They may be the first, they won’t be the last. Hate to say it but NISA didn’t do themselves any favors when they dropped all of their teams in cities/regions with 1 or more MLS/USL side. They were always going to come up short in those situations against long established leagues.
Fury survived what, all of two weeks? Shouldn't have even popped up. Very disappointing. But hey, at least all other teams get free forfeit wins.
I maintain the theory that if (the) Miami FC hadn't come along, NISA would never have actually kicked off. Pretty sure they forced the showcase into action, which is why everything seems so haphazard. Basically, the mess with Founder's Cup insurance woes forced this NISA into this, but they absolutely were not prepared for it. I stick by my prediction that if NISA is still around in 2 seasons, it will be almost all "NPSL Pro" teams and basically none of the originally announced NISA teams will still exist. This is probably the best case scenario, honestly. If there's a silver lining here, it's that NPSL will have the full-season schedule to fall back on if everything falls apart.
“[T]he temporary suspension from the Fall 2019 season is due to a last minute reversal from one of its main investors,” https://www.inquirer.com/soccer/philadelphia-fury-nisa-matt-driver-franklin-field-20190918.html
I’d throw 1904 into that hurry up pot too. Their owner is the commish after all. And he’s been trying to take any field he can for 4 years.
That's pretty much what happened with USL. OCSC are the only team from 2011 that's playing in the Championship. But MLS saved the day by allowing it's B teams to play in USL. NISA won't have that luxury.
I think that's mostly true, although I don't think they would have had enough together to have gotten the fall season off the ground on their own, though. Without Miami bringing Cal UTD and Roots, there would only have been 2 teams in the west, and I don't know that L.A. Force wouldn't have been content to hang out in the UPSL in the meantime. And their owner was the commish. New commish now. And Charleston and Pittsburgh. No, I agree. An infusion of clubs is definitely handy, especially when you're trying to reach escape velocity. Honestly, it's why something under D3 would be welcome, where you could have a mix of pro and amateur teams. Their future is really hard to predict. Unlike, say, the Armada, I'm not sure they make sense as a fully amateur team. It sort of works at cross purposes with their brand.
Saying the MLS2 teams 'saved the day' is supported by everything but the evidence. The Galaxy II were the first one. They weren't saving anything. Sacramento, Louisville and, for a time, Cincinnati did a hell of a lot more day-saving than Real Freaking Monarchs. The NASL was already on its way from nagging cough to hospice by 2015.
I think the presence of B teams allowed teams to have a full schedule and allowed the league to regionalise.
One of the key things they did was provide critical mass. I think it was Peter Wilt who said that every prospective owner wants to be the 9th team in the league; that is, they wait for other owners to commit before committing themselves, which makes it hard for a league to build size initially. The MLS teams were backed by rich owners who expected the teams to lose money and so you knew they were going to stick around. That made the league attractive to other potential owners. Now so many teams have joined that the USL could (and seems to want to) jettison the MLS teams and no one would notice.
This is basically my take on the reserves teams: "saving the day" is way overselling it. They provided ports in a storm, and that's not nothing, but the successful independent teams that joined around that time did a hell of a lot more to make the league a credible option. If you had a bunch of reserves teams, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Rochester, Harrisburg, Orange County, and you're adding teams like Colorado Springs, all of a sudden league looks a lot less glamorous.
Regardless of how big or small, the MLS 2 teams did have an impact however. And it’s one piece that NISA can’t hope to rely on. Which puts them at some level of disadvantage even had NISA made all the right choices out the gate and not hitched their wagon, however briefly, to the shitshow that was NASL.
I'm still not sure I buy this narrative. I think USL's (relative) stability has far less to do with the MLS arrangement than it has to do with the rising profile of soccer in this country. They benefited about as much from NASL's dissolution as they did the MLS reserves. That's really less of a testimony to USL than it is an indictment of NASL. I think it's difficult to compare NISA to, well, anything right now. It bears basically no resemblance to the league that got sanctioning in February, so the teams that are still there from then (minus one already, and all assumptions are that Baton Rouge will never materialize) are about to set to the side unless they can adapt to the change. Rightly or wrongly, they're taking a different tack: by being truly "open" to clubs that meet PLS, there will absolutely be volatility, but the idea being that if the barrier to entry is low enough, and you have a core of the league that is stable enough, you can have enough volume to keep the league intact. But that's certainly a risky proposition made more complicated, as I said, by the fact that they're transitioning the league's focus at the exact time it was theoretically supposed to have (but never would have) kicked off. Obviously the league needs to work out how to prevent situations like the Fury, but I have to imagine the new clubs are assuming this is the cost of having a league to jump to when Founder's Cup fell apart. A point in time. But we'll see.
Detroit area is getting a second team. Why you ask? Who knows. "NISA announces its newest member @MichiganStarsFC.George & his family are dedicated to the beautiful game & bring a pedigree of success in football. Based in Detroit will create a great derby w Detroit City FC & speaks to the open system NISA stands for."John Prutch Commissioner pic.twitter.com/0Lt8O4yH1f— NISA Official (@NISALeague) September 21, 2019
The agreement with MLS and the insertion of MLS2 teams absolutely had an impact, I do not deny that. (The agreement - coming after the NASL apparently rejected similar overtures - also kept that relationship out of the hands of existing or potential competitors.) But the fact the NASL didn't get those teams and USL did was not the major reason the NASL lost the war or that USL won it. Again, Sacramento showed what was possible and others have built on it since. The clubs that have moved up from USL to MLS are a tick in their favor, too, but they were not really contingent on there being a contractual relationship between the two. Given the disparate emotions the MLS2 teams elicit and their somewhat dubious positive effects they add in a business sense, it is simply an exaggeration to say they or the relationship "saved the day."
Because those are THE BENEFITS OF AN OPEN SYSTEM, DUH. If we want to look like Europe*, we have to have derbies. *And by "Europe," of course, I mean "England."
These are also the Michigan Stars who are 0-2-1 with one goal in three games in the Members Cup. After going 3-6-5 in the NPSL this summer. Totally ready!
I'm not sure about this transitive. I seriously doubt that NISA is going to be massively more competitive than NPSL, so if they're middling in NPSL, they very well might be middling in NISA. The top of the table of Members Cup includes some of the best NPSL teams, so that also stands to reason. And this isn't a knock on NISA: I say the same thing about League One. One of the advantages of NPSL is that you have access to players that absolutely belie their amateur status. The D3 leagues just give you an opportunity to have those sorts of players year-round.
I think we’ve hit peak league > club with NISA fans. They seem completely fine with teams folding if that means the leagues survival.
The PLSs themselves are a huge barrier to entry, as are stadium costs and insurance, staffing and infrastructure. How many of these teams will get concessions revenue to cover their rent?