and saying, "whew, tough problem, oh well, whatchagonnado?" is really acceptable, though, either. Yes, the American west is large and sparsely populated. So what can be done to help clubs out there? I don't think it's enough to say it's too hard or we're not equipped to help them. It's a big part of the country they're responsible for. Midland/Odessa Sockers have been quite successful despite being far from anything. That isn't to say that we can unfurl the mission accomplished banner and call it a day, but rather, what has worked for them? What isn't working for them? What do teams like this need? Honestly, the perfect example of the failings of the federation was on display when NPSL Pro started to run aground. Regardless of the specifics, there is absolutely no reason the federation shouldn't be actively engaging in trying to help make more leagues, which would provide more opportunities for players, succeed. When you have something as mundane as insurance as the sticking point, the fed should be facilitating how to reconcile something like that: if not just for the league in question, but future endeavors. Insuring players (for example) should not be an insurmountable obstacle, and if it is, what will be done to help either remove it in the future or at least work around it? And that's the thing: nobody is expecting the league to have solutions to every soccer-related problem in the men's, women's, amateur, youth, and national spheres, but showing some interest in understanding and an appetite for improving the situations would at least be something.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: UPSL has pro/rel in some of their conferences. It doesn't really make sense in the context of NPSL because it's primarily a summer development league for college players. A very wide, very flat hierarchy makes the most the sense there since it's far more analogous to the college game (e.g. short season, roster turnover) than a traditional pro league.
We have that in spades. It's called high school football, high school basketball, collegiate summer league baseball, minor league baseball, and semi pro American football. Some of these things catch the public's fancy more than others. I'd put semi pro community soccer ahead of semi pro football and behind summer collegiate baseball in the pecking order of stirring up community emotions.
Guess what, things change over 100+ years. 1888 England looks nothing like 2019 America. What worked then and there, in pretty much every single facet of life, won't work here and now. I don't know why that idea is so hard to understand.
Why would USSF go out of it's way to support a league that had rejected its sanctioning and who's lead owner was actively suing the Federation? USL apparently had no problem getting group insurance rates for a mix of amateur and professional players, it's called sanctioning. Anyway, we have a the perfect solution now, it's called NISA. Live long and prosper!
I honestly don't know why I'm engaging. Professional soccer is a business. I'm sorry if you can't see this but if no one was willing to pay money to see and/or broadcast Ajax, they wouldn't exist in the form they are in now. The United States didn't have a professional soccer organizational structure to speak of after the demise of the NASL. In order to get the World Cup in 1994 we had to create one and USSF rightly went to people who already owned sports teams, knew how to run a pro sports team and by and large, had stadiums available. I can distinctly remember kids at a High School in Cincinnati calling not just my visiting team but their own classmates homophobic slurs while we were playing a soccer game in 1998. This country was actively hostile to the sport so of course you're going to start with investors. Amateur soccer started that way. Then people realized that they could sell tickets. Pro sports started in a similar fashion here. Arsenal began as a club for workers of the Royal Arsenal, many early baseball teams started as a club of factory workers then they started paying workers to just play the game (ringers). In 1869 someone in Cincinnati had the bright idea to just cut out the middle man and create a fully-professional baseball team. Every pro sports league started because a game was popular at the amateur and scholastic level. We have a thriving amateur soccer scene here. We have a thriving scholastic soccer scene as well. I play in a local league with men and women who come together to play because we love the game and it's good exercise. What you don't seem to get is that pro/rel is about professional soccer. If you think PSG is just a group of people hanging out to pass the time, well you're deluded. The professional game was never successful here until about 10 years ago and it took people willing to put forth billions to prop up a pro league to the point that it's only just now that we can say with confidence that professional soccer is here to stay. That's a good thing for those of us who grew up playing and loving the game. We're just now to the point that a kid can grow up in Salt Lake and have the same dream of playing for RSL or the Royals the same way that I might have grown up wanting to play for the Chicago Bulls when I was young. That's what you don't understand. We have soccer clubs in smaller cities as well. We even have some semi-pro clubs. But the days of a plucky church team working its way up to be a stable pro team died 100 years ago. You have to have someone in a community whether it's Pete's Drycleaning or an eccentric heiress, someone willing to front the money for a professional team. Also, no one other than a few weirdos in Detroit really care that much about watching amateur soccer. We have a robust collegiate soccer system in the US and while interest has risen, it's not nearly as popular as collegiate softball and baseball. When MLS is able to pay world class stars big money with the option of living in LA, Miami and New York, it will be a top league globally. At that point the only thing that might hold it back is lack of access to the UCL. Big time stars don't care about pro/rel because it never affects them. Hell, if MLS paid close to NHL levels, it would probably be able to poach talent from any league outside the EPL, La Liga, Budesliga, Serie A and the French top division.
This is extremely disingenuous. There is something stopping a soccer league from implementing pro/rel, because it requires something to pro and rel into and out of. Otherwise, you're talking about something much larger than a league. You're talking about leagues, which is a massively coordinated effort. To say that "anyone can do this right now" is, itself, quite full of it.
Yes and USSF is rightly leaving that bit up to the owners and operators of the individual leagues. It's not forcing it. It shouldn't force it. And it probably doesn't legally have the power to force it. USL doesn't seem to have any trouble finding people willing to jump on board to form multiple tiers. Sure it's more than one "league" but its run by the same league HQ. They'll probably have p/r sometime soon and I'm sure people will cry about it being faux/rel (I've already seen this). A league is doing it. NISA can do it. Yes, it's a massively coordinated effort but anything in professional sports is a massively coordinated effort that requires planning and boatloads on money. What's the problem?
This is an extremely opinionated retelling of the events (and calling Commisso "the lead owner" is pretty inaccurate) - I'm sure you'll get the reps for it, though, so congrats on that - but I would hope that the federation isn't governing via petty grudges. No matter what, you would think they would be interested in what would be motivating a critical mass of clubs to want to start a league that didn't fall under the PLS. USL does not have amateurs and professionals playing together, but, regardless, USL sanctions League Two not USASA, so this is irrelevant. But that's beside the point: NPSL Pro had their own insurance. However, USASA would only sanction them if they used their existing insurer, but their insurer would not cover a mix pros and amateurs. This is exactly the sort of impasse that a reasonable person would expect the federation to mediate: it doesn't have to come to a satisfying conclusion, but at least acknowledge the issue. Except it doesn't address the problem, at all. Although maybe if they have success, they could sanction a semi-pro, full-season league.
Seconded. Ten years earlier, I was on the first soccer team my high school had ever had, and we actively got this treatment from our own classmates (especially athletes from other sports).
Pro/Rel doesn't become necessary ... saying that insinuates that it is a necessity. It isn't. It is a choice. A choice that only comes at a time we've not reached yet. It isn't impossible to start nor being excluded. That's actually a GREAT thing about the US Soccer landscape. Essentially, you can do whatever you want. If a league wanted to start TODAY with a different approach, they can. What about in Europe? Devil's Advocate: Why should the USSF make efforts when there's literally 100 different directions and 1000 different agendas among these "lower" tiers? There was a summit where NOT EVEN TWO clubs could agree to work together to move forward. There's a hell of a lot of hot air being puffed about in the lower leagues/tiers .... but not a whole lot of cohesion. Is it not, in part, on the clubs to present the "hey USSF, this is what we need" portion of the problem?
I don't really disagree with any of this and it doesn't contradict my point. USL is 30 years old. It's a little hard to compare that to "anybody can start a league right now with pro/rel". Certainly they have groups eager to join the top and the bottom tiers, the jury is still out on the middle one. I still can't see them implementing pro/rel with an order of magnitude difference between the expansion fees, though. What league? UPSL? It's still dependent on where your team is and the entire structure is in the second tier outside the pyramid. How? Remember, the original quote was "anyone can implement pro/rel right now".
And even that is region dependent. Semi-Pro Football (I know, I played in TX) is pretty damn huge in plenty of places.
Did they ask USSF for help? No, they affiliated with USASA to avoid having to deal with USSF. Pros do of course play in USL League 2, Red Bulls U23s for instance.
The NISA could get 20 owners to agree to start a league where 10 would either start in a lower level or start one 20 team season where the bottom ten get regulated. As long as every owner meets the PLS for D3 I can't see the USSF have a problem with that since pro/Rel would be a scheduling and standings gimmick.
Because it's their mandate to help grow the sport in this country. No one is asking that they serve every need for every club. Where are the commonalities? Ugh, this old chestnut. There was a half day meeting to try to find the sorts of commonalities addressed above. The question is, why are the clubs, who have a worm's eye view of the landscape, having to organize this? And, besides, I think it's ignoring the fact that it damn near started a very revolutionary, new league just one year later. That NPSL Pro didn't work had nothing to do with an inability to herd cats, it was because it hit a bureaucratic brick wall.
The owner of Kingston who happens to be the founder of foursquare by the way has said that he hopes for pro/Rel in the U.S but telling has said he wouldn't be interested in his club being promoted!?! He feels the cost of being promoted wouldn't be worth it to Kingston.
I'll bet they're actually amateur, to retain collegiate eligibility. Any pros would be on RBII. It's moot, though, anyway. USL would insurance for pro teams, anyway. It's not a valid comparison. USASA has pros playing against amateurs, anyway. The insurance problem was almost certainly because NPSL Pro was primarily professional not that NPSL had paid players in their ranks. You don't know this and I don't know this. Don't try to pass your speculation off as fact.
I have quite a few friends and acquaintances from back home who still feel this way. It's fading away but in many parts of the country you wouldn't dream of asking a bartender to turn the TV to a soccer game, even if there were other tvs and the bar wasn't full.
They don't even have 20 teams, yet. This is handwaving to a major degree. Let's not even get into the fact that taking 20 teams and breaking them into two national leagues at the D3 level isn't going to prove your point, anyway, because it would fold in a year. NISA (nor anyone else, besides, possibly, USL -who won't) can't do this "right now".
(again, Devil's Advocate) ... and they are. Indeed, other than pointing a finger and yelling "you aren't helping/doing anything to fix what WE think should be fixed" where are the commonalities? It's why I brought up the meeting .... ... yes, this meeting again because it is the perfect case in point. Despite the huffing/puffing and crying foul there couldn't even be an agreement to have a second conversation? To plan an actual deep dive among clubs? ANYTHING? Nope ... because at this point they're all self serving. Regardless of choice of approach there will always be a bureaucratic wall to climb. ... the point is that a league(s) can form, announce, and begin with pro/rel from the get go ... right now. Yes, there are standards in order to qualify for sanctioning at different tiers within the USSF. Those, in of themselves do not prevent anything from forming. The "top" of the pyramid could be D3 sanctioned with every other club meeting that standard but not having the other leagues "sanctioned" ... nothing anywhere says that the pro from and rel to has to be a USSF tier sanctioned league. They clubs moving into the D3 top tier just have to ensure that the league as a whole doesn't fall below the D3 PLS. As "difficult" as that may be for clubs ... I certainly don't see it being any more difficult (or costly) than say, trying to take Salford City to the Championship. Or say Novara back to Serie A ...