Ottawa (NASL) to USL? UPDATE: Tampa Bay Rowdies too?
- Thread starter sbrylski
- Start date
I honestly don't see how NASL can exist in 2017. If rumors are true, the best case scenario is having 8 teams in the league next year. Eight teams that could not be farther apart geographically. How can Edmonton, that only averages around 2k in attendance, possibly afford to fly back and fourth to Puerto Rico?
I think they've already come out with a schedule format of a 16 game season for both Spring & Fall. So 9 teams in the league and no more Home -or- Away Spring scheduling.
i actually read that the Strikers found a new owner and will help pay off the debt. i didnt know about armada situation.
also well know who else jumps ship in about 15 mins....they said second announcement at 3PM
Another one bites the dust. Ottawa to USL.
http://www.ottawafuryfc.com/news/2016/10/25/ottawa-fury-fc-to-join-the-usl-for-2017-season
http://www.ottawafuryfc.com/news/2016/10/25/ottawa-fury-fc-to-join-the-usl-for-2017-season
You have to think that USSF is speaking to everyone and trying to get things sorted out so 2017 is not a complete mess.
alot of pro/rel people on twitter/reddit say "where is the USSF ?" Why are they not saving the NASL ?
i mean dont they want an "open system"? the NASL is open and because of their not so great leadership its failing...so they are getting what they want...the better managed teams will survive ( by going to USL it seems) and the crappy ones wont
the USSF could do the whole "USSF Div 2" again making the winner of NASL play the winner of USLPRO ( just USL now). but leagues have to be able to survive on their own not depend fully on the USSF.
i also read USSF has did not make a decision on their division 2 status but there is still time for next years season.
Last edited:
I much as I wish it were otherwise, soccer is not yet popular enough in this country to have one large system, without salary constraints, in a pro/rel free for all. One would think the demise of the least controlled of the top 3 leagues would be enough to demonstrate that.
If it makes you feel better, most American sports aren't. Even baseball instituted a luxury tax to calm spending. All other major sports have caps. Maybe if our soccer league started in 1950 it would have been possible.
true at least not yet in the pro levels....i do think that at the amateur level ( anything below USL) they can have regional amateur leagues and have pro/rel within the regions. and then you can see which teams have potential to enter the pro game.
It never will be. With our country's geography (low density, spread out) it would take hundreds of independent professional soccer teams to run affordable lower division soccer. You can't have D3/D4 teams needing to fly multiple times a year. Our D2 leagues can barely afford it.
Fact is, lower levels don't work in American sports. The only sport that has extensive lower levels is baseball, and they're affiliated and subsidized by MLS teams. Which is exactly what the MLS-USL relationship is trending towards and everyone hates on.
I think it will be tough to even run a D3 league at all. Those teams won't earn enough revenue to pay professional wages AND travel, so the D3 league will need like 100 teams alone, or can only exist in major population centers like California or the Eastern Seaboard.
Mostly likely, we end up with a 32 team MLS, each with an affiliate in D2, plus a couple independent D2 teams. D2 then split into 3-4 regions of 12-16 teams, to make travel cost efficient. Below that, PDL/NPSL level semi-pro and development stuff.
Lower levels basically work if they are organized regionally. This is true of minor league baseball, lower levels in European soccer, and to a certain extent, college sports.
Yeah, agreed. What you have to do is create your typical league pyramid, not what is essentially a league tower as you have in the US at present. At the top you have two or three national leagues, which probably still have conferences in a US system. Under that you have somewhere between maybe two and perhaps more like four regional leagues, then each of them keeps subdividing in two at each level below until you get state level or smaller divisions which are essentially entirely amateur and self-funding, at a level where no team needs drive for more than 3-4 hours in a coach to reach their next match. You can then insert promotion & relegation into that system as fits, the key being that the extension of travel becomes affordable if each league is only so much bigger than the ones directly below it.
MLS - Independent in that there is no pro/rel.
USL - National league split into four regions (divisions). Each region sends its top team to playoffs and relegates its bottom team.
4 US Regional Leagues - Follow the same pattern. Split into four geographic divisions. Team that wins playoffs is promoted. Bottom of each division gets relegated.
And so on.
MLS uses USL as D-League and subsidizes travel costs, particularly for regions with geography too widespread - probably primarily the 2 western divisions.
I could get behind a system like that.
Forgive my non-US viewings here, but please explain to me (and just because I'm genuinely interested, not a backhanded response): why is it that at each regional level they need geographic regions with a championship game at the end? If you're reducing each level to a smaller area so the travel costs are smaller why not have each "conference" just be an independent league? If it's the need for a play-off series at the end for the excitement, you can have that within the league itself rather than needing to play the champion of another conference. Or is it just about the innate "thing" Americans have for conferences?
It just seems to me that if you're going to subdivide so that at some level, whether it be D2, D3, D4, so that you don't have one single entity organising all of the different leagues in a tier, it would be far easier for each independent league to only organise one "conference" rather than, at every single tier, a league always having four conferences. It makes things simpler, and it avoids risks such as the league constantly feeling the need to rebalance because one of its conferences is too strong, or too weak, or is generally not running like the other ones are - ultimately those differences are going to appear anyway as soon as a tier is not all organised by one body, so why not just let the conferences be independent?
For the record, I can get behind the idea of conferences at the highest levels, where it's needed to reduce the travel costs at least to a degree (although the practice will always be to some extent alien to me, and I'll never be persuaded it's the optimal format for a league). But once you get down to a level where the teams are able to afford to travel to all of the stadia within the league, why have further conferences?
Just for comparison, especially for those not from the US, here's a map of minor league baseball. You can click the individual checkboxes for the various leagues to see the area they have to cover for travel purposes. The leagues are in several levels. Major League Baseball is what everyone thinks of when they say "baseball." There's also AAA, AA, A, and the rookie leagues. Most teams are affiliated with MLB teams but that's not set in stone as teams can change affiliation and even which league they're in (not through pro/rel but rather as a business thing).
Note that for size comparison, especially when considering team travel, England is roughly the same size as the state of Nevada (in the west if you're looking for it). Here's the map page:
http://www.milb.com/milb/tickets/
Note that for size comparison, especially when considering team travel, England is roughly the same size as the state of Nevada (in the west if you're looking for it). Here's the map page:
http://www.milb.com/milb/tickets/
I'm going to say, "blame baseball."
In the 1800s they started with two competing leagues (to oversimplify the history of things a little as we ended up with two but there were many others). They started playing a championship series at some point which for some reason eventually was called the "World" Series. So in a sense we've always had championship series here. Eventually the leagues merged into one entity but they still kept them separate and still had the World Series. In 1969 they split each league into two conferences each, east and west, and had playoffs between the conference winners to determine the league champion who then went on to play the other league's champion in the World Series. From there we've descended into the current somewhat crazy playoff system (oops, editorial content there) and that's where we are today.
That's why we do it this way in soccer, basically because that's simply the way we do it in all of our sports.
