The All-Encompassing Pro/Rel Thread on Soccer in the USA

Discussion in 'Soccer in the USA' started by bigredfutbol, Mar 12, 2016.

  1. barroldinho

    barroldinho Member+

    Man Utd and LA Galaxy
    England
    Aug 13, 2007
    US/UK dual citizen in HB, CA
    Club:
    Manchester United FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    That's awful. But relevance...?
     
  2. barroldinho

    barroldinho Member+

    Man Utd and LA Galaxy
    England
    Aug 13, 2007
    US/UK dual citizen in HB, CA
    Club:
    Manchester United FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    I could see an LA team struggling. That town tends to love a winner but once they suck, they go and find something else to do.
     
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  3. Expansion Franchise

    Chattanooga FC
    United States
    Apr 7, 2018
    That's what I was angling towards: big cities have so many other "big league" options. Portland has the Trailblazers, but not much else. Not even a major university. SLC and Orlando have a similar sports profile (they both have universities, though), but not sure they'd be as likely to follow their teams down.
     
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  4. M

    M Member+

    Feb 18, 2000
    Via Ventisette
    My scales measure in stones, but nevertheless the two things I mentioned are pretty much the only things that legally are measured in Imperial units. Of course some folks will still talk in Imperial units and that will only die out when those folks ... die. Personally I think it’s great the UK has moved to metric units. Too bad the US is stuck in the Stone Age on this - except its scientists.
     
  5. Paul Berry

    Paul Berry Member+

    Notts County and NYCFC
    United States
    Apr 18, 2015
    Nr Kingston NY
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    The US has a metric interstate. I-19.

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
     
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  6. Expansion Franchise

    Chattanooga FC
    United States
    Apr 7, 2018
    I mean, I agree with you completely. I also don't think the way we, the British, or the French measure things makes a particularly large impact on how we respectively organize our sports leagues.
     
  7. Paul Berry

    Paul Berry Member+

    Notts County and NYCFC
    United States
    Apr 18, 2015
    Nr Kingston NY
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Surely if the French had invented sport each team would consist of 10 players and every game would last 100 minutes.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
     
  8. Expansion Franchise

    Chattanooga FC
    United States
    Apr 7, 2018
    During the revolution, they also implemented a decimal calendar.
     
  9. Paul Berry

    Paul Berry Member+

    Notts County and NYCFC
    United States
    Apr 18, 2015
    Nr Kingston NY
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Which was in the link. :)
     
  10. Expansion Franchise

    Chattanooga FC
    United States
    Apr 7, 2018
    It was, indeed!
     
  11. Expansion Franchise

    Chattanooga FC
    United States
    Apr 7, 2018
    Personally, I prefer Dave Gorman's proposal:
     
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  12. CrazyJ628

    CrazyJ628 Member+

    Jul 16, 2007
    The center of the Earth
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    Please go to every USL Championship owner, especially the ones who paid $7 million to join the league this year and ask them if they'd be cool with their team being replaced by a team that paid $300K to play in USL League 1 after their team had a bad year. Please produce a scientific study of US non-MLS owners and then you can make that claim.

    Also please find a scientific study of soccer fans in the US that is more than an internet poll. Also please tell me which "clubs' want pro/rel. Please exclude all amateur clubs because typically they're already playing at the highest level possible and thus their opinion doesn't matter because, and I can't stress this enough, THEY ARE NOT PROFESSIONAL TEAMS!

    It's good you support lower division soccer. I've long advocated that if leagues want to do pro/rel among themselves, they should go for it. If you want to commit league suicide, be my guest. Your problem with Kenn is that he challenges your opinion.

    The only reason to do pro/rel is because you don't want to do single-level regionalized leagues or because you're beholden to a corrupt FA(s) that arbitrarily mandate leagues be a certain size because...reasons.

    Kicking teams out of leagues for one bad year in a sports marketplace that doesn't do that will certainly be a revolutionary way to make sure more teams go out of business and the growth of the game here is stymied.

    IDK. The Cosmos spent years trying to tell us that they had all the financial wherewithal to be D1 and even drew up pretty pictures of a stadium at Belmont Park.

    The PLS were set up because soccer leagues have traditionally gone belly-up and were run by used car salesmen. While I might agree that the PLS are a little too strict, they are also there for a good reason and anyone who advocates pro/rel should actually embrace them since they would provide ownership stability in theory.

    The NCAA doesn't really get in the way at all. The only real issue that the NCAA brings up in terms of the soccer landscape are the amateur teams that rely on NCAA student-athletes on summer break. In baseball there's a huge infrastructure of leagues around the country where NCAA baseball players join traveling leagues that play with wooden bats (as opposed to the aluminum bats that are used in college baseball). These teams are pretty popular in smaller cities that could probably never even support the lowest level of minor league baseball and they provide NCAA players with more playing time.

    This is essentially what the NPSL is. The only difference is that in the NPSL you have cosplayer fans of teams like Detroit City who blame the NCAA and USSF for their team not being professional. When in reality the only reason their teams aren't pro is that they don't want to do the work to make them professional. It's much easier to blame other organizations for their shortcomings.

    You don't see fans of the college-wood bat summer league baseball team Paducah Chiefs going online and complaining about how they can't be a AAA baseball team because MiLB/MLB/NCAA hold them back. But you see it with soccer because the cosplayers are under the mistaken belief that soccer is different because...reasons.
     
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  13. Expansion Franchise

    Chattanooga FC
    United States
    Apr 7, 2018
    DCFC is professional this year, so you're going to need to rework your act.
    Motorik Alexandria would probably slot in nicely.
     
  14. Expansion Franchise

    Chattanooga FC
    United States
    Apr 7, 2018
    Like I said, I don't have a problem with the intentions of the standards and I think what they're gunning for is mostly pretty reasonable at their respective divisions.
    What I don't particularly agree with is how the standards are fairly prescriptive towards the franchise model. I know the counterargument to this will be "but that's all we've had in this country", but that's not what you create standards for. And by codifying them so rigidly, it makes it that much harder to change them for different league models.

    That said, with a closed pyramid, this may all be moot. There's no reason a league couldn't attract billionaire owners; encourage 15k+ seat, state of the art stadiums; have $100 million payrolls; TV deals; etc. and apply for D3 status and play only on the west coast. It literally makes no difference in the USSF pyramid.
     
  15. CrazyJ628

    CrazyJ628 Member+

    Jul 16, 2007
    The center of the Earth
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    Good to see them actually investing in players rather than profiting off unpaid labor while also acting so much more authentic than everyone else. However, NPSL shouldn’t exist in its current form with Cosmos, Miami, Detroit, Chattanooga Too Good For USOC Troll The Redwolves FC all paying players.

    I know I know. NPSL Pro and Founders Cup! Authentic smoakbomb soccer! Grab your skull bandannas and come on down! I’ll believe it when they actually start playing their too good for USSF sanctioning league
     
  16. Expansion Franchise

    Chattanooga FC
    United States
    Apr 7, 2018
    This seems like a really silly thing to get bent out of shape about.
     
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  17. USRufnex

    USRufnex Red Card

    Tulsa Athletic / Sheffield United
    United States
    Jul 15, 2000
    Tulsa, OK
    Club:
    --other--
    #19567 USRufnex, Mar 26, 2019
    Last edited: Mar 26, 2019
    I have.

    I've used the ignore tool on any number of occasions, only to observe that favor was never returned. And nobody has had any desire to ask me for my preferred terms of any "reboot."

    One sided effort?
    I've never composed a lengthy comedic parody of any of your posts.

    Once again, I've repeatedly tried to use the ignore tool over the course of several years at various times (on anywhere from one or two posters to as many as five or six) so that I could attempt to focus my attention and conversation on those BS posters who don't... wait for it... belittle, ridicule and marginalize. From time to time, I'd just give up, figuring the only way to work this out is to inspire at least a couple of the "usual suspects" to actually put ME on ignore, rather than the other way around, but alas...

    I will forgive and attempt to forget some of the past ridiculousness and attempt to modify my more caustic tone over the next 60 days, but only under the following conditions:

    I consider nobody in this thread, no matter how vehemently I disagree with them on the issue of Promotion/Relegation for the United States of America, to be an idiot. For this reason, I am requesting two of the "usual suspects," HTTK and CrazyJoe (who, when not calling me an "idiot" outright have certainly treated me like one) place me on their Ignore list for the next 60 days and I will follow suit. I fear that if I only ask for 30 days, the request wouldn't be honored for more than a week, maybe two weeks, tops.

    I understand that occasionally the "view ignored content" option will need to be utilized to make sense of some of the interactions of other posters with myself, but no direct interactions should take place for at least 60 days.

    I am not asking you, @barroldinho to use the Ignore feature for the next 60 days if you can also "attempt to proceed civilly." That means no unsoliticited personal advice and a focus on my actual proposals and arguments rather than questioning my motives or trying to link my views to those shared by a tiny handful of extremists.

    That said, a few days ago I read your blog post about Pro/Rel in Major League Soccer... I couldn't get through the first few paragraphs without rolling my eyes, sighing, and mumbling at least a couple of times "oh, FFS."

    But I got to the actual proposal, which isn't far from my views on any Pro/Rel involving MLS itself. As much as I wished FIFA would have put some real pressure on MLS to move in the direction of Pro/Rel by the time of the 2026 WC, expecting a corrupt organization to positively influence a not-as-corrupt organization is a bit too much to ask.

    I think the biggest sticking point to Pro/Rel involving MLS is, even if you convince an overwhelming majority of O/I's that it's worth their while, the prospect of being relegated to play a buncha MLS2 reserve teams playing before a few hundred fans is a big deal breaker.

    One of my twitter followers who hates Ted and is no fan of the ProRelForUSA hashtag makes an effective point that USSF D1, D2, and D3 really should be referred to as USSF D1, D3, and D5. And one of the best arguments about how any Pro/Rel involving MLS could take place involves MLS becoming incredibly successful by expanding to 32 or 34 teams by @superdave (an argument that seemed pretty far-fetched at the time after I first made it on BigSoccer) about 4 years ago.

    My proposal involves "legacy" teams that could experience Pro/Rel between a USSF MLS Premier D1 and a D2 regular MLS but no further as long as they field a competitive MLS2 team. USL would occupy D3 and D4 with their Championship and League One and Pro/rel between them with NPSL Pro as D5 (I'll believe NISA when I see it).

    Problem is, would any of this address the closed-shop imposed gaps between MLS and USL and NISA and NPSL Pro and the alphabet soup of summer amateur leagues we have?

    More details on Pro/Rel involving minor league soccer to come.
     
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  18. CrazyJ628

    CrazyJ628 Member+

    Jul 16, 2007
    The center of the Earth
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    If you make claims like Kids in Messi Shirts = #ProRelForUSA then I'm going to call that out. I don't ignore on forums as a personal rule. It sort of defeats the purpose of a forum. And it's not Joe, Jeff, but keep belittling marginalizing and trolling.

    Belittle, marginalize!

    So at what point do you start telling MLS teams they're no longer D1? Do you expand to 34 then decide to cut the league to 22? Do you keep a 34-team D1? Where do the golden parachute payments come from? What TV network goes for this when LA and NY can be relegated? Who gets sued when you try to tell MLS that they have to restructure? Is this a 100+ team single entity? That flies in the face of pro/rel theory 101.

    Looking back at SuperDave's format, it's even more unworkable than just forcing pro/rel on MLS. It's a square peg/round hole situation, like most pro/rel arguments.

    You could, and granted it's not very likely, have USL continue to grow, have 20 teams break off to form a D1 and have USL as a rival D1 league with pro/rel within itself. That's literally the simplest and most likely way to do it in the US. Will it work? Probably not, but I'd be willing to be proven wrong.

    Eh. It's not that I'm bent out of shape. It's kind of like watching a train wreck about to happen. You can see all the signs of disaster but the train is rolling and no one wants to stop it. I'm going to find a safe space to watch the whole thing blow up.
     
  19. barroldinho

    barroldinho Member+

    Man Utd and LA Galaxy
    England
    Aug 13, 2007
    US/UK dual citizen in HB, CA
    Club:
    Manchester United FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    I can certainly do my part.

    I went to an Orange County SC game on Saturday BTW.

    They were awful the first half but played far better the second and came back from 2-0 down to tie.

    Inadvertently bought a ticket with the SGs. Small but dedicated. Alright atmosphere for the size of venue and attendance.
     
  20. Expansion Franchise

    Chattanooga FC
    United States
    Apr 7, 2018
    They're fans of a soccer team. What makes their performative fandom less sincere than that of a USL, MLS, team or from any other league? Why do they get the special train wreck treatment?
     
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  21. HailtotheKing

    HailtotheKing Member+

    San Antonio FC
    United States
    Dec 1, 2008
    TEXAS
    Club:
    San Antonio Scorpions FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States


    ^ That is a hell of a thread and sees FANS expressing their opinions about the whole thing there. This isn't the "usual suspects" or anything like that. It's a raw, real thread. Pretty telling one too.

    This isn't an attack and has no hidden or secondary intent.

    It isn't about your preferred terms. This isn't your forum. This is an open discussion for any and all that wish to participate. The people put in charge of making decisions on how things go made more than one attempt to "reboot" the discussion on here. While you did so in your own way, you didn't participate in the reboots in the manner in which was expressed and the other people of this forum adhered too.

    That is a common thing with you. You expect and sometimes even demand that everyone (or at least the mods) cater to you. That simply isn't how it works.

    Though, I've only come back to these boards (and even my soccer twitter handle) in the last couple of months after a LONG period away. Combing through the thread absolutely nothing changed from when I left in regards to your behavior.

    Putting people on ignore is doing that, just ignoring the issues. I've even attempted true and honest discourse with you a couple weeks ago: https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/th...cer-in-the-usa.2029961/page-775#post-37615682 ... but you just ignored it and proceeded to name drop me a few times in tired, labored old finger pointing.


    Myself and others don't ignore conversation, discussion, and input (both good and bad). That's our choice and not yours. Though, you've not exactly ignored myself and others. You've simply quit engaging here and popped off on Twitter. Yes, myself and others have seen it on multiple occasions. You say this here to try and put yourself in a certain light while you are actually just popping off to your pro/rel friends on Twitter. You do the same ON twitter too. Block but still pop off.

    So no, you don't get to cry foul on "belittle, ridicule, and marginalize" when you do the exact same thing here AND in your efforts to "ignore" those you don't like.

    Also, YOU have been doing it for YEARS: https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/when-will-the-mls-be-top-4.1983851/page-3#post-27578956

    https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/when-will-the-mls-be-top-4.1983851/page-3#post-27579924

    Or posts like this gem and verbiage: https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/a-4-tier-pro-rel-pyramid-by-2024.1943404/page-4#post-25655698

    Or snarky belittling, ridiculing, marginalizing on your own personal OK issues here: https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/id...superthread-iii.1844597/page-23#post-26937681


    ALL of those are before the "pro/rel wars" broke out on these boards between any of us and yourself. These show YOU and YOUR posting tones, language, etc.

    OH, and as some proof that I've not ALWAYS been a certain way towards you

    Here's ME repping SYoshonis eating crow when you actually brought facts and backing out: https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/id...superthread-iii.1844597/page-23#post-26940597
    ^ actually that thread SHOWS that YOU USED to be able to actually discuss as well as do some give and take. You ridiculed and insulted people but ALSO discussed, engaged, and posted with more than just your opinion/wants.

    But let's FFWD to our first engagement: https://www.bigsoccer.com/threads/mls-2013-tv-ratings.1980451/page-26#post-27615085 ... I called you out for what I'd observed from you recently with posting a whole bunch of "other" in your responses (which you still do today). You had just called out engaging in "juvenile, snarky insults" by being juvenile and snarkily insulting and then giving Tulsa history. IN LITERALLY TWO POSTS you'd passed me off with "Once again, typical bigsoccer elitist groupthink"

    ... and here we are

    I don't consider you an idiot either. I'm telling you right now I don't have ANYONE on ignore and won't put ANYONE ignore. This is an open discussion on a vehemently attacked and defended stance on American soccer. I'm a fan of American soccer and in an indirect way have a direct stake in it. I'm a member of these boards. I'm going to take place in pro/rel discussions and I'm going to comment on ANYONE's post I feel the need to.

    That said, I've already started (again) an attempt at true and honest discourse with you that (again) is being ignored.

    You were just talking about how people "belittle, ridicule, and marginalize" ... and here you are.

    I don't see any scenario where p/r would be implemented and MLS2 teams aren't well down the ladder. Also, there were only 3 such teams (few hundred fans) last season and there were 3 IND clubs in the bottom 10 of USL att. The early stages of this season actually holds exactly the same.
     
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  22. DanGerman

    DanGerman Member+

    Aug 28, 2014
    New York City
    Club:
    New York City FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Are they really turning pro though? Because "NPSL Pro" isn't sanctioned by the USSF there's nothing stopping them from continuing the practice of playing amateurs. Does the founders cup mandate pro players? I know that the Cosmos and Miami will have them but that's par for the course for those teams.
     
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  23. DanGerman

    DanGerman Member+

    Aug 28, 2014
    New York City
    Club:
    New York City FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    #19573 DanGerman, Mar 27, 2019
    Last edited: Mar 27, 2019
    If we're talking about DCFC, then I think the issue is they're profiting on the backs of amateur players and their fans tell everyone how authentic and awesome they are. It's grating to hear and yes I also feel there's a euro cosplay aspect to their fandom that turns a blind eye to the team on the field and is more concerned with how their SG's are perceived . I'm interested in their "pro" season if they truly are doing it then their overhead is going to get WAY higher and I hope they're ready.
     
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  24. An Unpaved Road

    An Unpaved Road Member+

    Mar 22, 2006
    Club:
    --other--
    Performative fandom is fine (if a bit cheesy in my opinion), but the "******** MLS" sentiment as a big driver of certain NPSL fans is a turnoff for me. I can't help but get the feeling for a lot of them it's about the punkish crowd atmosphere as much as it is watching and appreciating the sport of soccer, hence their denigration of MLS Cup (and 70,000 who showed up for it) by calling it a "scrimmage." Thanks, but I'm not going to abandon the league that actually gave me soccer at a time when the sport might as well have been dead here just because someone else has smoke and bandanas.
     
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  25. CrazyJ628

    CrazyJ628 Member+

    Jul 16, 2007
    The center of the Earth
    Club:
    Real Salt Lake
    This sums up my feelings nicely. It's not about the game itself, one only has to look at DCFC's social accounts or their "supporters" accounts to see that. It's more about smoke bombs and the "atmosphere" and with their supporters it's also about trolling MLS clubs' fans about how they're "plastic, etc.". 99% of what they believe about USSF and MLS is absolutely false as well.

    My final straw with DCFC came last year when they played FC Cincinnati in the USOC. The month leading up to the game was a constant stream of DCFC try-hards showing pictures of themselves at Nippert stadium giving the FCC logo the finger and slapping DCFC stickers on FCC banners in the stadium. The biggest thing was when FCC actually offered more seats for away fans than the minimum required and DCFC fans had the audacity to complain that they weren't getting seats and that FCC was "afraid" of the DCFC fans coming to the game and showing up FCC fans. I lump them in with the Cosmos and Miami FC as an overall detriment to the game here and I look forward to Founders Cup and NPSL Pro crashing and burning.
     
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