NPSL has a lot of work to do if they expect to make a jump to D3. Most of their teams are fly by night organizations playing out of high school stadiums on shoestring budgets with local players they picked up off the street or college players on break.
"The New York Cosmos are also having financial issues and are up for sale by their owners apparently." I had to check the byline to see if this was published today. Does the author know something we don't?
In that he passes over it like it is nothing? I get the feeling that it didn't fit into his narrative, so he just glossed over it. *shrug* The article is a puff piece, imho. Particularly given that the current question isn't "can NASL survive and thrive as a D3 league", but whether they can survive at all and, it would appear, that ship has sailed as well.
D1, D2, and D3 are for professional leagues. The standards for those leagues include the teams being professional. The PDL and NPSL are not professional so they cannot be D3. There are some semi-pro leagues that could apply to be D3 but none meet the standards.
kind of strange. I get the technicalities of sanctioning but it's kind of silly to have tiers of divisions but a hole where a D3 would be. USSF really punted on this one. Their needs to be a restructuring of the leagues and reorganization of clubs throughought. Lots of PDL teams like Fresno could probably operate as D3, lots of teams in current USL should probably stay in D3, etc
Since, we don't have an American open system I could give two cents about who is considered D2, D3, D4, and D5. Sorry it really doesn't make a difference where everybody ends up at the end of the day.
Well there's not really a hole. We only have D1, D2 and D3. There's nothing below D3 as far as sanctioning goes so all we have is no bottom of the pyramid right now.
So the USL has announced that they are setting up a new D3 league. http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/...NASL-ESPN-promotion-relegation.html?mobi=true Also, if all the current D2 teams stay in place, are there enough teams/markets capable of making the jump to D3 in order to have regional play?
If they're smart, they'll roll out region by region, only ever meeting in the playoffs as they add more regions. The minimum number of teams needed in a D3 for USSF sanctioning is 8, and there is no timezone requirement. They could launch a D3 in the upper-midwest/Great Lakes, then a new "conference" in the Northeast, Southeast, Southwest/Texas, and Pacific/Northwest as they line-up clusters of teams ready to launch together. Seems far more viable than trying to spring 20+ teams into existence in a year.
And we have an answer to both questions. USL will be D2 in 2017 and USL will also be D3 in 2019. https://www.themaneland.com/2018/1/22/16914334/which-teams-will-compete-in-new-division-3 Is this it, are the Soccer Wars officially over now?
D3 standards still requires a principal owner to have an individual net worth of at least ten million US dollars. That seems excessive to me.
How so? Operating expenses for a USL team started at $1 million a year with losses of about half that.. Do you really want a person that can't absorb those loses for an extended period being the owner of the team?