In my region of the US, there was an MLS team 2.5 hours away from me. Thats a little too far to go each weekend. Now there are USL clubs that are closer. A bigger web or pyramid aids the growth of soccer immeasurably, and to have it be open would be nice from my perspective
@@oyaml1211 It's the fake fan syndrome. It's like McDonald's making it's menu healthy to appease it's critics, but then they still don't want to eat at McDonald's and then in the mean time McDonald's doesn't taste as good as before so it looses it's actual customers. Some people just enjoy being critical more than they enjoy the thing they are critical of.
I never watched USL and this year our city has a team and I bought season tickets. Now I’m engrossed in USL. Doesn’t matter to me that it’s division 3 it’s still fun to watch. I think USL is smart selling the tribal aspect of it. Smaller markets being able to field teams and say this is ours. I’m originally from Miami and it’s fun watching inter Miami but I have more interest following my division 3 team 😄. It’s strange 🤷🏻♂️
USL is more like division 2. In my opinion. MLS 2 is not any better and the USL fanbase and league is growing. MLS will always be like the G-league of MLS.
@@mackdeen7021 USL has multiple divisions. USL Championship is in D2, but USL league 1 is in D3 (they also have a League 2 that's D4), so he may be rooting for one of those League 1 clubs
Please everyone. This isnt about MLS. We need USL to do it. We need USL to challenge MLS to force them to negotiate and bring USSF back in to facilitate the open system
they don't even need to open the System, they could do what League of Ireland and J.League do, and just have Promotion/Relegation with in the league (LOI has 20 teams in the League system, they cut it i to two tiers with 10 teams each and Pro/Rel between the tiers. J.League has 60 teams in the League and has 3 tiers with 20 teams each and Pro/Rel between the 3 divisions)
The fact is that unless an open system can prove to be more lucrative than the current system, MLS will never want pro/rel. Considering that soccer is the biggest sport in the world, yet 4 of the top 5 revenue sports leagues are NFL, MLB, NBA, & NHL. It doesn't look like any open system in the world can compete with the America model, so it will never happen. Also, pro/rel is not necessary at all to grow the sport.
@stevenygabbyperez695 MLS is becoming arrogant and attempting to crush competition. Backing out of the Open Cup, building their own 2nd tier, they don't want competition which is why we should turn to USL and support a true league
It won't happen, for the exact same reason no one has ever made a successful product to compete with the NFL despite multiple attempts in my lifetime. Americans are not interested. Every American sport has gravitated to a few big teams competing in the major metropolitan centers with a fan base that is distributed geographically. Even in baseball, baseball fans tend to support the major league team over their own local farm team. They may enjoy cheap tickets and an afternoon at the local farm team, but they spend the big money on the merchandise for the big league team and that's what they watch on TV. USL isn't going to compete with MLS so much as at best form a second tier of fandom. Currently they are enjoying the fantasy that one day their team will be a major league team, but that's increasingly obviously never going to happen. What USL should have been going for was the MLB style farm system, but instead they bought into the idea that a European style pro/rel system would allow them to franchise up without paying the money. It's never going to happen.
USL has bills to pay too. They’re not gonna introduce pro/rel (an objectively inferior business model) unless they’re desperate and fear they’ll collapse if they don’t - in which case they’ll already be cooked
@@celebrim1I do not think it should nor do I think a promotion/relegation system is compatible on a number of fronts. However, the NFL has had only one successful competitor and is nearly half of today's NFL, namely the AFL.
@@sheldoninst Hense I said in my lifetime. USFL and XML attempted that and folded. AFL shows there is a maximum number of teams that can make it within the American sporting system. You need a certain size market to support sports at the quality and showmanship that Americans expect of a pro league. And with multiple major pro sports in the country, we're already at or near market saturation.
@celebrim1 AFL grew, challenged NFL and they merged, so you're oblivious to the history of that football. Also incorrect is your comment about market saturation. You do know that more Spanish speakers watch MLS than English speakers, right? The TV audience of old white guys is saturated, true. Hispanics markets are not. But you'd need to count the browns, which you have not.
In San Diego, we tried to get a MLS team & failed. Ended up getting a USL team, SD Loyal. They were a great franchise. Really committed to the community. Then MLS comes back in and gives SD a MLS team, which shoves Loyal out even though the fans were behind Loyal. Leaves a bad taste to the fans and community. MLS you have to earn our respect.
Don't be silly. San Diego landed the 30th team, you made it in, rejoice! And from the looks of it, you have a great ownership group. Very invested in player/youth development and strong ties to the community. SD Loyal was created out of nothing like 3 years ago, it's a blip. There've been lots of teams that have come an gone, just not the right team, not the right time, etc.
If you want someone to represent the other side, which is not anti-pro/rel, but a position based on reality, I will happily join you for the discussion.
Everything in the US Sports world goes through the owners and the majority of MLS owners will not go for this. They did not get into this investment for the love of the game. They got into it for the money and there isn’t a benefit for MLS owners to open themselves up to a fraction of the revenue. I’d like it see pro/rel, but I just don’t see it happening!
@SheaAlevy Last I checked USSF controls the game in this country. There are many different ways to create a soccer pyramid, pro/rel making the most sense. USSF has had over 100 years to create ANY sort of pyramid, and has failed to do so. USSF has the authority to create a soccer pyramid and announce that in 20 years the closed MLS will become an open system, integrated with USL and the others. It just needs to be logical and fair. I don't care how many billionaires don't like it.
@@r2dad282 Then MLS would split from USSF & there wouldn't be a damn thing they could do about it. This is exactly what is happening with US Open Cup right now. Even the "threat" of pulling MLS' Top Division status was basically laughed off because MLS knows that there is little that USSF can realistically do to them w/o destroying all the gains made in this country over the past 30 years.
Sounds like bad management has failed the fan base. Time to sell to a local investor who can do things better. If I were a supporter 45 cents sounds like a bargain. If I was a fair-weathered fan, no price will entice me to attend.
But when you're bad, there's nothing to play for or to watch for. Relegation battles are some of the most exciting games there are. It brings meaning and excitement to not being last place.
@StephonLove208 In the US, teams abandon fans! It's the American way! St Louis Rams, LA Raiders, Houston Earthquakes nee SJ Earthquakes, Baltimore Colts. We don't deserve better because we accept it when billionaire sh1te down our throats. Say what you will about europeans, but if a club treated their fans this way there would be no end to the protests until the owner relented.
Tho relegation and promo would be awesome in mls, I think the team base over all needs to grow, if an mls team that brings in let’s say 15-25 thousand fans, I’m sure that team being relegation will drastically bring down the stadium assistants.
I think north american soccer needs to have pro/rel. Even look at Japan. Theyve instituted the english pro/rel system within their soccer system and guess what it works. The competition builds better teams better players. It takes time.
We need to be careful not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Financial stability is a relatively new phenomenon for professional soccer in this country. MLS is attracting owners with deep pockets precisely because it’s a closed system. David Beckham came here because the league offered him ownership. Messi came here because the league offered him a percentage of the streaming revenue. Without MLS’ ability to vet new ownership groups and require them to build soccer specific stadiums you would have sketchy ownership groups who run their clubs on the cheap and use them as their personal piggy banks. Such a thing is rampant in the lower divisions of England. Look at how many clubs have gone under, and that’s in a country with a strong soccer culture.
I would argue teams going under is precisely how it should work because poor practices should ruin your team. You can have an open system but keep policies intact to have some safety net like salary caps and shared revenue at each tier. A closed system is indeed financially better and a great crowdfunding tool but it doesn't encourage improvement of the sport if you can just buy your way into the top league. Otherwise reliable lower teams can claw their way with good strategies and the sport grows.
What are these "golden eggs" that you speak of? Chicago Fire? The Aaronsons? The league? The benefits of the current system, or the "golden eggs" are starting to cap out. The way the USA takes soccer to the next level is by having a local club in every city and town across the nation and that's not going to happen without a pyramid similar to the way that the rest of the world does it. Soccer has become a huge juggernaut in the USA and it's only growing. It's here to stay. There is no way it's going to implode again like it did as the prior league imploded for reasons that are now moot.
@@IsaacHenryinAK Could not agree with you more. MLS needs to either merge or be taken over by USL and form the top 20 teams and start pro/rel. MLS' only golden egg is for the investors of MLS and the owners. The other thing is to do away with all the streaming contracts, App[e TV, and show them n broadcast. The game will never truly grow otherwise. We all saw what happened when they tried that for the first round of the NFL playoffs. People went ballistic. But us soccer fans just seem to take it for some reason.
That’s not pro/rel my friend. MLS would have the same issue in a closed system if it removed the salary cap. Let’s at least be fair when we criticize it.
@@joshuah.6095 Aside from a few clubs owned by fans like Benefica, how do you think European soccer works anyway? Do you really think it's not billionaires that own clubs? You might want to look at who really owns clubs in Europe.
I get why you don’t currently have while the league is still growing and trying to establish itself, but should be done in the future. Relegated teams could be given parachute payments to cushion the financial blow and to help them go back up as they will lose star players and generate less revenue.
The J-League has figured this out. The 🇺🇸 and 🇨🇦 need to follow them. In 🇺🇸 there are currently 62 combined statistical areas with populations greater than 1 million. In 🇨🇦, there are six metro areas above 1 million. If you add San Juan in 🇵🇷 , that's 69 metro/combined statistical areas that are above 1 million across the US and Canada. That is more than enough for three ⚽️ divisions in a pro-rel format.
@@1972dsrai 🇯🇵 initially did not have the ⚽️ culture throughout the nation for that to work when the J-League started. It had other more popular sports. Yet now ⚽️ is one of the major sports there.
Not what others are saying. Some teams lost a significant number of match day fans and sales when the team is performing badly. It seems some fans are only there if doing well.
If MLS keeps adding more teams, a reasonable regular season schedule will not be possible at some point. You would have to break the league in half, with 20 top and 20 bottom teams. This would be a closed system with two tiers, 20 teams each (40 teams total), compared to English football's numerous divisions. A hybrid approach- not quite the pyramid, but at least an A/B division.
More than likely what would actually happen is you have the Western and Eastern conferences play two completely separate schedules and then have a playoff format to determine the best MLS team.
@@liamconverse8950 They'd probably make the same amount in terms of revenue, but the value of the teams, which the owners care about would remain higher without the risk of relegation.
The issue I take with pro/rel has been mentioned a couple times in the comment section. The rich teams stay rich while the bottom teams cycle. If you look at the amount of premier league teams that have won the league championship since 2000, there is very little deviation, a small pool of teams always win. Conversely, the NFL has had a much larger pool of teams win the league championship. Rebuilding through the draft works for them. However, I do like the bottom teams having something to play for and limiting meaningless games.
i think we should make the bottom four teams of the nfl and nba play a tournement to determine who gets the number one pick in the draft. get rid of the lotto and teams that tank arent going to be guaranteed the best pick.
@@lapthanngo5609I like that idea but I don’t think it would work because I don’t see how it would motivate players because they would be essentially be playing for a draft pick that could be used to replace one of them on the team.
Pro/rel is not one size fits all. You can have whatever rules you want with it. There's a reason spending restrictions are popping up all over Europe. It turns out the spend as much as you want has problems, but they aren't even considering to cancel pro/real
What soccer in this country needs is continued investment. The quickest way to kill soccer in this country is to convince all the investors to pull out. The quickest way to do that is to make their investments way way way riskier. Introducing pro/rel might be the only thing that can kill the tremendous growth soccer is experiencing. It would take a truly colosal failure to derail the incredible growth. And this might just be enough.
Wrexham in Wales. 2 Northamerican investors saved a storied club and are building back better, all for $2M. Those are funds that could be used to build a club in the USA but USSF/MLS hates pro/rel so small investors aren;'t here. They're in France, England, Italy, Spain, all investing time and funds to build the own little Wrexham there.
@@r2dad282 San Diego is in the US. It doesn’t exist yet and investors already invested over half a billion dollars. The scale isn’t remotely close. There is no question that investors are much much more willing to invest when their investments are protected. Sure you can catch a romantic here and there with the football manager style story but if you want the billions and billions of investment you’re gonna have to rely on it being a good investment not getting a few celebrities to take it on as a passion project.
@@r2dad282 Everton is in the Premier League. They’re a club with very decent history and they’re teetering on bankruptcy because they can’t find a decent investor at the scale they need. They have one very sketchy buyer investor and that’s it. Sure you have some romantics who want to pull a football manager in real life (those tend to disappear after 2-3 hard years in the championship - but maybe Wrexham’s celebrities will stick around) but in MLS San Diego already got more investment than most premier clubs in the last 5 years and it doesn’t exist yet.
As a personal fan of pro/rel, I 100% do NOT think it will work in the U.S... it purely comes down to the typical sports fan in the u.s... we have to grow it with the normal person, and sports fans in the US do not generally support second-teir leagues... Just look at the ufl/xfl stuff... People mY like high school or college sports, but the majority of US fans will only support a "best" league. There is also not enough club history for the loyalties to be strong enough. The guest talks about how he would be dreaming of promotion if his local team was in a lower league. That's because he's already heavily invested and a fan. New fans will NOT be that way. American sports fans only want to follow winners. That is why shitty sports teams, even at top level, have zero audiences coming in. It won't work in the U.S., as much as I'd like it to happen. It is not something the American sports fan would get behind.
Adding this now that I got to this actual question/answer in the segment. The guest keeps saying he believes in the American soccer fans. That's great, BUT there aren't enough fans out there. We have to grow the fanbase, and that won't happen with pro/rel. USL clubs have fanbase, but even at Phoenix, the USL champions currently, they only get a couple thousand or so... The fanbase just ISN'T there for it.
You make a good point with respect to Pro sports fans. But think about college fans. Fans of small schools want their college to advance from Div III to Div II to Div I. The best stories during March Madness are when a small school outside the top leagues gets to play and maybe upset a blue blood school. I think there's a reservoir of fans that would embrace little guys moving up, and cheer big guys (who've maybe become complacent) dropping down.
@@richp6366like half the country goes to college. Everyone roots for their college team because it’s their college. Most people cannot name their local minor league hockey team. There is no built in fandom. People didn’t spend the 4 best years of their life becoming who they are under the stands in your soccer stadium. There is no built in fan base. You need to earn it. And go ask your dad if he can even name the local minor league baseball team - never mind if he knows the last time they made the playoffs
@@richp6366 It's much easier to take people who are already a fan of the sport to go watch College, High School, etc. I just don't see that happening with soccer.
As a casual fan, I don't think it'll work. I think pro/rel is crazy as a concept and have A LOT of reasons not to like it. I'll mention one. Like I said, I'm a casual fan, really casual...even before Messi. I'm really interested in the season this year because I want to see how Messi/Inter Miami do in a playoff system. An American system. If there was pro/rel, I don't think I would care about any specific season in MLS/whatever. I'd remain a casual 'oh, that happened' fan but I couldn't imagine any reason to ever be interested enough to follow a whole season. I'm really looking forward to seeing who makes the playoffs this season. I wouldn't want pro/rel because it would be boring to me. Soccer isn't a religion to me. However, thinking about a future where stars like Thiago Almada/Messi/Giroud/Neymar(?)/etc get the American (NBA-like) playoff marketing...that seems interesting. I also think that would appeal to a wider audience consistently. Pro/rel would...it might be popular as a subculture thing but, like I said soccer isn't a religion to me and if I'm being asked to care about teams fighting for a Participation Award (pro/rel) or which team won the league in the top division...I live in a city with multiple professional teams, big time college teams...in other words, I have choices which are going to have exciting playoffs/championship tournaments I'm used to. I'm not going to care about who was promoted, relegated or who won the top league. However, like I said, I am really looking to forward following this season. I'm hoping LA Galaxy/Inter Miami meet in the MLS Cup final. As a casual observer I would want to see how they handle Riqui Puig vs Messi. That's the kind of story lines I'm used to and would be interested in seeing on a yearly basis. I'm not trying to follow story arcs that happen over decades. The closed systems of the NFL and NBA are pushing into Europe. If the same marketing/etc was put behind MLS, I think the MLS playoffs would be as popular or more than Champions League. Why wouldn't 'world class' soccer players want to live/play in the US if they're going to have machines like the NBA/NFL turning them into the next Jordan, Curry, James, Mahomes or Brady? That would also, in my opinion, solve the problem of the low participation. If MLS was just like the NBA/NFL/MLB and kids saw there was a league to strive for...more kids will participate from a younger age. I think the guy is right. Small communities/etc might like their teams and they would be able to participate in an open pyramid but I think that would also make it forever seen as a joke by the greater American public...until demographics change.
"The closed systems of the NFL and NBA are pushing into Europe." which leagues are we talking about here? You could also have a playoff system with the promotion/relegation system, both the Belgian and Scottish league uses it.
@@88balloonsonthewall70 What I meant by that is that both of them are growing in popularity in Europe. Pro-rel makes no sense to me. It's a mental trick/Participation Award. It's a trick to make teams/fans think there's something other than championships to fight for. I don't follow sports to feel bad. They're entertainment not a religion. Each season I want the hope, even if it's baseless, that my team will win a championship. That can't happen if they're not even in the league. What would probably be worse is to be one of those teams, using the PL as an example, perpetually stuck between 7-15 (it's 18 teams right?) who EVERY year have NOTHING to hope for - not good enough to win a championship and not bad enough to get relegated. I take that back, what would be the absolute worse is to be a fan of a team in a lower division living in a delusional state while waiting for a miracle, because that's what it'll take, a miracle, to reach the top flight and win a championship in a pro-rel system.
@@sonpacho I was just saying you can have play offs and still have promotion / relegation. I think you are a little bit delusional because you have no idea why people follow teams in the lower leagues or the joys what just a promotion brings to fans or even avoiding relegation. There are continental competition places to fight for too that brings a lot of excitement to fans. You are also very stuck on the Top Leagues and forgets that in other Leagues it isnt just one team that can win their top division. Also in a closed league you get a participation award every season because it doesnt matter how bad you do, youd be there next season too.
@@88balloonsonthewall70 I understood your point about pro-rel in a system with Playoffs. I just don't think pro-rel makes any sense. Maybe in the 19th century but not now. Maybe. However, based on what you said about finding "joy" in "just a promotion," sounds like someone who's played a mental trick on themselves to value something other than winning championships to me. We can agree to disagree. The "top leagues," no parity, and the "other" leagues, with parity, you're talking about are all in the same pyramid. In my opinion, the fact you're using the lower leagues as an example proves my point. Instead of facing the reality the system is broken, you (not you personally) play mental tricks and act as if the big clubs in top leagues don't exist and all the "real" competitions are in the lower leagues, between teams fighting against relegation and/or between teams fighting for spots in 2nd/3rd tier continental competitions. Narratives are created to give all of this emotional/etc value to EVERYTHING except winning a championship because the pro-rel system makes it impossible for most clubs to even conceive of winning one. That's the best things for fans! It's entertainment, not a religion. Fans can have some hope/optimism for next season right before being disappointed again...and then do it all over again the year after that. I'm not a sadist or a masochist. I don't want to see people suffer financially and emotionally just because a stupid team had a bad season - it's just a game not a religion. That's probably why there's so much violence in the sport. So many people emotionally/financially/legally/etc tied to the fortunes of a club they overreact. It's not that serious. Like I said, it makes no sense on any level to me.
I have never understood the argument for a pro/rel system. In general, the only justification people suggest is that this is the way it's done in other countries. The guest offered up some dream world scenario where everyone in the country is engaged to the point where they will invest/buy a local club in hopes that they will one day reach the top. It's a nice dream, but he offers no evidence to suggest that it would take off in the US. In fact, we have ample evidence that sports in this country don't need that in order to take off. Fans don't need their teams to be from their local community to support them. More importantly, fans need to be able to support a team that has a chance to win. Pro/rel pyramids do not promote league parity. That will never fly in the US.
That's the other thing I feel like people who support pro/rel don't appreciate. The farthest any team in the EFL National League, a fifth tier league, has to travel is 5 hours and 21 minutes. The travel budgets for any US minor league Soccer team would be insane. Especially across the Western half of the US where people just aren't concentrated together. You'd have teams like Fargo having to travel to Omaha just to play a "close" rival. Even derbies in the MLS sense are KC and St. Louis or Orlando and Miami which are still 3 hour drives.
@@sheldoninst brazil has promotion and relegation. Brazil is geographically larger than the lower 48 states. Russia is bigger than the US and has promotion and relegation. After the first two/three tiers you just break up the tiers regionally. I dont think its that big of an obstacle
Love the idea of Pro/Rel here...but is it really working over there? clubs are dying in the lower levels in England and elsewhere in Europe...and I believe thats one of the reasons a Euro Super League hasnt been killed completely...Those big clubs dont want to be saddled with having to deal with that kind of stability problems if something goes completely crazy and they get relegated...
Ya when Tac said "the club goes bankrupt who cares?" everyone should care we are very young and fragile as a soccer country. Clubs going bankrupt would be awful for what ever location they are in and the whole point of the MLS structure is to prevent that
It's not. England's football pyramid is absolutely crumbling as more and more local fans become primarily fans of the big televised clubs that are playing meaningful soccer. Pro/rel is an accidental artifact of soccer's semi-pro recreational roots. It comes from a time when there was no mass media, long distance travel was difficult and expensive and recreational soccer teams were representational of your community in much the same way that high school or college teams are now. With so many different teams, they needed some sort of fair structure to determine who played who every year. But at the time, even as late as the 1960s, teams competing in the third division of soccer had revenues, fan bases, and salaries that were like a 1/3rd of the teams competing at the highest level. Moving up or down didn't represent any serious financial problem because 90% of the revenue of the team was from ticket sales, and even the size of your stadium didn't matter much because everyone was selling just admittance to the grounds and crowding in more people than they had seats. Under those circumstances, pro/rel makes a ton of sense and it does in fact engage everyone in the country. But we are like 50 years past that and while everyone loves pro/rel in theory because of tradition and its what they are familiar with, the practice is getting more and more broken. Clubs don't play local players anymore. Clubs don't make most of their revenue from ticket sales anymore. And the competition is mostly dead. Teams at the top of the league have salaries and revenues 30 times that of teams at the bottom of the same league. They have salaries and revenues like 1000 times that of times a couple of tiers below them. There is no longer even the possibility of real competition. The whole thing now works like a Ponzi scheme for the benefit of a few wealthy clubs, and the whole thing increasing depends on a steady stream of outside investors more interested in playing football manager for real than actually making their money back. Team like Leichester didn't win because of some magical Cinderella story, but because a wealthy group of investors bought a team that went bankrupt as a personal plaything and dumped money on it. It's a fun story, but the whole thing is financially unstable. Eventually the English football pyramid is going to run out of foreigners who view the whole thing as a very expensive game for billionaires, and those billionaires are going to start pouring their money into more financially stable local domestic systems. The Saudi's have already made this switch. The Americans are making this switch. The Asian investors will soon do the same. And at that point, the lunatic dumbest sporting leagues in the world will collapse. I mean I love the EFL championship, but its finances are looney tunes.
@@celebrim1 Theres zero proof of that in the attendance figures because you just made it up. England has teams that are not even pro pulling in crowds in their thousands
@@ian_r125 I didn't make anything up. But what really confuses me is how you think "England has teams that are not even pro pulling in crowds in their thousands" refutes me. Those teams are on the same football pyramid as Manchester City, but fat lot of good it does them. Do you think teams that pull in crowds in the hundreds primarily have the loyalty of their community, or do you think maybe in their community, for most fans, their favorite players play for bigger teams? Do you really think Hemel Hempstead Town F.C. is actually capable of being competitive in any meaningful way, or that local kids don't wear shirts for Chelsea and Arsenal and the like?
I think there's only 2 paths for this to ever happen. 1) Like Chris said, USL implements it and it becomes widely popular to the point where MLS's prestige/popularity/value is hurt by it or 2) Find a way to sell the idea to MLS owners by creating a pro/rel plan that is financially beneficial to those MLS owners in the short and long term. MLS franchises are a business/investment first and foremost to all the owners. Whether it should be that way or not does NOT matter, that's just the reality of the situation. Trying to argue for pro/rel because it is what is best for soccer in the US (while true) isn't going to change anything. In order to have a true open pyramid in the US, MLS would have to be on board. And the only way to get them on board is to impact (or create an impact) them financially.
Look at these comments man… I really hope 2026 changes some of these people with closed off minds to what is leaps and bounds a more competitive and expansive system.
@@kalmenbarkin5708there's a ton of ways to set it up. Pro/rel is a core value. Every serious soccer nation employs it differently. Some far more efficiently and better than others. But it unequivocally is needed.
Ah yes Man City playing in 10 out of the last 12 english championships is so competitive. Bayern Munich winning 11 straight German championships is so competitive. The last spanish championship to not feature either Barcelona or Real Madrid was in 2002 (22 years ago). Out of those 22 championships, 14 of them have been Barcelona vs Real Madrid. Such a competitive and expansive system they have there lmao.
The problem I have with the Pro/Rel model is where it encourages our competition. For me I want every team to have a realistic shot at winning because you then have to establish prizes for winning the league and being promoted. For example I want my league to look like the NFL or NBA where you have historically great franchises because they develop and manage well. But there are teams like the nuggets, kings and Timberwolves who can go toe to toe with them every year. I don't want my professional league to only be won by three or four teams because they can outspend everyone else like in a lot of the European leagues. You can pretty much bet on the teams that are gonna finish top four in most of the Big five leagues in Europe and you will very rarely be wrong over a ten year span. But in the NFL and NBA there are competitive cycles that even historic teams suffer through. It emphasizes management, internal development and resource allocation that I don't see in Europe. The best team in the Netherlands prides itself on selling its best players to other teams in Europe. Maybe it's just me but that's not what I want from my Sports.
@@belluh-1huey102 The reason they have balance is because owners can be assured that their team will be bringing in regular revenue every year for the next ten years plus. Because of this, owners are free to invest funds and can make long term plans to develop a more competitive team. This gives everyone in the league the chance to compete and win the title. In pro/rel leagues, on the other hand, you are never assured of sustained revenue unless you are one of the few teams who have survived long enough to guarantee they'll never be relegated. This is why nearly every team that gets promoted gets relegated within a couple years. No owner would be willing to risk a half a billion dollars on a team that is most likely getting relegated and losing the majority of its future revenue within a couple years. That's just a really bad investment. Only the teams who are guaranteed to not get relegated have a shot at the title. They have, in essence, created monopolies. Pro/rel leagues discourage owner investment into their team. That's not good for competition.
I strongly agree with you, because in Europe and South America soccer is a depressing sport for any fans that aren't lined up with the same old 2-3 teams that always win.
@@mdfrenchy While i do agree with you that the top teams have a monopoly like hold on the major titles, i dont agree with the sentiment that that it discourages investments in the team for the rest of the teams. All teams have to (and most do) invest in their team to keep up with the rest of the league. If they dont invest they will eventually get relegated and thats enough incentive to invest. It also have allowed for major investments in smaller teams, Manchester City, Chelsea, Newcastle are good examples of major investments in (what used to be) smaller teams due to possibilities a competative league offers. Atletico Madrid is another good example of a team that has established itself as a top side due to its own investments. You also have teams like Brighton who has established itself as a Premier League team due to its investments into their team, while a long term Premier League team like Sunderland got relegated due to its poor management. If the league was closed a team like Brighton wouldnt be up, and a team like Sunderland would still be in the Premier League despite not being competative. You can also make the argument that closed leagues discourages investments because they dont need to be competative to stay in the league, and with the draft system they could even be rewarded for being bad.
This would be good for the draft, ultimately but terrible in the eyes of league programs if they get washed by a college team. lol. That's mainly why MLS pulled out of the Open Cup, if not also for monetary reasons.
@r2dad282 The NCAA will never let it happen because they insist on the Amaturism/student-athlete model. To compete in US open Cup, they would have to ditch that.
The mathematical maximum of MLS is 60 teams (48 matches played by every team in a regular season), which covers most 1+ million CSA in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico. And promoting a smaller market to MLS would become possible only in Hoffenheim's case - when some mad fan would pump money into a 36 thousand metro area club, which even is impossible in the US, because of the salary cup. For example - the smallest agglomeration in the EPL this year is Ipswich - which is 34th in the UK (haven't found a separate table for England). 34th agglomeration in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico combined is Kansas City, and Wizzards are already in the MLS. Another huge problem is entry agreements with clubs. Because in exchange for entry fees, they were guaranteed a place in the US-Canada top flight. So MLS or USSF should give the entry fees back, which would cost billions of dollars, or they would face a felon accusation. I'm not very good at the states law, but in Ukraine, it's "illegal gaining" - quite a similar felony to fraud. So promotion and relegation are possible only in USL, the Canadian pyramid below MLS, and Puerto Rico.
Here's a thought-- how's about keeping MLS "closed," but weight the schedule such that top teams play top teams and lower teams play lower teams more often. "Top" and "lower" determined by their performance the previous season, i.e., whether they made the playoffs or not.
pro/rel. is absolutely what this country needs to truly compete on the world stage in terms of both the league and national team. I dont see anything happening short term but im optimistic that eventually USL or another league will become popular enough that it sparks change
Pro/rel has nothing to do with competing on the world stage. If you want our league to become one of the best in the world then advocate for MLS to drop their nonsensical roster rules, TAM/GAM crap & put a revenue based salary cap in place. We need more money being spent on better (& younger) players not multiple divisions of poorly supported teams in markets that can't sustain a professional sport.
We all want to see Pro/Rel in US soccer. There are issues that people don't think about. One of them is how are you going to make MLS add Pro/Rel if USL hasn't added Pro/Rel either? USL just announced a new USL team Brooklyn FC for 2025 with an entry fee of $20 million. In what world would an owner pay 20 million for them to add Pro/Rel one year later? USSF isn't going to force MLS to add Pro/Rel if an MLS owner is paying $50 million for the new National Training Center. It's a if you scratch my back I'll scratch yours type of deal. Another issue is that you will be 100% off all of the movement that MLS teams are starting to kill.
Generally *AGAINST* promotion/relegation for these reasons (which are never discussed): -Polarization and eventual creation of a sclerotic caste system only rewarding too few teams. Relegated teams suffer disproportionately, creating an eventual and unbreakable “top tier” teams, one that has endured since the international soccer leagues were founded over a century ago. Specifically, every single league in the world is utterly dominated by no more than 2 teams, with the EPL shifting between only 2 teams among 4 teams. Boring and depressing! Not only that, top tier teams will eventually monopolize the services of the top players, monopolizing wins and championships, and also give credit to coaches who may or may not have the best tactics. Case in point: The 1950s Boston Celtics. Who knows if Auberbach was a decent coach? He had a monopoly of the best players and couldn't lose. Same for many soccer coaches of the world's top teams. -Promotion/relegation is based on realities of the past with a plethora of almost exclusively semi-pro teams, and now obsolete. Before there was TV and mass marketing, there used to be dozens of local semi pro teams that could easily rely on only ticket sales, which then needed to be separated by some form of merit using promotion/relegation. Today hardly any team relies on ticket sales but rather mass TV and monumental multimillion dollar (sometimes billions) sponsorships. Plus the wages across the levels was NOT all that different, however today the gap is huge between top tier teams and even mid level teams. -Playoffs are a form of limited promotion/relegation. Playoffs already fulfill the function of promotion, as missing the playoffs is a form a seasonal relegation as those teams that miss the playoffs suffer financially, but it doesn’t nearly bankrupt them. -American uniqueness, why imitate Europe and South America? Also incompatible with franchise system. Makes no sense, especially with the financial arrangements between leagues and club franchise owners, salary caps, etc. Just because the Europeans do it and have done it for over a century, doesn’t make it interesting. Plus not only are there hundreds of teams in each european country, their countries are very tribal and no bigger than our states, so regional support is absolutely crucial. With the USA being continent and it's population known for moving around between states fairy easily, it would be difficult for a local team to nearly monopolize local support. -Europe and South America only have soccer as a main sport, and thus there are hundreds of clubs that play professionally. In the USA, there just aren’t that many teams with the level of financial backing to support hundreds of teams that would require splitting up by regions and levels. Plus there’s too many other sports in the USA to share the sporting spotlight. -Any team can eventually win; too depressing for the permanent mid and lower level teams. I love that any team in the franchise based leagues can win and win on any given day, and also build a championship team within a few short seasons. -Economics, and social competitiveness among players and teams. Since the USA s a rich continental sized country, players do NOT necessarily view a sport as their ticket out of poverty and climb socially. There are many foreign coaches that indicate the lack of urgency on behalf of American players because they already have many career options and nor is soccer (or any sport for that matter) a religion to players and fans, so until the USA becomes poor and only plays one sport (which may eventually happen with low first world birth rates countered with exploding third world birthrates), I doubt the introduction of a promotion/relegation system would finally make it "a competitive religious experience." Only advantage of promotion/relegation: -incentive for teams to perform when in a relegation battle. Counter: there’s already an incentive with a playoff system without the long term financial damage of a full on relegation. My qualifications for opining? Lived and played in argentinean youth leagues for 6 years, used to go along with the notion of promotion/relegation but after much study and as a fan of many different sports, come to dislike promotion/relegation as a form of sclerotic classism and think arguments posed by Kessel and others is completely baseless.
Disagree. Caste system: tell Leister about how they can't win the league. TV/Mass marketing: streaming matches can be quite inexpensive when it needs to be. But the major networks want big/fancy. Playoffs are dumb, convincing everyone that if you're 7th best in the conference you haven't totally failed. Franchise system is socialized sports, I don't care to support billionaires running a monopoly, Pro/rel is capitalism but I guess that is passe now in the USA.
@@r2dad282 Mexico and Brazil (2 soccer-mad countries) use playoffs to determine the league champion... so it can't be that "dumb". American sports fans generally want a sports league to deliver on some form of "parity" where no single team holds a very obvious advantage over others... this keeps fans guessing as to what the outcome will be. The playoff format is the only one that holds the greatest number of fans "interested" in following the season for the longest time... nothing is more uneventful or unexciting for an American sports fan than knowing that not even halfway through a season, the majority of teams are basically out of contention for the title. There's a reason why all the top US pro sports leagues all evolved into a form of franchise system over time (after having been run in a very "traditional" independent club type way)... it's really the only one that encourages further investment and creates the product most of the sports-going public wants to see.
I'd add a couple of more points to this already very good list... Specifically under a franchise system, the assumption is there that the "top" league already contains all the top-league quality players (or at least, contains the highest "concentration" of such quality players)... therefore, by what logical reasoning would a team *not* already in the top league deserve any kind of chance to be there? Whatever team finishes first in a lower tier league is *still* just a lower tier team... I compare this to being a middleweight boxing champion - winning the middleweight title doesn't magically turn that boxer into a heavyweight-caliber boxer no matter how much he dominates his weight class. So this concept of the best team of a lower tier league somehow now "deserving" to be in the top league just because the previous top league team had a bad year really doesn't make much sense in a franchise system. But of course, such a system makes *perfect* sense in a traditional "club" system... given that every club is its own individual, self-sustaining entity with relatively little restrictions in team building and acquiring (no salary caps, etc.) and placings are determined by field results. MLS isn't even close to being such a system however... making the idea of pro/rel preposterous to even consider for it. The idea of "relegation" shines a very unnatural spotlight on which team is doing *worst* rather than the more natural attention being at the top of the standings... most sports fans couldn't care less who is playing worst, they want to know about who is first or competition for that spot.
@@r2dad282 I don't know if "half the conference" qualifies or not... that wasn't the point. If you're saying too many teams qualify for the playoffs in MLS, then I agree... but it's about right.
If you care about a team it sucks to watch them lose year after year. The reason that Manchester United and Arsenal have so many fans today is because they used to be the top two teams in the premier League
Americans are never going to put up with a system where the same few teams win every year. It's not even working in soccer right now if you actually dig into the numbers, but in the USA if your local baseball team doesn't compete then you are going to support your basketball or football team or whatever.
Actually, Liverpool was the biggest English club when the Premier League started. ManU’s fandom grew because they won like 30+ trophies under Ferguson. And people love winners. That’s how Chelsea became a “big club”. 20 trophies in the Abramovich era
15:08 is probably what’s going to end up happening. Everyone talks about whether pro/rel is good for the sport and if MLS can sustain it, but nobody talks about how it would work. USL is probably going to create their own pyramid and - because their league is open and also have all their teams compete in the USOC - they can apply for Tier 1 sanctioning. If that happens MLS will probably absorb the USL pyramid to protect their own investment on the condition MLS teams relegate into the USL. What’s interesting is if Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver got relegated they can’t go to USL. Perhaps MLS can also open their league to the CPL if that happens and maybe a Canadian team can promote to MLS. HFX, Forge, Cavalry and Pacific draw good crowds.
Without pro/rel system, there is absolutely no reason for club owners to build better team . Why should they. They not going anywhere, revenue keep coming and fans keep coming hoping just because they love the game not the club
MLS only exists because some investors were willing to risk hundreds of millions of dollars to try and fast track this league, buy the infrastructure, facilities and acquire decent players that people are willing to pay to see. Why would anyone invest a red cent at this point in a US league with pro/rel that could deep six their entire investment in a season after being relegated. They're competing in a US sports market with other pro sports and college sports that don't exist in European nations. Our league and the sport needs time to grow, get more market share of US sports entertainment dollars and for those owners to get a decent return on their investment.
They have the same incentive as owners in the other 4 major professional sports leagues that operate in this country. No owner wants their team to be at the bottom forever. A losing team has less fan interest, fewer tickets & concessions sold in the stadium & a lot less commercial revenue overall. Owners don't want that even if there is no risk of being relegated because winning means they make more $.
whether its a closed league or an open league doesn’t matter. There will always be owners who just go and pocket money. And that last sentence makes zero sense.
If soccer was the 2nd or 3rd popular sport in the US, pro/rel would have a much better chance at succeeding and not crushing all that has been built by MLS and USL.
A bunch of Euro soccer fans keep wanting to change the way the USA does its sports. Over and Over and over. We have 4 of the top 5 leagues in Revenue in the world. Pro/ Rel isnt some magic wand. Its not going to happen. This isnt Europe with countries the size of states having their own leagues. A 2d or third division team in Germany gets on a bus to go to its rival. That isnt the case here and will never be the case. Stop with this nonsense.
Revenue isn't the most important thing in the world. That money goes to a small portion of people. Do you want our national team to have a chance at winning a World cup? Do you want every kid in the US to get a fair chance to pursue their soccer dreams? But no, who cares about if 10,000 more teams opened all spending money throughout out the pyramid. It needs to be concentrated all at the top 30 teams that's so beautiful
@@rq7284 Hes proud of the fact that most of American sports revenue comes from excessive commercials and overpriced tickets, and not the actual quality of the sport itself. If the premier league had commercials every 2 minutes , it would be richer than all american major league sports combined
@@ian_r125 clearly, I care about the sport, grassroots, culture, quality of players, meritocracy in the sport, etc. But high revenue for the few is so good for us normal citizens I guess
"If I have a team in my hometown, I'm probably going to support...." Nope. It will never happen. The proof of this is that no one has ever successfully created minor leagues in sports like Basketball or Football. There are semi-professional football teams in smaller cities around the country, because cities like Oklahoma City or Baton Rouge or Birmingham will probably never have an NFL team, but even the inhabitants of those cities are often unaware those semi-professional teams exist and if they are aware they don't care. Americans aren't suddenly going to embrace second division professional sports just because you want them to. If they were going too, there would already be 30 thriving second division American football clubs in the USA. It's not like American sports fans are starved for choice and entertainment.
That's a marketing issue though and the marketing issues are somewhat caused by having closed leagues at the top level. As there is no connection between the main league and the alt leagues they don't benefit from each other, the top level suffocates the alt leagues. Just look at American Football, lots of money was put into things like XFL but it couldn't get a foothold, they would have needed to keep spending that kind of money for 10 plus years to start erroding the NFL. If it was however a 2nd division to the NFL with pro/rel the XFL would benefit from the NFL marketing making the marketing costs for the XFl cheaper and more effective. In England even though the PL is a different organisation to the EFL who are different to the national league etc etc they all feed each other. If the US had pro/rel the MLS would help bring the local sides that people might be unaware of into a bigger spotlight. TBH it doesn't even need to as significant as 3 down per conference. Just 1 going down in each conference with the 2nd bottom in each playing a playoff against say the runner up of the corresponding conference (be it either from the league standing or if the loser of the conference final in the playoffs). Just some movement to give hope to more local clubs and to help grow the sport in towns and cities that don't have MLS teams right now for the good of everyone. And let's be honest it would reduce 'fans' dropping off at all levels during the season , fans who might never come back as another activity or sport takes over their time
@@SimonWakefieldUK It doesn't even really work for the UK, don't try to tell me that it would work in the USA. The NFL is already bigger than the EPL, La Liga, and the Bundesliga combined. It doesn't need your business advice. When the IPL open up in India, they didn't pattern it after the EPL; they sent agents to the NFL to discuss how to manage a professional league.
If we had a soccer system where the same one or two teams win every year (aka, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, La Liga), the system would not succeed. Americans will not embrace an environment where only a few teams will ever win anything because they are bankrolled by billionaires. The idea that promotion and relegation makes the system fair is flawed.
Bad argument. You didn't mention the EPL, which has had 7 different clubs win the league since 1992. Ligue 1 has had 19 different league winners since 1933. Serie A has had 16 teams win since 1901. Bundesliga has had 29 teams win since 1903. If your facts are flawed, so is your conclusion.
@victorq4842 Right! those KC fans stuck around for the 50 years of sucking they went through before this recent stretch of winning. See! Fans will stick around even if there team is crap. Look at Minnesota fans! Their team has always sucked.
A salary cap is what prevents that. A lack of a salary cap is why the same clubs win in Europe. And FFP is not a salary cap - it basically changes nothing.
It’s comical to call MLS “pay to play” league when all these pro/rel leagues are pay to win. We don’t need pro/rel to fix soccer in this country, just support your local team. I find it comical to say that you would only be engaged if your local club was in an open pyramid. A lot of these pro/rel stans still won’t watch local soccer as they would complain about the quality.
Full disclosure - I'm old (61). Now that I have that out of the way, I can say you CAN teach an old dog new tricks. I've been a fan of various sports (especially baseball) for over 50 years. It never dawned on me what was wrong with all the major sports in this country. Not the sports themselves, but the way the leagues are run. Then my stepson, who married an English woman and moved to London, acted as my 'sherpa' to explain some of the confusing bits of soccer to me about 6 years ago - because he became an Arsenal fan since his new wife was a generational Arsenal fan. Once I understood "off sides", the rest came naturally and I've been following the sport ever since. The first time I ever saw a relegation battle in the Premier League - and heard what the stakes were (TV money, especially) it suddenly clicked. WHY do we Americans, who are supposed to be all about a meritocracy, REWARD the WORST teams with the BEST draft picks? Why do we INCENTIVIZE "tanking"? When you look at it from a standpoint of "Would you create a league this way" - it FAILS. It's wrong. It's an insult to athletes trying their best to have an owner deliberately trying to lose to get that draft pick. It's an insult to the game - ALL games - baseball, football, basketball and hockey. It destroys the integrity and puts cities in debt because the owners can threaten to move a team, no matter how bad. Do you think the Oakland Athletics would be getting such a sweet deal from Las Vegas is they got relegated to a 3rd division? NO. The ransom threats to public coffers would at least be curtailed if not ended completely.
I think that pro/rel could work but I don’t believe that USL is going to be the one to create that change because they are basically a smaller scale MLS. USL has franchise fees for USLC and USL1, territorial rights that prevent smaller communities from having multiple teams, and pay to play academies. It would have to be a reorganized NISA or a new league separate from the three we already have.
USL is the opportunity to have homegrown fans, homegrown talent, and push real opportunities. Right now, MLS grabs the biggest local clubs and gives them opportunities while squeezing out smaller leagues. Even a club like RSL has forgotten their roots and pushed aside most outside of the Salt Lake/Provo area. Heck, they even went outside of UT to have an academy.
my biggest concern with pro/rel in the American soccer system is the biggest soccer teams in America being able to outspend small teams. look at the premier league biggest teams like Manchester city, arsenal. and Liverpool are the only three teams that have a chance at winning the premier league title.
If I was commissioner, here's what I would do: Structure: The United States has enough cities and population to have two division 1 soccer leagues. MLS already has 30 teams, all it would need is 10 more, 5 from each conference. The first step would be MLS could either negotiate promotion-relegation with usl, or they could buy out USL. Over a period of time, integrate the top USL teams into MLS. Split mls in half, that way you would have the Eastern conference with 20 teams and the western conference with 20 teams. There would be no interleague play until leagues cup or concacaf champions cup. Get rid of the playoffs entirely. Instead, take the winners of the Eastern conference and the winners of the Western conference and put them in a two-leg MLS super cup final, 2 weeks after the season ends. This will make the regular season matter much much more, and also with promotion relegation, it will make the regular season matter for the the bad teams at the bottom of the table. We could be getting an intense final day between two stinker clubs just for a relegation spot. The bottom half of each league will play in the US Open cup, while the top half of each league will play in the leagues cup. The top four teams from each league will qualify for concacaf champions cup. Finances: The finances of mLs are so insane right now, I think the easiest first thing to do would be to make it easier to integrate homegrown players into your roster. Because MLS is a franchise League I still believe that a salary cap is needed, but, I think that the salary cap should be around 30 million, with only one DP spot available, all the other weird roster spots need to be taken away. I also believe that the salary cap should be flexible for different teams, if your club makes more money than a different club there's no reason that you shouldn't be allowed to spend more than a different club, clubs should be rewarded for making the league money. The salary cap is still important to keep clubs from overspending and losing profit, MLS is still a young league and just because it's growing it doesn't mean that it can't fail. Promotion-relegation: Here's where it gets tricky. MLS owners are very stingy and any threat to their business making money is a big issue. I think the easiest solution to the promotion relegation problem is to split the team into two leagues and give current MLS teams a 5 or 10 year grace period, meaning, current MLS teams cannot be relegated to division 2 until a certain time, which will give MLS owners time to prepare for something like that to happen. Most likely, it will only be current usl clubs that would get relegated anyway, but to give the owners some ease, give the MLS teams a grace period. Marketing: MLS really needs to work with the US soccer federation and concacaf to make both the US Open cup and the concacaf champions cup much bigger spectacles. I'm sick and tired of seeing 20% full stadiums during the concacaf champions cup. MLS should understand that promoting these events will only grow the league further. Stadiums/fields conditions: MLS has done a really good job with the expansion clubs getting great facilities and soccer fields, but many of the old clubs still have trash stadiums and horrible soccer fields, it's so frustrating watching the ball bounced around on a completely unlevel surface. Chicago and Charlotte both need soccer specific stadiums, if Charlotte could manage to get their playing surface changed to real grass then I actually think it's cool where they play, but Chicago has a horrible situation. Revs and New York are getting new stadiums so that should be good. I would also love to see Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver get real grass installed. Last side note, I also feel that the Canadian teams should move to the Canadian premier League, which will help the Canadian League grow a lot and homogenize MLS, but that's not really super important.
USSF has no leverage over MLS. The D1 designation means nothing. MLS has the billionaire owners, stadiums and Apple tv deal. That's the only D1 designation MLS respects
You don't need promotion relegation. What you need is a better youth system that each MLS team will need that is not pay to play only the best 22 kids stay and every year there's tryouts and every year a new kids get promoted in and out only the best stay. Around age 15 or 16 your elite players starts signing contracts. Every soccer nation that's wearth a dam has this. Look at LA Masia in Barcelona. River Plate in Argentina. They are a factory of elite youth.
I guess the biggest problem with pro/rel is if you think of professional soccer in this country as "fragile." If it is fragile, then we don't just have the structure we have with the MLS closed-system, we then *need* MLS with whatever system they have, and messing with what MLS does is an existential threat to soccer in this country and the US Men's National Team. I'm old enough to be concerned that MLS is in fact fragile and wouldn't survive opening the league. So I personally would prefer that we have a semi-open pyramid instead, where the USL functions as the open portion, and then the best of the best at the USL level can then build a proposal to join MLS, without an expectation of MLS ever instituting relegation. That's a middle ground that could have many of the benefits and goal-setting-and-achievement your guest mentioned without killing the MLS golden egg.
I am struggling to see how Pro/Rel would work without first adressing the salary cap as currently constructured. Also the DP rules. Teams like Inter Miami and LA Galaxy would have been relegatee last season (DP's either got hurt or were late season transfers). Now a few dps later both are title contenders. MLS is set up to create competitive balance. The league would have to fundamentally change how it aproaches roster construction. Taking the salary cap and DP rules out of our game would leave organizations like City Group in a advantagous position. Then we will be like the priemer league where 1 of 5 teams wins every year.
@@flpndroxYes...you can lol. That's how rules and competition works. And you'd only be handcuffing the super wealthy owners. But Spain does it and I think France is planning to as well. Like I said you can have safeguards to keep it as competitive and honest as possible, and if you still can't hang then you can't hang. A closed system is hypocritical to a capitalist system.
@@bradenhazle4378 The problem with that analysis is Amercian sports fans want a league of more-or-less "evenly" balanced teams... the so-called "capitalist" system of just allowing teams to spend whatever amount to load up on stars (while teams with lesser means cannot due to having smaller budgets) in order to always be the most competitive team isn't one that is conducive to good business for the league overall. There is no "hypocrisy to capitalism" a closed league system whatsoever...
The biggest reason I want pro/rel in the US is for accountability. Nothing bugs me more than to see cheap MLS owners. There's no repercussions for an owner to cheap out their roster, finish in last place, and their supporters suffer those consequences. If owners understand there are penalties for being cheap, and their club could be relegated to the USL 1st division, owners would be forced to make sure their roster is competitive. The same goes for owners in the USL 1st and 2nd divisions. That's great for youth soccer because that means more scouting across this country. Kids in small towns won't be ignored. Pro/rel would raise competition, and the bottom floor of US Soccer
Everything in the US Sports world goes through the owners and the majority of MLS owners will not go for this. They did not get into this investment for the love of the game. They got into it for the money and there isn’t a benefit for MLS owners to open themselves up to a fraction of the revenue. I’d like it see pro/rel, but I just don’t see it happening!
Excited for part 2. The Open Cup was awesome, and I think it captures a lot of the magic of the sport. But I understand why MLS clubs don't want to do it if it's bad for their bottom line, even if I disagree with them. I guess you've probably already filmed it, but hopefully you can discuss how to make this competition work for the MLS clubs so that they will stay involved. They don't care if a bunch of soccer purists complain. They care about the money, so we've got to figure out some way to make it work financially.
Hello Felipo, a fellow Brazilian here. I don't think it was Lalas' intention when he said that, but his idea is very good. Remember that the English league started small and naturally grew. Because the pyramid system tends to grow naturally and is more open, it is popular. It allows groups and associations across the country to form and join an already open system that can start with three divisions. If the American federation doesn't create obstacles, this could in a few decades, 10 or 20 years, start to bother MLS as a league.
I agree with others. The US will support major league sports and college, but minor league programs just don't do get the same attention. I don't think pro/rel will change that much. I also don't think that we "need" pro/rel to make a difference. While I don't think that we will become Brazil, Argentina, Germany, etc, I do think we can into the England, Spain, Belgium territory over the next 40-50 yrs. We have advantages that many don't. -Population - Places like England and Spain have around 50 million people. The US has >330 million and growing fast. -Money - self explanatory -Immigration - It's no secret that those populations who come to the US and multiply have soccer as their #1 sport. -Lifestyle - to a lot of athletes, the cities, freedom, food, low taxes, etc is very attractive -Growth - We have to remember that MLS is only 30 yrs old. And there were many areas of the US where youth leagues just didn't exist back then. There already has been a massive shift forward. -Death of the Big 3 - We've all witnessed the slow death of baseball as one of our most watched sports. My personal favorite is American Football.....and while it's currently the king, they continue to make so many changes that I think it'll start to lose fans at some point. -etc, etc, etc.
They don't get the same attention since they can't go any higher, why watch a minor team that has no chance of getting D1 when you can just go watch D1 that has no risk of falling?
I think this stems from the rationalization that American fans are not loyal at all and are fickle to only when teams win. I believe that a closed system such as MLS and other sports actually promote such behavior because "why go to a game when they will lose? I'll come back next season". But, if the team have actual stakes of dropping down a league, you'd be more invested to see if they'll stay up or go down. With only a handful of teams able to have academies, there is no real way that talent will be fostered in the US to make it a competitive national team year in and year out if real talent isn't scouted. If we continue this way, we might see it that the US's golden generation was just a fluke.
If I am a club owner, I would move to a second tier city and then invest in creating one single brand and have a team under that brand in both leagues along with academies and shared training infrastructure. That would be awesome.
They can't, the central branding can't be taken outside of the MLS, like they can't have a New York Red Bulls 3 in USL2 because the MLS owns the "New York Red Bulls" branding
Adopting the pro/rel system will be catastrophic for MLS. Teams struggle to fill 20,000-seat stadiums, so imagine if they were to fall into a lower division. The problem with MLS is the quality of the matches. Americans don't have the same culture as Europeans or South Americans in terms of attachment to a club, and are generally only interested in the entertainment aspect of the sport. If MLS is to grow, it needs to attract more people to matches and make them regular by changing the rules of soccer to make the game more fluid, faster and more spectacular; defences are bad enough so why not limit the use of low blocks and eliminate time-wasting.
Please stop. This is what was tried at the outset. Countdown clocks, shootouts, music during the game, etc., and little by little every one of those things was rolled back and the league has grown. People thinking soccer needs to change to attract fans. No. Soccer is just fine. The quality of play has improved. Now we need to remove (or raise substantially) the salary cap and introduce promotion and relegation. It will inject the league with the skill and excitement to rival the very top 5-8 leagues in the world.
@@TonyBrasunas By making "the game more fluid... spectacular", I was talking about the rhythm of the matches, not the atmosphere. MLS obviously made a good decision in removing these elements, as they were cringe. Soccer in its current state doesn't sit well with most Americans, just look at how insignificant it is compared to other *college* sports in terms of attendance and viewing figures. It's often boring and painful to watch (this from an absolute fan). I know people who tried to give MLS a shot by attending a few games; guess what, they all gave up at some point because they were bored and frustrated most of the time (by the diving, slow pace (compared to the Premier League), soft calls and dull low block) and decided it wasn't worth the time and effort. Teams like Atlanta United, Charlotte FC, Nashville and Austin are good examples of people who were enthusiastic at first before slowly losing interest. Conversely, St Louis City's home games are always full because they play physical, attacking soccer (like Austin in his first season).
You care about MLS, we care about American soccer in general. MLS cares about enriching a few rich men, not about the optimal growth of the sport. If the sport grew in the US and they couldn't extract dollars for themselves they wouldn't want it
I think Pro/Rel is the most American concept. The idea of being able to work your way to the top regardless of who you are or where your from, isnt that the American dream?
But that's not what actually happens in pro/rel, is it? What actually happens is you wait for some billionaire to descend from on high and buy your team. This system allows the best team, with the best strategies and tactics, to win instead of just going out and buying better players. In other words it's the same European mindset that if you have a problem, you should go find a rich person and take their money to fix it for you instead.
@@loganleroy8622 not necessarily, look at Luton Town. What this systems shows is no matter how good you are domestically if you don't have depth, you'll never be able to compete at the top level, or even one level above.
@@loganleroy8622 that's not always the case look at Luton. But on the other end of the spectrum look at teams like PSG they've got all the money in the world and are great domestically but struggle globally. So it takes a balance of all things finances, tactics, and something to strive for. What I believe this system show is that you can be the best team in the MLS but what does that really get you, not a Pro/Rel issue but the salary cap holds MLS teams back from competing on bigger stage
No. Pro/Rel happened in England out of genuine need/demand when a few owners got together and created a national league leaving out many others across the country that were just as competitive and often had as much in resources as they did. It was a different time... before today's billions in broadcast dollars, global exposure and accessibility. There was no where near the incredible financial disparity there is now between tiers. Its interesting that Europe more and more have been trying to model their leagues in line with our rich US leagues (with FFP, Superleague, etc), while American europosers who have no respect for our sporting success and pedigree keep trying to mimic European ways in order to fit square pegs into round holes. That said, I genuinely like the idea of Pro/rel, but when/if it happens here it will happen out of demand and not just "cuz Europe". It'll also be done the RIGHT way.
Mate, the MLS is doing exactly what you historically described. No pro/rel is fantastic for owners at the top. It's like opening a business with a monopoly. Of course McDonald's would love if other fast food places weren't allowed to properly compete with them. But no one else in that scenario benefits. The top teams in Europe want what's best for their pockets. They don't care about the sport or anything else. Thieves are everywhere there is money. The only difference is in the US the money came before the sport culture. So the thieves entered at the ground level, instead of joining up later.
Not needed. No other legue in the states has it. I don’t see the nfl players or fans complaining it doesn’t make the legue competitive enough. Besides, San Diego is a perfect example. 500 million to get in, and to lose that investment in a year because the team had a bad season…no one, no one would make that investment.
you look at soccer with an American mindset you are not look at soccer/football as global sport which it is, so I see why u are viewing it like that just like any other American sports league, and its ok its just your opinion still
@@davepazz580 I understand all of that from the jump.. but overtime the league grow, and throughout the growing process we see the try a lot a new thing and those thing did really stick, so the league come back around to soccer/football how its being play globally so pro/Reli is here sing any of the league in the US, it more likely will actually grow the leagues, but like I said I also overstand why persons wanna push back on pro/reli because that wasn't how the MLS was introduce like said from the jump so I get it ..
Have you asked any Oakland Raiders fans how happy they are with NFL? Or Houston Oiler fans? St Louis Rams fans? LA Raiders fans? Baltimore Colts fans? Yeah, didn't think so.
@@ballakick9080 American sports culture is different from European/South American sports culture and we need to embrace those differences instead of constantly trying to morph us into something that we are not. Football is a global sport but in this country we have a different structure which is more inline with what American sports fans want to see.
Pro/rel in MLS will never happen. As fans we need to push USL to follow through on the vote they promised us. If USL with pro/rel can start to challenge (they dont have to ecplipse them) MLS for fans, sponsors and TV viewers that could bring MLS to the table. Forget MLS... its dead.
I think it would be interesting if they do pro/rel on the women side with the nwsl and usl. Which the Usl is debuting their division 1 pro women's league this August which follows the European calendar. To mention the nwsl doesn't own all the teams like mls does. I think it would be easier to get investors on board
USA and Canada should tried a promotion/regelation. Venuezuela and Panama are baseball countries or Cricket country like India and Pakistan, they have promotion and regulation football tiers. Basketball countries like Serbia and Turkey have promotion/regelation tiers leagues. Hockey country like Russia and Sweden have a promotion/regelation football tier leagues which Canada can have. Ruby similar to American Football which Ireland have promotion/regelation leagues. MLS and USA including Canada sport industry won't have them due to these teams are a form accumulation of wealth of money and power.
Pro/rel has no tradition in the USA, and most Americans have no interest in it. The tiny percentage of very vocal soccer fans that want pro/rel just want it because they want approval of fans outside the USA. But the approval of fans outside the USA isn't what soccer needs to succeed in the USA.
I agree with Chris that USL-C should strive to become D1 and then set up a pyramid. The current standard of viewing games doesn't really encourage people with the severe lack of stadiums. That's why I think they're holding out and unfortunately it will take a long time to get to that ideal point unless a swath of generous investors come in. Hopefully 2026 will be a catalyst now that a massively stronger soccer culture exists in the US compared to the last time we hosted.
Ehhh I doubt pro/rel reduces or eliminates pay to play. If there were to be more clubs in these smaller markets. They're not fully funding a youth academy set up let alone a full youth program. Some MLS clubs now are slashing their academy budgets.
It will depend on what type of team we are talking about. We have teams like Brommapojkarna from Stockholm who funds the best youth academy in Sweden, because thats the best way for them to compete and finance their club while being surrounded by giants. In England there are over 50 academies despite there are only 20 teams in the Premier League. Any team who wants a competitive edge through their youth academies cant outprice talents and they certainly cant be more expensive for parents than any of their rivals. In Atalanta for example it is free to play for any player that gets accepted into the academy. And almost all teams, whether professional, semi-pro or amateur has youth teams withing their clubs, giving kids on all levels a chance to play football competitively throughout their careers.
Everyone also forgets that MLS has a seat on the USSF board, so there's no way they won't be heavily involved in the decision making process. Until somebody can come up with a REALISTIC way to convince the owners of the MLS clubs to put their $100 Million plus investments at risk in a Pro-Rel system, it's never going to happen.
I am against pro/rel in the US, because it will hurt your league in the long run, the competitiveness between clubs would be awful the clubs that are promoted would go down almost immeduately like in other countries, one thing you have going right now is that the league is rich and has great potential and already has partnerships with big brands, most of portugal doesn't get anything good, some clubs don't even have stadiums of their owm, every team in the mls has a stadium just for football a kit by adidas great marketing and a real chance to win the title in the beggining of the year, the most important things right now are to fix the youth, scrap the territorial/state rules and implement the benfica model where every club has a bunch of academies around the country maybe everyone gets 1 academy per state and you play leagues that way, increase the salary cap each for example 7,25M in 2025 ,10M in 2026, 12,5M in 2028, 15M by 2030 and go for minimum salary to balance the squads, after that market it internationally and find a way to do the draft and be exciting if every club has academis the draft doesn’t make much sense to me. I think the MLS has a lot of potential, and i would love if every club in portugal or spain coulsd have that investment. I'm really excited to see what new teams come to MLS, who will be the 40 teams and when will the MLS have 40 teams and I want to see what would happen if the mls had a closed system with MLS, MLS2,3 and 4 where the small clubs still get money from the big MLS clubs, because everyone is owned by MLS and they can grow together.
I played club soccer my whole life until I graduated highschool. Pay to play kills normal kids from playing soccer competitively. Soccer shouldn’t be an expensive sport. Like they said kids who could be amazing players and play for the national team never play past 1st grade because it’s too expensive
Not implementing Pro/Rel in USA is equal to rewarding failures when the club is having bad season by staying in the league. No consequences for bad results means complacency and lack of accountability.
Bingo. Relegation forces owners to get better and be better there is no slacking. This forces the best of the best to compete against each other every week. MLS is so watered down at this point with about to be 32 teams here in a bit we need either 4 divisions or relegation this current model is boring.
@@tfries72 those with limited resources on the other hand, will be forced to be more innovative and/or rely heavily on their youth academies, thus potentially unearthing talents that can be matured by first team football early in their careers. Either way pro/rel works.
@@wanr5701 It does unfortunately sports in the states is all about money and business you would think putting a better product out would equal more money for some reason the model they are using is profitable good for them bad for us. Relegation would make MLS overall a far more competitive league than it currently is. I don't even watch its so watered down.
Pro/Rel is exciting and really exemplifies the dream of seeing your team clash with the big boys. However this will never happen. Closed leagues represent financial stability to owners and are on average twice as lucrative as open league teams. Search Party did a really good video on this. I'd love to see pro rel but MLS wants to be the NFL so that will never happen.
The owners dream of going from an open league to a closed league. It's basically as much of a waste of breath as anything discussing pro/rel in NA. Even if the MLS buy USL, it would sooner become major/minor leagues similar to that of baseball than pro/rel. I would rather we discuss how to revamp the homegrown rule and entice better academies and stronger investment in the league.
What US soccer needs is a strong base of 60 to 80,000(!) local grassroots clubs that provide the change for kids and adults to play soccer in an organized way. Soccer needs that local rooting to grow and to produce talent. Soccer is as much about playing as going to watch your own club's first team or going to support your local professional team. Soccer needs Boston (not New England) Revolution to play Worcester or Rhode Island or even another Boston team. And soccer needs local investors/sponsors to support their local club, not to take over.
I'm no expert and I hope one day promotion/relegation can become a thing, but at the moment I don't see how it could be implemented effectively unless there is serious financial protections in place. MLS clubs that get relegated would become financially unstable, investors would pull out, and clubs may dissolve. Getting new investors in would be difficult. What I expect to see is that MLS Next and USL eventually fully merge and develop full promotion/relegation themselves. Eventually when Div 2 and 3 are stabilized, and soccer is bigger in the US, MLS starts internal promotion/relegation
"MLS clubs that get relegated would become financially unstable, investors would pull out, and clubs may dissolve." People neglect how often this happens in Europe as well.
Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga are not successful because of pro/relegation. They are successful because soccer is the most popular sport in those countries. The NFL is doesn’t have pro/rel. They are successful because football is the most popular sport in the US. The pro-pro/rel argument is a correlation/causation fallacy. I think another reason pro/rel has a challenge is scholastic sports. i think the place scholastic sports has in the US is uncommon, if not unique. The community teams you are talking about exist already. It’s the local high school and college/university.
If there were leagues where smaller teams could compete, you'd have more teams in smaller cities and you'd get more scholastic participation and grow the sport.
The talk of a guy on a couch. What about the players? Do they matter? Or should the system stay the way it is because it benefits a small group of rich men and guys who watch soccer when the NFL and NBA aren't on?
@@rq7284 Players in closed systems tend to be *a lot* better off. They tend to have very strong unions and because the leagues are doing well financially they tend to get paid really well. The stability also works great for them. And they tend to get "promoted" and "relegated" as individuals rather than as teams. In fact much of minor leagues in closed sports exist primarily to develop players and make them Major league worthy - which is very good for the players.
We (USA/MLS/USL) need it (so I agree), but with owners paying 500+ million to get into the league (which is nuts) we're not going to get it anytime soon. Some MLS teams just go through the motions (Colorado I'm looking at you, sure you won one MLS cup in 2010..but generally you suck). With an open system....any team has a chance, with the right ownership/leader direction. I do agree that the only way we are going to get it is if USL (or some similar league) creates an open system and challenges MLS. However, based on what happened with the Open Cup (I haven't seen your video on that as of the time I posted this.), it would appear that US Soccer is bowing down to MLS. It would be in US Soccer's interest help USL become a 1st division league and challenge MLS. Right now is all about the $$ and US Soccer and USL are playing 2nd fiddle to MLS. USL now has a 1st division women's league to challenge NWSL....so way not on the men's side??
Because of the window of who's available and what they're willing to do. They want their European players to rest during their offseason so it doesn't hurt their standing with their teams. The MLS players on the other hand are right at peak form in the MLS schedule.
The 2020 Nations League final got delayed to 2021. Because the delayed event took place mere weeks prior to the regularly scheduled 2021 Gold Cup, US Soccer chose to prioritize rest for the bulk of the A team players by calling them in for only one of the two events (the shorter one). Also due to the 2020 pandemic delays, the Hexagonal [which morphed into an Octagonal] international dates got pushed into later windows, displacing the 2022 Nation's League until after 2022 WC qualification was settled. As a result the 2022 Nations League final got pushed back to the June 2023 window. Again, mere weeks prior to a regularly scheduled Gold Cup. Again, US Soccer chose to deploy an A team for the shorter event, even more understandable since these players had also not gotten a break for the WC (because most played in it). The 2024 Nations League final, just concluded, turns out to be the first to fill its originally intended window and is also the first not to take place in a Gold Cup year. That there is also in 2024 a Copa America for the A team is coincidental. Expect the A team for the 2025 Gold Cup, especially because there are no other competitive matches in '25 (no WC qualifying and no Nations League.)
I think pro/rel. would help increase the level of play, but the US is so big it would be a problem. You could have no teams on the west coast, or east coast. Could you image not having a 1st Division team in NY or LA? With pro/rel., that could happen. Now image MLS having talks with Apple or other broadcasters and streaming options when they don't have a team in a major market. To work around this you would have to do pro/rel. by region. That would make the "M" in MLS look like it stand for "minor". US sports fans expect coast to coast teams in the top leagues.
All good observations... I would add that for *true* pro/rel to take place and have it be really meaningful, MLS would have to dissolve the very foundation of its business model and have new teams created from scratch and become totally independent, self-sustaining entities from day one. The mere fact that MLS is a single-entity league where all teams share revenues, impose salary caps and have "parity" as an underlying principle makes even the thought of implementing pro/rel not very logical...
Their plan it's to make çonferences like they already have in their other sports franchises. Same investors, same business strategy, that's why they are successful...🤷
I think Pro/Rel could certainly work, i just think the MLS needs to make some serious structure changes to do that. For example the owners need to be ACTUAL owners of their respective clubs. As of now they're just custodians that run the day to day for the MLS. Soccer is on the rise in the US, that can't be denied, but the MLS needs to make some changes to make the league the favorite of soccer fans in the US. If they dont they will just play second to the Prem or LigaMX or any other foreign league.
It's impossible for a top tier to have 30+ teams while doing pro/rel, but I have started to think. What if MLS remains a closed system, single entity, and caps out. Stops adding teams. But along with that, 12 teams from the USL Championship form a 1st division. It has to expand to 14 teams by year 3 of its existence. And then, maybe, USL implements pro/rel across three or four divisions, and that whole thing simply exists alongside MLS. Could that work? Could we eventually have MLS with 30+ teams, a reserve system at tier 2 and 3 probably, and then a whole pyramid of 100+ additional pro teams from communities of all sizes, and the best teams at the top tier compete well with the best clubs on the rest of the continent. The whale investors go to MLS, and all the other investors operate in the pro/rel pyramid. Could that potentially work? Could we have both systems, side by side and overlapping within the same country?
I think pro/rel isn't a necessity right now, but I think it probably will be in the future, it's just not something that's part of your guys culture, personally I'd like to see it though one day, it'll add another compelling storyline to US football (or US soccer as you call it, I just can't call it soccer, that's your guys word for it 😂) I think it'd be nice to have an open pyramid and give the opportunity for smaller clubs to dream, it'd be good for some players who get overlooked, to maybe go to a small club and prove there worth by potentially being a big part of a clubs rise, we see it here in England (look at Luton for example, in the 90's Fulham were in what's now known as league two and rose up to the prem) I think it'd be an overall good thing for you guys
I like pro/rel but believe that it should be regulated (team must meet league requirements) and all teams should playoff with the winner staying up. Not auto up/down.
The major thing about all of this is the idea of bringing all clubs in Americans soccer together. If you can do that its going to be massive for American soccer development more than anything... That's why it works for everyone in the world bar a few...
Seems baseball has had this conversation 150 yrs ago. What's happening to soccer now is exactly what happened between NL and other baseball leagues ( AA, UA, AL, FL, PCL, etc). Time to act now before it's too late.
Sports are a competition by definition. A closed league is not: so it's a fake competition parading as one. Why even watch it? More like a stage play than a league.
A "closed" league is designed to be competitive against other sports leagues... that's what you're missing here. The "competition" within a "closed" league is among the players on two teams on the field of play on game day only...
The answer is no, pro-rel is just a massive waste of time and money, we only 32 MLS teams, theres room for a 2nd tier National league with 32 teams. and 64 teams in 4 regional leagues for the 3rd tier. nothing else is wanted or desired.
12:12 If a single person is not wealthy enough to qualify but you can gather 1000's you can form a corporation or trust to combine the wealth to do so.
There is logic, but I don't think there is any stomach for it from fans, owners or the MLS. You are looking at something that could take over 10 years to see any benefit if it all.
In my region of the US, there was an MLS team 2.5 hours away from me. Thats a little too far to go each weekend. Now there are USL clubs that are closer. A bigger web or pyramid aids the growth of soccer immeasurably, and to have it be open would be nice from my perspective
isn't a team within 3.5 hours of me, nor in my state. Zero interest outside of Messi which is on other side of US
My question is why has USL not added Pro/Rel?
@@noting7678 I mean, you clearly don't watch USL so why do you bother to ask?
Guys complain about not having an MLS team in their city so they won't watch but have no problem watching a league that is an ocean away from us 😂
@@oyaml1211 It's the fake fan syndrome. It's like McDonald's making it's menu healthy to appease it's critics, but then they still don't want to eat at McDonald's and then in the mean time McDonald's doesn't taste as good as before so it looses it's actual customers.
Some people just enjoy being critical more than they enjoy the thing they are critical of.
I never watched USL and this year our city has a team and I bought season tickets. Now I’m engrossed in USL. Doesn’t matter to me that it’s division 3 it’s still fun to watch. I think USL is smart selling the tribal aspect of it. Smaller markets being able to field teams and say this is ours. I’m originally from Miami and it’s fun watching inter Miami but I have more interest following my division 3 team 😄. It’s strange 🤷🏻♂️
USL is more like division 2. In my opinion. MLS 2 is not any better and the USL fanbase and league is growing. MLS will always be like the G-league of MLS.
@@mackdeen7021 USL has multiple divisions. USL Championship is in D2, but USL league 1 is in D3 (they also have a League 2 that's D4), so he may be rooting for one of those League 1 clubs
Please everyone. This isnt about MLS. We need USL to do it. We need USL to challenge MLS to force them to negotiate and bring USSF back in to facilitate the open system
they don't even need to open the System, they could do what League of Ireland and J.League do, and just have Promotion/Relegation with in the league (LOI has 20 teams in the League system, they cut it i to two tiers with 10 teams each and Pro/Rel between the tiers. J.League has 60 teams in the League and has 3 tiers with 20 teams each and Pro/Rel between the 3 divisions)
@@supersasukemaniacJapan is a very small country by comparison
The fact is that unless an open system can prove to be more lucrative than the current system, MLS will never want pro/rel. Considering that soccer is the biggest sport in the world, yet 4 of the top 5 revenue sports leagues are NFL, MLB, NBA, & NHL. It doesn't look like any open system in the world can compete with the America model, so it will never happen. Also, pro/rel is not necessary at all to grow the sport.
@stevenygabbyperez695 MLS is becoming arrogant and attempting to crush competition. Backing out of the Open Cup, building their own 2nd tier, they don't want competition which is why we should turn to USL and support a true league
We don't want an open system
USL is going to have to prove the concept AND push/threaten the MLS for fans. When that happens the country will be ready for Pro/Rel
It won't happen, for the exact same reason no one has ever made a successful product to compete with the NFL despite multiple attempts in my lifetime.
Americans are not interested. Every American sport has gravitated to a few big teams competing in the major metropolitan centers with a fan base that is distributed geographically. Even in baseball, baseball fans tend to support the major league team over their own local farm team. They may enjoy cheap tickets and an afternoon at the local farm team, but they spend the big money on the merchandise for the big league team and that's what they watch on TV.
USL isn't going to compete with MLS so much as at best form a second tier of fandom. Currently they are enjoying the fantasy that one day their team will be a major league team, but that's increasingly obviously never going to happen.
What USL should have been going for was the MLB style farm system, but instead they bought into the idea that a European style pro/rel system would allow them to franchise up without paying the money. It's never going to happen.
USL has bills to pay too. They’re not gonna introduce pro/rel (an objectively inferior business model) unless they’re desperate and fear they’ll collapse if they don’t - in which case they’ll already be cooked
@@celebrim1I do not think it should nor do I think a promotion/relegation system is compatible on a number of fronts. However, the NFL has had only one successful competitor and is nearly half of today's NFL, namely the AFL.
@@sheldoninst Hense I said in my lifetime. USFL and XML attempted that and folded.
AFL shows there is a maximum number of teams that can make it within the American sporting system. You need a certain size market to support sports at the quality and showmanship that Americans expect of a pro league. And with multiple major pro sports in the country, we're already at or near market saturation.
@celebrim1 AFL grew, challenged NFL and they merged, so you're oblivious to the history of that football. Also incorrect is your comment about market saturation. You do know that more Spanish speakers watch MLS than English speakers, right? The TV audience of old white guys is saturated, true. Hispanics markets are not. But you'd need to count the browns, which you have not.
In San Diego, we tried to get a MLS team & failed. Ended up getting a USL team, SD Loyal. They were a great franchise. Really committed to the community. Then MLS comes back in and gives SD a MLS team, which shoves Loyal out even though the fans were behind Loyal. Leaves a bad taste to the fans and community. MLS you have to earn our respect.
Same thing happened in Austin.
Now Loyal folded because MLS is coming there in 2025
Don't be silly. San Diego landed the 30th team, you made it in, rejoice! And from the looks of it, you have a great ownership group. Very invested in player/youth development and strong ties to the community. SD Loyal was created out of nothing like 3 years ago, it's a blip. There've been lots of teams that have come an gone, just not the right team, not the right time, etc.
Same thing is happening in Indianapolis now.
If you want someone to represent the other side, which is not anti-pro/rel, but a position based on reality, I will happily join you for the discussion.
Anti pro/rel?
Email us: TacticalManagerTV@gmail.com
If you go on, please check out my post... and let me know if you agree with some of these ideas AGAINST promotion/relegation.
Everything in the US Sports world goes through the owners and the majority of MLS owners will not go for this. They did not get into this investment for the love of the game. They got into it for the money and there isn’t a benefit for MLS owners to open themselves up to a fraction of the revenue. I’d like it see pro/rel, but I just don’t see it happening!
@SheaAlevy Last I checked USSF controls the game in this country. There are many different ways to create a soccer pyramid, pro/rel making the most sense. USSF has had over 100 years to create ANY sort of pyramid, and has failed to do so. USSF has the authority to create a soccer pyramid and announce that in 20 years the closed MLS will become an open system, integrated with USL and the others. It just needs to be logical and fair. I don't care how many billionaires don't like it.
@@r2dad282 Then MLS would split from USSF & there wouldn't be a damn thing they could do about it. This is exactly what is happening with US Open Cup right now. Even the "threat" of pulling MLS' Top Division status was basically laughed off because MLS knows that there is little that USSF can realistically do to them w/o destroying all the gains made in this country over the past 30 years.
People abandoned the Carolina Panthers when they were the worst team last season. Tickets were 45 cents for some games.
If they do this with our most popular sport imagine what they'll do with our 5th most popular sport 😂
Sounds like bad management has failed the fan base. Time to sell to a local investor who can do things better. If I were a supporter 45 cents sounds like a bargain. If I was a fair-weathered fan, no price will entice me to attend.
You’re not wrong that fans would abandoned teams but the example your giving is kinda an outlier bc that game had terrible weather
But when you're bad, there's nothing to play for or to watch for. Relegation battles are some of the most exciting games there are. It brings meaning and excitement to not being last place.
@StephonLove208 In the US, teams abandon fans! It's the American way! St Louis Rams, LA Raiders, Houston Earthquakes nee SJ Earthquakes, Baltimore Colts. We don't deserve better because we accept it when billionaire sh1te down our throats. Say what you will about europeans, but if a club treated their fans this way there would be no end to the protests until the owner relented.
Tho relegation and promo would be awesome in mls, I think the team base over all needs to grow, if an mls team that brings in let’s say 15-25 thousand fans, I’m sure that team being relegation will drastically bring down the stadium assistants.
This ALREADY happens in MLS, NFL etc.
Look at the Carolina Panthers attendance last year.
I think north american soccer needs to have pro/rel. Even look at Japan. Theyve instituted the english pro/rel system within their soccer system and guess what it works. The competition builds better teams better players. It takes time.
lol.
No doubt pro/rel is why England keeps winning the World Cup.
@@celebrim1every country competing for the WC seriously has pro/rel. England doesn't win because another nation that has pro/rel won
Pro/rel is not necessarily an English system. It’s implemented in almost every country I can think of.
@@mackdeen7021 they invented it. Of course the us was building the minor league system at the same time.
@@celebrim1 Your point is? The countries that DO win world cups also have pro/rel.
We need to be careful not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Financial stability is a relatively new phenomenon for professional soccer in this country. MLS is attracting owners with deep pockets precisely because it’s a closed system. David Beckham came here because the league offered him ownership. Messi came here because the league offered him a percentage of the streaming revenue.
Without MLS’ ability to vet new ownership groups and require them to build soccer specific stadiums you would have sketchy ownership groups who run their clubs on the cheap and use them as their personal piggy banks. Such a thing is rampant in the lower divisions of England. Look at how many clubs have gone under, and that’s in a country with a strong soccer culture.
Lies...
Preach!
I would argue teams going under is precisely how it should work because poor practices should ruin your team. You can have an open system but keep policies intact to have some safety net like salary caps and shared revenue at each tier. A closed system is indeed financially better and a great crowdfunding tool but it doesn't encourage improvement of the sport if you can just buy your way into the top league. Otherwise reliable lower teams can claw their way with good strategies and the sport grows.
What are these "golden eggs" that you speak of? Chicago Fire? The Aaronsons? The league?
The benefits of the current system, or the "golden eggs" are starting to cap out. The way the USA takes soccer to the next level is by having a local club in every city and town across the nation and that's not going to happen without a pyramid similar to the way that the rest of the world does it.
Soccer has become a huge juggernaut in the USA and it's only growing. It's here to stay. There is no way it's going to implode again like it did as the prior league imploded for reasons that are now moot.
@@IsaacHenryinAK Could not agree with you more. MLS needs to either merge or be taken over by USL and form the top 20 teams and start pro/rel. MLS' only golden egg is for the investors of MLS and the owners.
The other thing is to do away with all the streaming contracts, App[e TV, and show them n broadcast. The game will never truly grow otherwise. We all saw what happened when they tried that for the first round of the NFL playoffs. People went ballistic. But us soccer fans just seem to take it for some reason.
Well done my brother, love this type of conversation.
Pro/Rel: A system famous for producing leagues with at most a handful of teams capable of actually winning titles.
That’s not pro/rel my friend.
MLS would have the same issue in a closed system if it removed the salary cap.
Let’s at least be fair when we criticize it.
"Let's import a Ponzi scheme into American sports!"
@@celebrim1 Let's keep a billionaire boys club looking to maximize profits by fleecing "fans" (Customers)
@@joshuah.6095 Aside from a few clubs owned by fans like Benefica, how do you think European soccer works anyway? Do you really think it's not billionaires that own clubs? You might want to look at who really owns clubs in Europe.
@@celebrim1 How is that worse than a monopoly?
THANK YOU for spreading the message! We NEED Pro/Rel in the US to compete on the world stage.
I get why you don’t currently have while the league is still growing and trying to establish itself, but should be done in the future. Relegated teams could be given parachute payments to cushion the financial blow and to help them go back up as they will lose star players and generate less revenue.
The J-League has figured this out. The 🇺🇸 and 🇨🇦 need to follow them.
In 🇺🇸 there are currently 62 combined statistical areas with populations greater than 1 million. In 🇨🇦, there are six metro areas above 1 million. If you add San Juan in 🇵🇷 , that's 69 metro/combined statistical areas that are above 1 million across the US and Canada. That is more than enough for three ⚽️ divisions in a pro-rel format.
You just don’t have the football culture throughout the US for that to work. Remember its still way behind the other big sports.
@@1972dsrai 🇯🇵 initially did not have the ⚽️ culture throughout the nation for that to work when the J-League started. It had other more popular sports. Yet now ⚽️ is one of the major sports there.
MLB, NBA, & NHL don't need Pro/Rel to be the greatest leagues in the world.
Olhe
That’s a false equivalency. You don’t know how successful they would be if they did have it.
Club fans will follow even in lesser leage, this never been an issue
Not what others are saying. Some teams lost a significant number of match day fans and sales when the team is performing badly. It seems some fans are only there if doing well.
If MLS keeps adding more teams, a reasonable regular season schedule will not be possible at some point. You would have to break the league in half, with 20 top and 20 bottom teams. This would be a closed system with two tiers, 20 teams each (40 teams total), compared to English football's numerous divisions. A hybrid approach- not quite the pyramid, but at least an A/B division.
More than likely what would actually happen is you have the Western and Eastern conferences play two completely separate schedules and then have a playoff format to determine the best MLS team.
This^
But would the MLS make more or less money doing that
@@liamconverse8950 They'd probably make the same amount in terms of revenue, but the value of the teams, which the owners care about would remain higher without the risk of relegation.
Why not? Just play each team once or have two leagues. It makes sense, US pop is as big as Europe put together
The issue I take with pro/rel has been mentioned a couple times in the comment section. The rich teams stay rich while the bottom teams cycle. If you look at the amount of premier league teams that have won the league championship since 2000, there is very little deviation, a small pool of teams always win. Conversely, the NFL has had a much larger pool of teams win the league championship. Rebuilding through the draft works for them. However, I do like the bottom teams having something to play for and limiting meaningless games.
i think we should make the bottom four teams of the nfl and nba play a tournement to determine who gets the number one pick in the draft. get rid of the lotto and teams that tank arent going to be guaranteed the best pick.
@@lapthanngo5609I like that idea but I don’t think it would work because I don’t see how it would motivate players because they would be essentially be playing for a draft pick that could be used to replace one of them on the team.
Salary cap and profit sharing: Problem solved.
Pro/rel is not one size fits all. You can have whatever rules you want with it. There's a reason spending restrictions are popping up all over Europe. It turns out the spend as much as you want has problems, but they aren't even considering to cancel pro/real
What does "richest teams" have to do with an MLS pro/rel system that has salary caps like we see now?
What soccer in this country needs is continued investment.
The quickest way to kill soccer in this country is to convince all the investors to pull out.
The quickest way to do that is to make their investments way way way riskier.
Introducing pro/rel might be the only thing that can kill the tremendous growth soccer is experiencing. It would take a truly colosal failure to derail the incredible growth. And this might just be enough.
Why would investors pull out?
Wrexham in Wales. 2 Northamerican investors saved a storied club and are building back better, all for $2M. Those are funds that could be used to build a club in the USA but USSF/MLS hates pro/rel so small investors aren;'t here. They're in France, England, Italy, Spain, all investing time and funds to build the own little Wrexham there.
@@r2dad282 San Diego is in the US. It doesn’t exist yet and investors already invested over half a billion dollars.
The scale isn’t remotely close.
There is no question that investors are much much more willing to invest when their investments are protected.
Sure you can catch a romantic here and there with the football manager style story but if you want the billions and billions of investment you’re gonna have to rely on it being a good investment not getting a few celebrities to take it on as a passion project.
@@emilbarycki9206 because that’s what people do when investments aren’t good
@@r2dad282 Everton is in the Premier League. They’re a club with very decent history and they’re teetering on bankruptcy because they can’t find a decent investor at the scale they need.
They have one very sketchy buyer investor and that’s it.
Sure you have some romantics who want to pull a football manager in real life (those tend to disappear after 2-3 hard years in the championship - but maybe Wrexham’s celebrities will stick around) but in MLS San Diego already got more investment than most premier clubs in the last 5 years and it doesn’t exist yet.
As a personal fan of pro/rel, I 100% do NOT think it will work in the U.S... it purely comes down to the typical sports fan in the u.s... we have to grow it with the normal person, and sports fans in the US do not generally support second-teir leagues... Just look at the ufl/xfl stuff... People mY like high school or college sports, but the majority of US fans will only support a "best" league. There is also not enough club history for the loyalties to be strong enough. The guest talks about how he would be dreaming of promotion if his local team was in a lower league. That's because he's already heavily invested and a fan. New fans will NOT be that way. American sports fans only want to follow winners. That is why shitty sports teams, even at top level, have zero audiences coming in. It won't work in the U.S., as much as I'd like it to happen. It is not something the American sports fan would get behind.
Adding this now that I got to this actual question/answer in the segment. The guest keeps saying he believes in the American soccer fans. That's great, BUT there aren't enough fans out there. We have to grow the fanbase, and that won't happen with pro/rel. USL clubs have fanbase, but even at Phoenix, the USL champions currently, they only get a couple thousand or so... The fanbase just ISN'T there for it.
You make a good point with respect to Pro sports fans. But think about college fans. Fans of small schools want their college to advance from Div III to Div II to Div I. The best stories during March Madness are when a small school outside the top leagues gets to play and maybe upset a blue blood school. I think there's a reservoir of fans that would embrace little guys moving up, and cheer big guys (who've maybe become complacent) dropping down.
@@richp6366like half the country goes to college. Everyone roots for their college team because it’s their college.
Most people cannot name their local minor league hockey team. There is no built in fandom. People didn’t spend the 4 best years of their life becoming who they are under the stands in your soccer stadium. There is no built in fan base. You need to earn it. And go ask your dad if he can even name the local minor league baseball team - never mind if he knows the last time they made the playoffs
@@richp6366 It's much easier to take people who are already a fan of the sport to go watch College, High School, etc. I just don't see that happening with soccer.
UFL and XFL are not part of a second tier. College football would be the second-tier league and they are doing fine financially.
As a casual fan, I don't think it'll work.
I think pro/rel is crazy as a concept and have A LOT of reasons not to like it. I'll mention one.
Like I said, I'm a casual fan, really casual...even before Messi.
I'm really interested in the season this year because I want to see how Messi/Inter Miami do in a playoff system. An American system.
If there was pro/rel, I don't think I would care about any specific season in MLS/whatever. I'd remain a casual 'oh, that happened' fan but I couldn't imagine any reason to ever be interested enough to follow a whole season.
I'm really looking forward to seeing who makes the playoffs this season.
I wouldn't want pro/rel because it would be boring to me. Soccer isn't a religion to me.
However, thinking about a future where stars like Thiago Almada/Messi/Giroud/Neymar(?)/etc get the American (NBA-like) playoff marketing...that seems interesting. I also think that would appeal to a wider audience consistently.
Pro/rel would...it might be popular as a subculture thing but, like I said soccer isn't a religion to me and if I'm being asked to care about teams fighting for a Participation Award (pro/rel) or which team won the league in the top division...I live in a city with multiple professional teams, big time college teams...in other words, I have choices which are going to have exciting playoffs/championship tournaments I'm used to. I'm not going to care about who was promoted, relegated or who won the top league.
However, like I said, I am really looking to forward following this season.
I'm hoping LA Galaxy/Inter Miami meet in the MLS Cup final. As a casual observer I would want to see how they handle Riqui Puig vs Messi. That's the kind of story lines I'm used to and would be interested in seeing on a yearly basis. I'm not trying to follow story arcs that happen over decades.
The closed systems of the NFL and NBA are pushing into Europe. If the same marketing/etc was put behind MLS, I think the MLS playoffs would be as popular or more than Champions League. Why wouldn't 'world class' soccer players want to live/play in the US if they're going to have machines like the NBA/NFL turning them into the next Jordan, Curry, James, Mahomes or Brady?
That would also, in my opinion, solve the problem of the low participation. If MLS was just like the NBA/NFL/MLB and kids saw there was a league to strive for...more kids will participate from a younger age.
I think the guy is right. Small communities/etc might like their teams and they would be able to participate in an open pyramid but I think that would also make it forever seen as a joke by the greater American public...until demographics change.
Fully agree!
"The closed systems of the NFL and NBA are pushing into Europe." which leagues are we talking about here?
You could also have a playoff system with the promotion/relegation system, both the Belgian and Scottish league uses it.
@@88balloonsonthewall70 What I meant by that is that both of them are growing in popularity in Europe.
Pro-rel makes no sense to me.
It's a mental trick/Participation Award. It's a trick to make teams/fans think there's something other than championships to fight for.
I don't follow sports to feel bad. They're entertainment not a religion.
Each season I want the hope, even if it's baseless, that my team will win a championship. That can't happen if they're not even in the league.
What would probably be worse is to be one of those teams, using the PL as an example, perpetually stuck between 7-15 (it's 18 teams right?) who EVERY year have NOTHING to hope for - not good enough to win a championship and not bad enough to get relegated.
I take that back, what would be the absolute worse is to be a fan of a team in a lower division living in a delusional state while waiting for a miracle, because that's what it'll take, a miracle, to reach the top flight and win a championship in a pro-rel system.
@@sonpacho I was just saying you can have play offs and still have promotion / relegation.
I think you are a little bit delusional because you have no idea why people follow teams in the lower leagues or the joys what just a promotion brings to fans or even avoiding relegation.
There are continental competition places to fight for too that brings a lot of excitement to fans. You are also very stuck on the Top Leagues and forgets that in other Leagues it isnt just one team that can win their top division.
Also in a closed league you get a participation award every season because it doesnt matter how bad you do, youd be there next season too.
@@88balloonsonthewall70 I understood your point about pro-rel in a system with Playoffs.
I just don't think pro-rel makes any sense. Maybe in the 19th century but not now.
Maybe. However, based on what you said about finding "joy" in "just a promotion," sounds like someone who's played a mental trick on themselves to value something other than winning championships to me. We can agree to disagree.
The "top leagues," no parity, and the "other" leagues, with parity, you're talking about are all in the same pyramid. In my opinion, the fact you're using the lower leagues as an example proves my point.
Instead of facing the reality the system is broken, you (not you personally) play mental tricks and act as if the big clubs in top leagues don't exist and all the "real" competitions are in the lower leagues, between teams fighting against relegation and/or between teams fighting for spots in 2nd/3rd tier continental competitions.
Narratives are created to give all of this emotional/etc value to EVERYTHING except winning a championship because the pro-rel system makes it impossible for most clubs to even conceive of winning one.
That's the best things for fans! It's entertainment, not a religion. Fans can have some hope/optimism for next season right before being disappointed again...and then do it all over again the year after that.
I'm not a sadist or a masochist.
I don't want to see people suffer financially and emotionally just because a stupid team had a bad season - it's just a game not a religion.
That's probably why there's so much violence in the sport. So many people emotionally/financially/legally/etc tied to the fortunes of a club they overreact. It's not that serious.
Like I said, it makes no sense on any level to me.
I have never understood the argument for a pro/rel system. In general, the only justification people suggest is that this is the way it's done in other countries. The guest offered up some dream world scenario where everyone in the country is engaged to the point where they will invest/buy a local club in hopes that they will one day reach the top. It's a nice dream, but he offers no evidence to suggest that it would take off in the US. In fact, we have ample evidence that sports in this country don't need that in order to take off. Fans don't need their teams to be from their local community to support them. More importantly, fans need to be able to support a team that has a chance to win. Pro/rel pyramids do not promote league parity. That will never fly in the US.
That's the other thing I feel like people who support pro/rel don't appreciate. The farthest any team in the EFL National League, a fifth tier league, has to travel is 5 hours and 21 minutes. The travel budgets for any US minor league Soccer team would be insane. Especially across the Western half of the US where people just aren't concentrated together. You'd have teams like Fargo having to travel to Omaha just to play a "close" rival. Even derbies in the MLS sense are KC and St. Louis or Orlando and Miami which are still 3 hour drives.
@@loganleroy8622 Excellent point.
Saying pro/rel doesnt support parity is ignorant. Its because they dont have a salary cap and dont have playoffs. it has nothing to do with pro/rel.
Excellent point. Why do what the europeans do, especially with their tribal sense of country with boundaries no bigger than our states?
@@sheldoninst brazil has promotion and relegation. Brazil is geographically larger than the lower 48 states. Russia is bigger than the US and has promotion and relegation. After the first two/three tiers you just break up the tiers regionally. I dont think its that big of an obstacle
Love the idea of Pro/Rel here...but is it really working over there? clubs are dying in the lower levels in England and elsewhere in Europe...and I believe thats one of the reasons a Euro Super League hasnt been killed completely...Those big clubs dont want to be saddled with having to deal with that kind of stability problems if something goes completely crazy and they get relegated...
Ya when Tac said "the club goes bankrupt who cares?" everyone should care we are very young and fragile as a soccer country. Clubs going bankrupt would be awful for what ever location they are in and the whole point of the MLS structure is to prevent that
I doubt theyre “dying” theyre all well supported and get millions in funding
It's not. England's football pyramid is absolutely crumbling as more and more local fans become primarily fans of the big televised clubs that are playing meaningful soccer.
Pro/rel is an accidental artifact of soccer's semi-pro recreational roots. It comes from a time when there was no mass media, long distance travel was difficult and expensive and recreational soccer teams were representational of your community in much the same way that high school or college teams are now. With so many different teams, they needed some sort of fair structure to determine who played who every year. But at the time, even as late as the 1960s, teams competing in the third division of soccer had revenues, fan bases, and salaries that were like a 1/3rd of the teams competing at the highest level. Moving up or down didn't represent any serious financial problem because 90% of the revenue of the team was from ticket sales, and even the size of your stadium didn't matter much because everyone was selling just admittance to the grounds and crowding in more people than they had seats.
Under those circumstances, pro/rel makes a ton of sense and it does in fact engage everyone in the country.
But we are like 50 years past that and while everyone loves pro/rel in theory because of tradition and its what they are familiar with, the practice is getting more and more broken. Clubs don't play local players anymore. Clubs don't make most of their revenue from ticket sales anymore. And the competition is mostly dead. Teams at the top of the league have salaries and revenues 30 times that of teams at the bottom of the same league. They have salaries and revenues like 1000 times that of times a couple of tiers below them. There is no longer even the possibility of real competition.
The whole thing now works like a Ponzi scheme for the benefit of a few wealthy clubs, and the whole thing increasing depends on a steady stream of outside investors more interested in playing football manager for real than actually making their money back. Team like Leichester didn't win because of some magical Cinderella story, but because a wealthy group of investors bought a team that went bankrupt as a personal plaything and dumped money on it. It's a fun story, but the whole thing is financially unstable. Eventually the English football pyramid is going to run out of foreigners who view the whole thing as a very expensive game for billionaires, and those billionaires are going to start pouring their money into more financially stable local domestic systems. The Saudi's have already made this switch. The Americans are making this switch. The Asian investors will soon do the same. And at that point, the lunatic dumbest sporting leagues in the world will collapse.
I mean I love the EFL championship, but its finances are looney tunes.
@@celebrim1 Theres zero proof of that in the attendance figures because you just made it up. England has teams that are not even pro pulling in crowds in their thousands
@@ian_r125 I didn't make anything up.
But what really confuses me is how you think "England has teams that are not even pro pulling in crowds in their thousands" refutes me. Those teams are on the same football pyramid as Manchester City, but fat lot of good it does them. Do you think teams that pull in crowds in the hundreds primarily have the loyalty of their community, or do you think maybe in their community, for most fans, their favorite players play for bigger teams? Do you really think Hemel Hempstead Town F.C. is actually capable of being competitive in any meaningful way, or that local kids don't wear shirts for Chelsea and Arsenal and the like?
I think there's only 2 paths for this to ever happen. 1) Like Chris said, USL implements it and it becomes widely popular to the point where MLS's prestige/popularity/value is hurt by it or 2) Find a way to sell the idea to MLS owners by creating a pro/rel plan that is financially beneficial to those MLS owners in the short and long term. MLS franchises are a business/investment first and foremost to all the owners. Whether it should be that way or not does NOT matter, that's just the reality of the situation. Trying to argue for pro/rel because it is what is best for soccer in the US (while true) isn't going to change anything. In order to have a true open pyramid in the US, MLS would have to be on board. And the only way to get them on board is to impact (or create an impact) them financially.
Bundesliga will add a Salary Cap before MLS/U.S. adds Pro-Rel.
Look at these comments man…
I really hope 2026 changes some of these people with closed off minds to what is leaps and bounds a more competitive and expansive system.
more competitive? lol. tell that to everybody chasing City for the last 10 plus years.
“Why can’t people be more open minded and believe like me that there’s only one right way to set up a sport” 😂
@@kalmenbarkin5708there's a ton of ways to set it up. Pro/rel is a core value. Every serious soccer nation employs it differently. Some far more efficiently and better than others. But it unequivocally is needed.
Ah yes Man City playing in 10 out of the last 12 english championships is so competitive. Bayern Munich winning 11 straight German championships is so competitive. The last spanish championship to not feature either Barcelona or Real Madrid was in 2002 (22 years ago). Out of those 22 championships, 14 of them have been Barcelona vs Real Madrid. Such a competitive and expansive system they have there lmao.
@@kalmenbarkin5708 LOL for real
The problem I have with the Pro/Rel model is where it encourages our competition.
For me I want every team to have a realistic shot at winning because you then have to establish prizes for winning the league and being promoted.
For example I want my league to look like the NFL or NBA where you have historically great franchises because they develop and manage well. But there are teams like the nuggets, kings and Timberwolves who can go toe to toe with them every year.
I don't want my professional league to only be won by three or four teams because they can outspend everyone else like in a lot of the European leagues. You can pretty much bet on the teams that are gonna finish top four in most of the Big five leagues in Europe and you will very rarely be wrong over a ten year span.
But in the NFL and NBA there are competitive cycles that even historic teams suffer through.
It emphasizes management, internal development and resource allocation that I don't see in Europe. The best team in the Netherlands prides itself on selling its best players to other teams in Europe. Maybe it's just me but that's not what I want from my Sports.
The reason why the NFL and NBA have balance is due to local government spending and the draft system.
@@belluh-1huey102 I don't disagree with you, but that is far from the only reason
@@belluh-1huey102 The reason they have balance is because owners can be assured that their team will be bringing in regular revenue every year for the next ten years plus. Because of this, owners are free to invest funds and can make long term plans to develop a more competitive team. This gives everyone in the league the chance to compete and win the title. In pro/rel leagues, on the other hand, you are never assured of sustained revenue unless you are one of the few teams who have survived long enough to guarantee they'll never be relegated. This is why nearly every team that gets promoted gets relegated within a couple years. No owner would be willing to risk a half a billion dollars on a team that is most likely getting relegated and losing the majority of its future revenue within a couple years. That's just a really bad investment. Only the teams who are guaranteed to not get relegated have a shot at the title. They have, in essence, created monopolies. Pro/rel leagues discourage owner investment into their team. That's not good for competition.
I strongly agree with you, because in Europe and South America soccer is a depressing sport for any fans that aren't lined up with the same old 2-3 teams that always win.
@@mdfrenchy While i do agree with you that the top teams have a monopoly like hold on the major titles, i dont agree with the sentiment that that it discourages investments in the team for the rest of the teams. All teams have to (and most do) invest in their team to keep up with the rest of the league. If they dont invest they will eventually get relegated and thats enough incentive to invest.
It also have allowed for major investments in smaller teams, Manchester City, Chelsea, Newcastle are good examples of major investments in (what used to be) smaller teams due to possibilities a competative league offers. Atletico Madrid is another good example of a team that has established itself as a top side due to its own investments.
You also have teams like Brighton who has established itself as a Premier League team due to its investments into their team, while a long term Premier League team like Sunderland got relegated due to its poor management.
If the league was closed a team like Brighton wouldnt be up, and a team like Sunderland would still be in the Premier League despite not being competative. You can also make the argument that closed leagues discourages investments because they dont need to be competative to stay in the league, and with the draft system they could even be rewarded for being bad.
The us open cup should include university teams
would be an awesome addition. Then maybe NCAA would finally stop insisting on their dumbvass, non-FIFA rules. And hire real coaches, too.
This would be good for the draft, ultimately but terrible in the eyes of league programs if they get washed by a college team. lol. That's mainly why MLS pulled out of the Open Cup, if not also for monetary reasons.
@r2dad282 The NCAA will never let it happen because they insist on the Amaturism/student-athlete model. To compete in US open Cup, they would have to ditch that.
@Truman5555 Maybe image/likeness rights will be the grenade that blows up the NCAA--much worse could happen.
They can make pro/rel and open the pyramid for universities to join if they want. In some countries university teams are in the pyramid.
The mathematical maximum of MLS is 60 teams (48 matches played by every team in a regular season), which covers most 1+ million CSA in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico. And promoting a smaller market to MLS would become possible only in Hoffenheim's case - when some mad fan would pump money into a 36 thousand metro area club, which even is impossible in the US, because of the salary cup. For example - the smallest agglomeration in the EPL this year is Ipswich - which is 34th in the UK (haven't found a separate table for England). 34th agglomeration in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico combined is Kansas City, and Wizzards are already in the MLS.
Another huge problem is entry agreements with clubs. Because in exchange for entry fees, they were guaranteed a place in the US-Canada top flight. So MLS or USSF should give the entry fees back, which would cost billions of dollars, or they would face a felon accusation. I'm not very good at the states law, but in Ukraine, it's "illegal gaining" - quite a similar felony to fraud.
So promotion and relegation are possible only in USL, the Canadian pyramid below MLS, and Puerto Rico.
Here's a thought-- how's about keeping MLS "closed," but weight the schedule such that top teams play top teams and lower teams play lower teams more often. "Top" and "lower" determined by their performance the previous season, i.e., whether they made the playoffs or not.
pro/rel. is absolutely what this country needs to truly compete on the world stage in terms of both the league and national team. I dont see anything happening short term but im optimistic that eventually USL or another league will become popular enough that it sparks change
Pro/rel has nothing to do with competing on the world stage. If you want our league to become one of the best in the world then advocate for MLS to drop their nonsensical roster rules, TAM/GAM crap & put a revenue based salary cap in place. We need more money being spent on better (& younger) players not multiple divisions of poorly supported teams in markets that can't sustain a professional sport.
We all want to see Pro/Rel in US soccer. There are issues that people don't think about. One of them is how are you going to make MLS add Pro/Rel if USL hasn't added Pro/Rel either? USL just announced a new USL team Brooklyn FC for 2025 with an entry fee of $20 million. In what world would an owner pay 20 million for them to add Pro/Rel one year later? USSF isn't going to force MLS to add Pro/Rel if an MLS owner is paying $50 million for the new National Training Center. It's a if you scratch my back I'll scratch yours type of deal. Another issue is that you will be 100% off all of the movement that MLS teams are starting to kill.
All of these problems can be solved if the people running soccer wanted to solve them. They want to enrich themselves first, grow soccer 2nd.
Generally *AGAINST* promotion/relegation for these reasons (which are never discussed):
-Polarization and eventual creation of a sclerotic caste system only rewarding too few teams.
Relegated teams suffer disproportionately, creating an eventual and unbreakable “top tier” teams, one that has endured since the international soccer leagues were founded over a century ago. Specifically, every single league in the world is utterly dominated by no more than 2 teams, with the EPL shifting between only 2 teams among 4 teams. Boring and depressing!
Not only that, top tier teams will eventually monopolize the services of the top players, monopolizing wins and championships, and also give credit to coaches who may or may not have the best tactics. Case in point: The 1950s Boston Celtics. Who knows if Auberbach was a decent coach? He had a monopoly of the best players and couldn't lose. Same for many soccer coaches of the world's top teams.
-Promotion/relegation is based on realities of the past with a plethora of almost exclusively semi-pro teams, and now obsolete.
Before there was TV and mass marketing, there used to be dozens of local semi pro teams that could easily rely on only ticket sales, which then needed to be separated by some form of merit using promotion/relegation. Today hardly any team relies on ticket sales but rather mass TV and monumental multimillion dollar (sometimes billions) sponsorships. Plus the wages across the levels was NOT all that different, however today the gap is huge between top tier teams and even mid level teams.
-Playoffs are a form of limited promotion/relegation.
Playoffs already fulfill the function of promotion, as missing the playoffs is a form a seasonal relegation as those teams that miss the playoffs suffer financially, but it doesn’t nearly bankrupt them.
-American uniqueness, why imitate Europe and South America? Also incompatible with franchise system.
Makes no sense, especially with the financial arrangements between leagues and club franchise owners, salary caps, etc. Just because the Europeans do it and have done it for over a century, doesn’t make it interesting. Plus not only are there hundreds of teams in each european country, their countries are very tribal and no bigger than our states, so regional support is absolutely crucial. With the USA being continent and it's population known for moving around between states fairy easily, it would be difficult for a local team to nearly monopolize local support.
-Europe and South America only have soccer as a main sport, and thus there are hundreds of clubs that play professionally.
In the USA, there just aren’t that many teams with the level of financial backing to support hundreds of teams that would require splitting up by regions and levels. Plus there’s too many other sports in the USA to share the sporting spotlight.
-Any team can eventually win; too depressing for the permanent mid and lower level teams.
I love that any team in the franchise based leagues can win and win on any given day, and also build a championship team within a few short seasons.
-Economics, and social competitiveness among players and teams.
Since the USA s a rich continental sized country, players do NOT necessarily view a sport as their ticket out of poverty and climb socially. There are many foreign coaches that indicate the lack of urgency on behalf of American players because they already have many career options and nor is soccer (or any sport for that matter) a religion to players and fans, so until the USA becomes poor and only plays one sport (which may eventually happen with low first world birth rates countered with exploding third world birthrates), I doubt the introduction of a promotion/relegation system would finally make it "a competitive religious experience."
Only advantage of promotion/relegation:
-incentive for teams to perform when in a relegation battle.
Counter: there’s already an incentive with a playoff system without the long term financial damage of a full on relegation.
My qualifications for opining? Lived and played in argentinean youth leagues for 6 years, used to go along with the notion of promotion/relegation but after much study and as a fan of many different sports, come to dislike promotion/relegation as a form of sclerotic classism and think arguments posed by Kessel and others is completely baseless.
Disagree. Caste system: tell Leister about how they can't win the league. TV/Mass marketing: streaming matches can be quite inexpensive when it needs to be. But the major networks want big/fancy. Playoffs are dumb, convincing everyone that if you're 7th best in the conference you haven't totally failed. Franchise system is socialized sports, I don't care to support billionaires running a monopoly, Pro/rel is capitalism but I guess that is passe now in the USA.
@@r2dad282 Mexico and Brazil (2 soccer-mad countries) use playoffs to determine the league champion... so it can't be that "dumb".
American sports fans generally want a sports league to deliver on some form of "parity" where no single team holds a very obvious advantage over others... this keeps fans guessing as to what the outcome will be.
The playoff format is the only one that holds the greatest number of fans "interested" in following the season for the longest time... nothing is more uneventful or unexciting for an American sports fan than knowing that not even halfway through a season, the majority of teams are basically out of contention for the title.
There's a reason why all the top US pro sports leagues all evolved into a form of franchise system over time (after having been run in a very "traditional" independent club type way)... it's really the only one that encourages further investment and creates the product most of the sports-going public wants to see.
I'd add a couple of more points to this already very good list...
Specifically under a franchise system, the assumption is there that the "top" league already contains all the top-league quality players (or at least, contains the highest "concentration" of such quality players)... therefore, by what logical reasoning would a team *not* already in the top league deserve any kind of chance to be there?
Whatever team finishes first in a lower tier league is *still* just a lower tier team... I compare this to being a middleweight boxing champion - winning the middleweight title doesn't magically turn that boxer into a heavyweight-caliber boxer no matter how much he dominates his weight class.
So this concept of the best team of a lower tier league somehow now "deserving" to be in the top league just because the previous top league team had a bad year really doesn't make much sense in a franchise system.
But of course, such a system makes *perfect* sense in a traditional "club" system... given that every club is its own individual, self-sustaining entity with relatively little restrictions in team building and acquiring (no salary caps, etc.) and placings are determined by field results.
MLS isn't even close to being such a system however... making the idea of pro/rel preposterous to even consider for it.
The idea of "relegation" shines a very unnatural spotlight on which team is doing *worst* rather than the more natural attention being at the top of the standings... most sports fans couldn't care less who is playing worst, they want to know about who is first or competition for that spot.
@davepazz580 Is half the conference invited to the playoffs in Brazil? No. That's why the MLS playoff implementation is dumb.
@@r2dad282 I don't know if "half the conference" qualifies or not... that wasn't the point.
If you're saying too many teams qualify for the playoffs in MLS, then I agree... but it's about right.
If you care about a team it sucks to watch them lose year after year. The reason that Manchester United and Arsenal have so many fans today is because they used to be the top two teams in the premier League
Americans are never going to put up with a system where the same few teams win every year. It's not even working in soccer right now if you actually dig into the numbers, but in the USA if your local baseball team doesn't compete then you are going to support your basketball or football team or whatever.
United had the biggest fanbase before the premier league was even thought of
Actually, Liverpool was the biggest English club when the Premier League started. ManU’s fandom grew because they won like 30+ trophies under Ferguson. And people love winners. That’s how Chelsea became a “big club”. 20 trophies in the Abramovich era
You never advocate for High School Soccer... Why not?
15:08 is probably what’s going to end up happening. Everyone talks about whether pro/rel is good for the sport and if MLS can sustain it, but nobody talks about how it would work. USL is probably going to create their own pyramid and - because their league is open and also have all their teams compete in the USOC - they can apply for Tier 1 sanctioning. If that happens MLS will probably absorb the USL pyramid to protect their own investment on the condition MLS teams relegate into the USL.
What’s interesting is if Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver got relegated they can’t go to USL. Perhaps MLS can also open their league to the CPL if that happens and maybe a Canadian team can promote to MLS. HFX, Forge, Cavalry and Pacific draw good crowds.
Without pro/rel system, there is absolutely no reason for club owners to build better team . Why should they. They not going anywhere, revenue keep coming and fans keep coming hoping just because they love the game not the club
MLS only exists because some investors were willing to risk hundreds of millions of dollars to try and fast track this league, buy the infrastructure, facilities and acquire decent players that people are willing to pay to see. Why would anyone invest a red cent at this point in a US league with pro/rel that could deep six their entire investment in a season after being relegated. They're competing in a US sports market with other pro sports and college sports that don't exist in European nations. Our league and the sport needs time to grow, get more market share of US sports entertainment dollars and for those owners to get a decent return on their investment.
They have the same incentive as owners in the other 4 major professional sports leagues that operate in this country. No owner wants their team to be at the bottom forever. A losing team has less fan interest, fewer tickets & concessions sold in the stadium & a lot less commercial revenue overall. Owners don't want that even if there is no risk of being relegated because winning means they make more $.
whether its a closed league or an open league doesn’t matter. There will always be owners who just go and pocket money. And that last sentence makes zero sense.
If soccer was the 2nd or 3rd popular sport in the US, pro/rel would have a much better chance at succeeding and not crushing all that has been built by MLS and USL.
A bunch of Euro soccer fans keep wanting to change the way the USA does its sports. Over and Over and over. We have 4 of the top 5 leagues in Revenue in the world. Pro/ Rel isnt some magic wand. Its not going to happen. This isnt Europe with countries the size of states having their own leagues. A 2d or third division team in Germany gets on a bus to go to its rival. That isnt the case here and will never be the case. Stop with this nonsense.
Lol what? Why would it matter to Europeans. They dont care what you do
@@ian_r125 he’s talking about Americans that are obsessed with European structure. Not Europeans themselves dummy.
Revenue isn't the most important thing in the world. That money goes to a small portion of people.
Do you want our national team to have a chance at winning a World cup? Do you want every kid in the US to get a fair chance to pursue their soccer dreams?
But no, who cares about if 10,000 more teams opened all spending money throughout out the pyramid. It needs to be concentrated all at the top 30 teams that's so beautiful
@@rq7284 Hes proud of the fact that most of American sports revenue comes from excessive commercials and overpriced tickets, and not the actual quality of the sport itself. If the premier league had commercials every 2 minutes , it would be richer than all american major league sports combined
@@ian_r125 clearly, I care about the sport, grassroots, culture, quality of players, meritocracy in the sport, etc.
But high revenue for the few is so good for us normal citizens I guess
"If I have a team in my hometown, I'm probably going to support...."
Nope. It will never happen. The proof of this is that no one has ever successfully created minor leagues in sports like Basketball or Football. There are semi-professional football teams in smaller cities around the country, because cities like Oklahoma City or Baton Rouge or Birmingham will probably never have an NFL team, but even the inhabitants of those cities are often unaware those semi-professional teams exist and if they are aware they don't care. Americans aren't suddenly going to embrace second division professional sports just because you want them to. If they were going too, there would already be 30 thriving second division American football clubs in the USA.
It's not like American sports fans are starved for choice and entertainment.
That's a marketing issue though and the marketing issues are somewhat caused by having closed leagues at the top level. As there is no connection between the main league and the alt leagues they don't benefit from each other, the top level suffocates the alt leagues. Just look at American Football, lots of money was put into things like XFL but it couldn't get a foothold, they would have needed to keep spending that kind of money for 10 plus years to start erroding the NFL. If it was however a 2nd division to the NFL with pro/rel the XFL would benefit from the NFL marketing making the marketing costs for the XFl cheaper and more effective. In England even though the PL is a different organisation to the EFL who are different to the national league etc etc they all feed each other. If the US had pro/rel the MLS would help bring the local sides that people might be unaware of into a bigger spotlight. TBH it doesn't even need to as significant as 3 down per conference. Just 1 going down in each conference with the 2nd bottom in each playing a playoff against say the runner up of the corresponding conference (be it either from the league standing or if the loser of the conference final in the playoffs). Just some movement to give hope to more local clubs and to help grow the sport in towns and cities that don't have MLS teams right now for the good of everyone. And let's be honest it would reduce 'fans' dropping off at all levels during the season , fans who might never come back as another activity or sport takes over their time
@@SimonWakefieldUK It doesn't even really work for the UK, don't try to tell me that it would work in the USA. The NFL is already bigger than the EPL, La Liga, and the Bundesliga combined. It doesn't need your business advice. When the IPL open up in India, they didn't pattern it after the EPL; they sent agents to the NFL to discuss how to manage a professional league.
If we had a soccer system where the same one or two teams win every year (aka, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, La Liga), the system would not succeed. Americans will not embrace an environment where only a few teams will ever win anything because they are bankrolled by billionaires. The idea that promotion and relegation makes the system fair is flawed.
Bad argument. You didn't mention the EPL, which has had 7 different clubs win the league since 1992. Ligue 1 has had 19 different league winners since 1933. Serie A has had 16 teams win since 1901. Bundesliga has had 29 teams win since 1903. If your facts are flawed, so is your conclusion.
Kansas City chiefs win every year and people still watch the nfl
@victorq4842 Right! those KC fans stuck around for the 50 years of sucking they went through before this recent stretch of winning. See! Fans will stick around even if there team is crap. Look at Minnesota fans! Their team has always sucked.
A salary cap is what prevents that. A lack of a salary cap is why the same clubs win in Europe. And FFP is not a salary cap - it basically changes nothing.
@@r2dad282 exactly. Us American fans are more loyal than they give us credit for
It’s comical to call MLS “pay to play” league when all these pro/rel leagues are pay to win. We don’t need pro/rel to fix soccer in this country, just support your local team. I find it comical to say that you would only be engaged if your local club was in an open pyramid. A lot of these pro/rel stans still won’t watch local soccer as they would complain about the quality.
Full disclosure - I'm old (61). Now that I have that out of the way, I can say you CAN teach an old dog new tricks.
I've been a fan of various sports (especially baseball) for over 50 years. It never dawned on me what was wrong with all the major sports in this country. Not the sports themselves, but the way the leagues are run.
Then my stepson, who married an English woman and moved to London, acted as my 'sherpa' to explain some of the confusing bits of soccer to me about 6 years ago - because he became an Arsenal fan since his new wife was a generational Arsenal fan. Once I understood "off sides", the rest came naturally and I've been following the sport ever since.
The first time I ever saw a relegation battle in the Premier League - and heard what the stakes were (TV money, especially) it suddenly clicked.
WHY do we Americans, who are supposed to be all about a meritocracy, REWARD the WORST teams with the BEST draft picks? Why do we INCENTIVIZE "tanking"?
When you look at it from a standpoint of "Would you create a league this way" - it FAILS.
It's wrong. It's an insult to athletes trying their best to have an owner deliberately trying to lose to get that draft pick. It's an insult to the game - ALL games - baseball, football, basketball and hockey. It destroys the integrity and puts cities in debt because the owners can threaten to move a team, no matter how bad. Do you think the Oakland Athletics would be getting such a sweet deal from Las Vegas is they got relegated to a 3rd division? NO. The ransom threats to public coffers would at least be curtailed if not ended completely.
I think that pro/rel could work but I don’t believe that USL is going to be the one to create that change because they are basically a smaller scale MLS. USL has franchise fees for USLC and USL1, territorial rights that prevent smaller communities from having multiple teams, and pay to play academies. It would have to be a reorganized NISA or a new league separate from the three we already have.
USL is the opportunity to have homegrown fans, homegrown talent, and push real opportunities. Right now, MLS grabs the biggest local clubs and gives them opportunities while squeezing out smaller leagues. Even a club like RSL has forgotten their roots and pushed aside most outside of the Salt Lake/Provo area. Heck, they even went outside of UT to have an academy.
my biggest concern with pro/rel in the American soccer system is the biggest soccer teams in America being able to outspend small teams. look at the premier league biggest teams like Manchester city, arsenal. and Liverpool are the only three teams that have a chance at winning the premier league title.
If I was commissioner, here's what I would do:
Structure:
The United States has enough cities and population to have two division 1 soccer leagues. MLS already has 30 teams, all it would need is 10 more, 5 from each conference. The first step would be MLS could either negotiate promotion-relegation with usl, or they could buy out USL. Over a period of time, integrate the top USL teams into MLS. Split mls in half, that way you would have the Eastern conference with 20 teams and the western conference with 20 teams. There would be no interleague play until leagues cup or concacaf champions cup. Get rid of the playoffs entirely. Instead, take the winners of the Eastern conference and the winners of the Western conference and put them in a two-leg MLS super cup final, 2 weeks after the season ends. This will make the regular season matter much much more, and also with promotion relegation, it will make the regular season matter for the the bad teams at the bottom of the table. We could be getting an intense final day between two stinker clubs just for a relegation spot. The bottom half of each league will play in the US Open cup, while the top half of each league will play in the leagues cup. The top four teams from each league will qualify for concacaf champions cup.
Finances:
The finances of mLs are so insane right now, I think the easiest first thing to do would be to make it easier to integrate homegrown players into your roster. Because MLS is a franchise League I still believe that a salary cap is needed, but, I think that the salary cap should be around 30 million, with only one DP spot available, all the other weird roster spots need to be taken away. I also believe that the salary cap should be flexible for different teams, if your club makes more money than a different club there's no reason that you shouldn't be allowed to spend more than a different club, clubs should be rewarded for making the league money. The salary cap is still important to keep clubs from overspending and losing profit, MLS is still a young league and just because it's growing it doesn't mean that it can't fail.
Promotion-relegation:
Here's where it gets tricky. MLS owners are very stingy and any threat to their business making money is a big issue. I think the easiest solution to the promotion relegation problem is to split the team into two leagues and give current MLS teams a 5 or 10 year grace period, meaning, current MLS teams cannot be relegated to division 2 until a certain time, which will give MLS owners time to prepare for something like that to happen. Most likely, it will only be current usl clubs that would get relegated anyway, but to give the owners some ease, give the MLS teams a grace period.
Marketing:
MLS really needs to work with the US soccer federation and concacaf to make both the US Open cup and the concacaf champions cup much bigger spectacles. I'm sick and tired of seeing 20% full stadiums during the concacaf champions cup. MLS should understand that promoting these events will only grow the league further.
Stadiums/fields conditions:
MLS has done a really good job with the expansion clubs getting great facilities and soccer fields, but many of the old clubs still have trash stadiums and horrible soccer fields, it's so frustrating watching the ball bounced around on a completely unlevel surface. Chicago and Charlotte both need soccer specific stadiums, if Charlotte could manage to get their playing surface changed to real grass then I actually think it's cool where they play, but Chicago has a horrible situation. Revs and New York are getting new stadiums so that should be good. I would also love to see Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver get real grass installed.
Last side note, I also feel that the Canadian teams should move to the Canadian premier League, which will help the Canadian League grow a lot and homogenize MLS, but that's not really super important.
USSF has no leverage over MLS. The D1 designation means nothing. MLS has the billionaire owners, stadiums and Apple tv deal. That's the only D1 designation MLS respects
You could offer teams a parachute payment if they go down to cushion the financial blow like in the EPL/EFL.
You don't need promotion relegation. What you need is a better youth system that each MLS team will need that is not pay to play only the best 22 kids stay and every year there's tryouts and every year a new kids get promoted in and out only the best stay. Around age 15 or 16 your elite players starts signing contracts. Every soccer nation that's wearth a dam has this. Look at LA Masia in Barcelona. River Plate in Argentina. They are a factory of elite youth.
Not going to happen without pro/rel
I guess the biggest problem with pro/rel is if you think of professional soccer in this country as "fragile." If it is fragile, then we don't just have the structure we have with the MLS closed-system, we then *need* MLS with whatever system they have, and messing with what MLS does is an existential threat to soccer in this country and the US Men's National Team. I'm old enough to be concerned that MLS is in fact fragile and wouldn't survive opening the league. So I personally would prefer that we have a semi-open pyramid instead, where the USL functions as the open portion, and then the best of the best at the USL level can then build a proposal to join MLS, without an expectation of MLS ever instituting relegation. That's a middle ground that could have many of the benefits and goal-setting-and-achievement your guest mentioned without killing the MLS golden egg.
You would then only have wealthier clubs possibly going up, but better teams being denied because they don’t have wealthy owners or a smaller fanbase.
I am struggling to see how Pro/Rel would work without first adressing the salary cap as currently constructured. Also the DP rules. Teams like Inter Miami and LA Galaxy would have been relegatee last season (DP's either got hurt or were late season transfers). Now a few dps later both are title contenders. MLS is set up to create competitive balance. The league would have to fundamentally change how it aproaches roster construction. Taking the salary cap and DP rules out of our game would leave organizations like City Group in a advantagous position. Then we will be like the priemer league where 1 of 5 teams wins every year.
You know you can keep those rules while keeping pro/rel right?
5 competitive teams is rather optimistic, TBH.
@@bradenhazle4378how, you can't handcuff a club and then punish them.
@@flpndroxYes...you can lol. That's how rules and competition works. And you'd only be handcuffing the super wealthy owners. But Spain does it and I think France is planning to as well. Like I said you can have safeguards to keep it as competitive and honest as possible, and if you still can't hang then you can't hang. A closed system is hypocritical to a capitalist system.
@@bradenhazle4378 The problem with that analysis is Amercian sports fans want a league of more-or-less "evenly" balanced teams... the so-called "capitalist" system of just allowing teams to spend whatever amount to load up on stars (while teams with lesser means cannot due to having smaller budgets) in order to always be the most competitive team isn't one that is conducive to good business for the league overall.
There is no "hypocrisy to capitalism" a closed league system whatsoever...
The biggest reason I want pro/rel in the US is for accountability. Nothing bugs me more than to see cheap MLS owners. There's no repercussions for an owner to cheap out their roster, finish in last place, and their supporters suffer those consequences. If owners understand there are penalties for being cheap, and their club could be relegated to the USL 1st division, owners would be forced to make sure their roster is competitive. The same goes for owners in the USL 1st and 2nd divisions. That's great for youth soccer because that means more scouting across this country. Kids in small towns won't be ignored. Pro/rel would raise competition, and the bottom floor of US Soccer
great interview. Being from Montreal i prefer the Canadian Premier League then the MLS
very interesting point for me Dear Filippo I love USA Soccer so much.
Everything in the US Sports world goes through the owners and the majority of MLS owners will not go for this. They did not get into this investment for the love of the game. They got into it for the money and there isn’t a benefit for MLS owners to open themselves up to a fraction of the revenue. I’d like it see pro/rel, but I just don’t see it happening!
Excited for part 2. The Open Cup was awesome, and I think it captures a lot of the magic of the sport. But I understand why MLS clubs don't want to do it if it's bad for their bottom line, even if I disagree with them. I guess you've probably already filmed it, but hopefully you can discuss how to make this competition work for the MLS clubs so that they will stay involved. They don't care if a bunch of soccer purists complain. They care about the money, so we've got to figure out some way to make it work financially.
Hello Felipo, a fellow Brazilian here. I don't think it was Lalas' intention when he said that, but his idea is very good. Remember that the English league started small and naturally grew. Because the pyramid system tends to grow naturally and is more open, it is popular. It allows groups and associations across the country to form and join an already open system that can start with three divisions. If the American federation doesn't create obstacles, this could in a few decades, 10 or 20 years, start to bother MLS as a league.
Relegation would kill teams. I don't think FC Dallas, NY redbulls, Whitecaps, Dc United, and Colorado Rapids could financially survive relegation.
Many European teams can't survive it either.
I agree with others. The US will support major league sports and college, but minor league programs just don't do get the same attention. I don't think pro/rel will change that much.
I also don't think that we "need" pro/rel to make a difference. While I don't think that we will become Brazil, Argentina, Germany, etc, I do think we can into the England, Spain, Belgium territory over the next 40-50 yrs. We have advantages that many don't.
-Population - Places like England and Spain have around 50 million people. The US has >330 million and growing fast.
-Money - self explanatory
-Immigration - It's no secret that those populations who come to the US and multiply have soccer as their #1 sport.
-Lifestyle - to a lot of athletes, the cities, freedom, food, low taxes, etc is very attractive
-Growth - We have to remember that MLS is only 30 yrs old. And there were many areas of the US where youth leagues just didn't exist back then. There already has been a massive shift forward.
-Death of the Big 3 - We've all witnessed the slow death of baseball as one of our most watched sports. My personal favorite is American Football.....and while it's currently the king, they continue to make so many changes that I think it'll start to lose fans at some point.
-etc, etc, etc.
They don't get the same attention since they can't go any higher, why watch a minor team that has no chance of getting D1 when you can just go watch D1 that has no risk of falling?
I think this stems from the rationalization that American fans are not loyal at all and are fickle to only when teams win. I believe that a closed system such as MLS and other sports actually promote such behavior because "why go to a game when they will lose? I'll come back next season". But, if the team have actual stakes of dropping down a league, you'd be more invested to see if they'll stay up or go down.
With only a handful of teams able to have academies, there is no real way that talent will be fostered in the US to make it a competitive national team year in and year out if real talent isn't scouted. If we continue this way, we might see it that the US's golden generation was just a fluke.
If I am a club owner, I would move to a second tier city and then invest in creating one single brand and have a team under that brand in both leagues along with academies and shared training infrastructure. That would be awesome.
They can't, the central branding can't be taken outside of the MLS, like they can't have a New York Red Bulls 3 in USL2 because the MLS owns the "New York Red Bulls" branding
13:50 I mean the football league in England in the late 1890’s was just a couple of divisions, it wasn’t a 4 tier pro league over night.
Adopting the pro/rel system will be catastrophic for MLS. Teams struggle to fill 20,000-seat stadiums, so imagine if they were to fall into a lower division.
The problem with MLS is the quality of the matches. Americans don't have the same culture as Europeans or South Americans in terms of attachment to a club, and are generally only interested in the entertainment aspect of the sport.
If MLS is to grow, it needs to attract more people to matches and make them regular by changing the rules of soccer to make the game more fluid, faster and more spectacular; defences are bad enough so why not limit the use of low blocks and eliminate time-wasting.
Please stop. This is what was tried at the outset. Countdown clocks, shootouts, music during the game, etc., and little by little every one of those things was rolled back and the league has grown. People thinking soccer needs to change to attract fans. No. Soccer is just fine. The quality of play has improved. Now we need to remove (or raise substantially) the salary cap and introduce promotion and relegation. It will inject the league with the skill and excitement to rival the very top 5-8 leagues in the world.
@@TonyBrasunas By making "the game more fluid... spectacular", I was talking about the rhythm of the matches, not the atmosphere.
MLS obviously made a good decision in removing these elements, as they were cringe.
Soccer in its current state doesn't sit well with most Americans, just look at how insignificant it is compared to other *college* sports in terms of attendance and viewing figures.
It's often boring and painful to watch (this from an absolute fan). I know people who tried to give MLS a shot by attending a few games; guess what, they all gave up at some point because they were bored and frustrated most of the time (by the diving, slow pace (compared to the Premier League), soft calls and dull low block) and decided it wasn't worth the time and effort.
Teams like Atlanta United, Charlotte FC, Nashville and Austin are good examples of people who were enthusiastic at first before slowly losing interest. Conversely, St Louis City's home games are always full because they play physical, attacking soccer (like Austin in his first season).
You care about MLS, we care about American soccer in general. MLS cares about enriching a few rich men, not about the optimal growth of the sport. If the sport grew in the US and they couldn't extract dollars for themselves they wouldn't want it
I think Pro/Rel is the most American concept. The idea of being able to work your way to the top regardless of who you are or where your from, isnt that the American dream?
But that's not what actually happens in pro/rel, is it? What actually happens is you wait for some billionaire to descend from on high and buy your team. This system allows the best team, with the best strategies and tactics, to win instead of just going out and buying better players. In other words it's the same European mindset that if you have a problem, you should go find a rich person and take their money to fix it for you instead.
@@loganleroy8622 not necessarily, look at Luton Town. What this systems shows is no matter how good you are domestically if you don't have depth, you'll never be able to compete at the top level, or even one level above.
@@loganleroy8622 that's not always the case look at Luton. But on the other end of the spectrum look at teams like PSG they've got all the money in the world and are great domestically but struggle globally. So it takes a balance of all things finances, tactics, and something to strive for. What I believe this system show is that you can be the best team in the MLS but what does that really get you, not a Pro/Rel issue but the salary cap holds MLS teams back from competing on bigger stage
@@loganleroy8622oh yeah mate, MLS is the league with the least billionaire owners for sure
No.
Pro/Rel happened in England out of genuine need/demand when a few owners got together and created a national league leaving out many others across the country that were just as competitive and often had as much in resources as they did. It was a different time... before today's billions in broadcast dollars, global exposure and accessibility. There was no where near the incredible financial disparity there is now between tiers. Its interesting that Europe more and more have been trying to model their leagues in line with our rich US leagues (with FFP, Superleague, etc), while American europosers who have no respect for our sporting success and pedigree keep trying to mimic European ways in order to fit square pegs into round holes.
That said, I genuinely like the idea of Pro/rel, but when/if it happens here it will happen out of demand and not just "cuz Europe". It'll also be done the RIGHT way.
FFP is not even close to a salary cap. Realistically, all FFP does is keep it competitive between Man City and Real Madrid.
Mate, the MLS is doing exactly what you historically described.
No pro/rel is fantastic for owners at the top. It's like opening a business with a monopoly. Of course McDonald's would love if other fast food places weren't allowed to properly compete with them. But no one else in that scenario benefits.
The top teams in Europe want what's best for their pockets. They don't care about the sport or anything else. Thieves are everywhere there is money. The only difference is in the US the money came before the sport culture. So the thieves entered at the ground level, instead of joining up later.
Not needed. No other legue in the states has it. I don’t see the nfl players or fans complaining it doesn’t make the legue competitive enough. Besides, San Diego is a perfect example. 500 million to get in, and to lose that investment in a year because the team had a bad season…no one, no one would make that investment.
you look at soccer with an American mindset you are not look at soccer/football as global sport which it is, so I see why u are viewing it like that just like any other American sports league, and its ok its just your opinion still
@@ballakick9080 MLS was designed to serve the purposes of the local fans within an MLS city first and foremost... everything else is meaningless.
@@davepazz580 I understand all of that from the jump.. but overtime the league grow, and throughout the growing process we see the try a lot a new thing and those thing did really stick, so the league come back around to soccer/football how its being play globally so pro/Reli is here sing any of the league in the US, it more likely will actually grow the leagues, but like I said I also overstand why persons wanna push back on pro/reli because that wasn't how the MLS was introduce like said from the jump so I get it ..
Have you asked any Oakland Raiders fans how happy they are with NFL? Or Houston Oiler fans? St Louis Rams fans? LA Raiders fans? Baltimore Colts fans? Yeah, didn't think so.
@@ballakick9080 American sports culture is different from European/South American sports culture and we need to embrace those differences instead of constantly trying to morph us into something that we are not. Football is a global sport but in this country we have a different structure which is more inline with what American sports fans want to see.
Pro/rel in MLS will never happen. As fans we need to push USL to follow through on the vote they promised us. If USL with pro/rel can start to challenge (they dont have to ecplipse them) MLS for fans, sponsors and TV viewers that could bring MLS to the table.
Forget MLS... its dead.
I think it would be interesting if they do pro/rel on the women side with the nwsl and usl. Which the Usl is debuting their division 1 pro women's league this August which follows the European calendar. To mention the nwsl doesn't own all the teams like mls does. I think it would be easier to get investors on board
First question- NO
Second question- NO
Third question- NO
USA and Canada should tried a promotion/regelation. Venuezuela and Panama are baseball countries or Cricket country like India and Pakistan, they have promotion and regulation football tiers. Basketball countries like Serbia and Turkey have promotion/regelation tiers leagues. Hockey country like Russia and Sweden have a promotion/regelation football tier leagues which Canada can have. Ruby similar to American Football which Ireland have promotion/regelation leagues. MLS and USA including Canada sport industry won't have them due to these teams are a form accumulation of wealth of money and power.
Pro/rel has no tradition in the USA, and most Americans have no interest in it. The tiny percentage of very vocal soccer fans that want pro/rel just want it because they want approval of fans outside the USA. But the approval of fans outside the USA isn't what soccer needs to succeed in the USA.
We have pro/rel soccer in the US (UPSL)
Nobody watches it though.
I agree with Chris that USL-C should strive to become D1 and then set up a pyramid. The current standard of viewing games doesn't really encourage people with the severe lack of stadiums. That's why I think they're holding out and unfortunately it will take a long time to get to that ideal point unless a swath of generous investors come in. Hopefully 2026 will be a catalyst now that a massively stronger soccer culture exists in the US compared to the last time we hosted.
Ehhh I doubt pro/rel reduces or eliminates pay to play. If there were to be more clubs in these smaller markets. They're not fully funding a youth academy set up let alone a full youth program. Some MLS clubs now are slashing their academy budgets.
It will depend on what type of team we are talking about. We have teams like Brommapojkarna from Stockholm who funds the best youth academy in Sweden, because thats the best way for them to compete and finance their club while being surrounded by giants. In England there are over 50 academies despite there are only 20 teams in the Premier League. Any team who wants a competitive edge through their youth academies cant outprice talents and they certainly cant be more expensive for parents than any of their rivals. In Atalanta for example it is free to play for any player that gets accepted into the academy.
And almost all teams, whether professional, semi-pro or amateur has youth teams withing their clubs, giving kids on all levels a chance to play football competitively throughout their careers.
Everyone also forgets that MLS has a seat on the USSF board, so there's no way they won't be heavily involved in the decision making process.
Until somebody can come up with a REALISTIC way to convince the owners of the MLS clubs to put their $100 Million plus investments at risk in a Pro-Rel system, it's never going to happen.
My biggest criticism is....There was what 12 years for this to happen. It was wide open NASL died MLS hadnt been founded. And it didnt happen.
I don’t know about investors, I don’t know about building talent, I just know pro/rel makes the league more interesting.
I am against pro/rel in the US, because it will hurt your league in the long run, the competitiveness between clubs would be awful the clubs that are promoted would go down almost immeduately like in other countries, one thing you have going right now is that the league is rich and has great potential and already has partnerships with big brands, most of portugal doesn't get anything good, some clubs don't even have stadiums of their owm, every team in the mls has a stadium just for football a kit by adidas great marketing and a real chance to win the title in the beggining of the year, the most important things right now are to fix the youth, scrap the territorial/state rules and implement the benfica model where every club has a bunch of academies around the country maybe everyone gets 1 academy per state and you play leagues that way, increase the salary cap each for example 7,25M in 2025 ,10M in 2026, 12,5M in 2028, 15M by 2030 and go for minimum salary to balance the squads, after that market it internationally and find a way to do the draft and be exciting if every club has academis the draft doesn’t make much sense to me. I think the MLS has a lot of potential, and i would love if every club in portugal or spain coulsd have that investment. I'm really excited to see what new teams come to MLS, who will be the 40 teams and when will the MLS have 40 teams and I want to see what would happen if the mls had a closed system with MLS, MLS2,3 and 4 where the small clubs still get money from the big MLS clubs, because everyone is owned by MLS and they can grow together.
I played club soccer my whole life until I graduated highschool. Pay to play kills normal kids from playing soccer competitively. Soccer shouldn’t be an expensive sport. Like they said kids who could be amazing players and play for the national team never play past 1st grade because it’s too expensive
Not implementing Pro/Rel in USA is equal to rewarding failures when the club is having bad season by staying in the league. No consequences for bad results means complacency and lack of accountability.
Bingo. Relegation forces owners to get better and be better there is no slacking. This forces the best of the best to compete against each other every week. MLS is so watered down at this point with about to be 32 teams here in a bit we need either 4 divisions or relegation this current model is boring.
@@tfries72 those with limited resources on the other hand, will be forced to be more innovative and/or rely heavily on their youth academies, thus potentially unearthing talents that can be matured by first team football early in their careers. Either way pro/rel works.
@@wanr5701 It does unfortunately sports in the states is all about money and business you would think putting a better product out would equal more money for some reason the model they are using is profitable good for them bad for us. Relegation would make MLS overall a far more competitive league than it currently is. I don't even watch its so watered down.
Pro/Rel is exciting and really exemplifies the dream of seeing your team clash with the big boys. However this will never happen. Closed leagues represent financial stability to owners and are on average twice as lucrative as open league teams. Search Party did a really good video on this. I'd love to see pro rel but MLS wants to be the NFL so that will never happen.
The owners dream of going from an open league to a closed league. It's basically as much of a waste of breath as anything discussing pro/rel in NA. Even if the MLS buy USL, it would sooner become major/minor leagues similar to that of baseball than pro/rel. I would rather we discuss how to revamp the homegrown rule and entice better academies and stronger investment in the league.
What US soccer needs is a strong base of 60 to 80,000(!) local grassroots clubs that provide the change for kids and adults to play soccer in an organized way. Soccer needs that local rooting to grow and to produce talent. Soccer is as much about playing as going to watch your own club's first team or going to support your local professional team. Soccer needs Boston (not New England) Revolution to play Worcester or Rhode Island or even another Boston team. And soccer needs local investors/sponsors to support their local club, not to take over.
I'm no expert and I hope one day promotion/relegation can become a thing, but at the moment I don't see how it could be implemented effectively unless there is serious financial protections in place. MLS clubs that get relegated would become financially unstable, investors would pull out, and clubs may dissolve. Getting new investors in would be difficult. What I expect to see is that MLS Next and USL eventually fully merge and develop full promotion/relegation themselves. Eventually when Div 2 and 3 are stabilized, and soccer is bigger in the US, MLS starts internal promotion/relegation
"MLS clubs that get relegated would become financially unstable, investors would pull out, and clubs may dissolve."
People neglect how often this happens in Europe as well.
Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga are not successful because of pro/relegation. They are successful because soccer is the most popular sport in those countries. The NFL is doesn’t have pro/rel. They are successful because football is the most popular sport in the US. The pro-pro/rel argument is a correlation/causation fallacy. I think another reason pro/rel has a challenge is scholastic sports. i think the place scholastic sports has in the US is uncommon, if not unique. The community teams you are talking about exist already. It’s the local high school and college/university.
If there were leagues where smaller teams could compete, you'd have more teams in smaller cities and you'd get more scholastic participation and grow the sport.
@@IsaacHenryinAKmaybe we should make the UPSL or NPSL.
Oh wait we have that already and you’ve never even heard of them.
Preach it.
The talk of a guy on a couch. What about the players? Do they matter? Or should the system stay the way it is because it benefits a small group of rich men and guys who watch soccer when the NFL and NBA aren't on?
@@rq7284 Players in closed systems tend to be *a lot* better off. They tend to have very strong unions and because the leagues are doing well financially they tend to get paid really well. The stability also works great for them.
And they tend to get "promoted" and "relegated" as individuals rather than as teams. In fact much of minor leagues in closed sports exist primarily to develop players and make them Major league worthy - which is very good for the players.
We (USA/MLS/USL) need it (so I agree), but with owners paying 500+ million to get into the league (which is nuts) we're not going to get it anytime soon. Some MLS teams just go through the motions (Colorado I'm looking at you, sure you won one MLS cup in 2010..but generally you suck). With an open system....any team has a chance, with the right ownership/leader direction. I do agree that the only way we are going to get it is if USL (or some similar league) creates an open system and challenges MLS. However, based on what happened with the Open Cup (I haven't seen your video on that as of the time I posted this.), it would appear that US Soccer is bowing down to MLS. It would be in US Soccer's interest help USL become a 1st division league and challenge MLS. Right now is all about the $$ and US Soccer and USL are playing 2nd fiddle to MLS. USL now has a 1st division women's league to challenge NWSL....so way not on the men's side??
Not related to the video but can anyone explain why USA sends A teams to Nations League and not Gold Cup?
Because of the window of who's available and what they're willing to do. They want their European players to rest during their offseason so it doesn't hurt their standing with their teams. The MLS players on the other hand are right at peak form in the MLS schedule.
The 2020 Nations League final got delayed to 2021. Because the delayed event took place mere weeks prior to the regularly scheduled 2021 Gold Cup, US Soccer chose to prioritize rest for the bulk of the A team players by calling them in for only one of the two events (the shorter one). Also due to the 2020 pandemic delays, the Hexagonal [which morphed into an Octagonal] international dates got pushed into later windows, displacing the 2022 Nation's League until after 2022 WC qualification was settled. As a result the 2022 Nations League final got pushed back to the June 2023 window. Again, mere weeks prior to a regularly scheduled Gold Cup. Again, US Soccer chose to deploy an A team for the shorter event, even more understandable since these players had also not gotten a break for the WC (because most played in it). The 2024 Nations League final, just concluded, turns out to be the first to fill its originally intended window and is also the first not to take place in a Gold Cup year. That there is also in 2024 a Copa America for the A team is coincidental. Expect the A team for the 2025 Gold Cup, especially because there are no other competitive matches in '25 (no WC qualifying and no Nations League.)
The worse thing that could happen is that MLS would proposed a closed pro/rel system within MLS that never becomes an open system
To have a complete discussion, Filippo, you now have to bring on someone who is against the idea of pro/rel. Just saying.
Working on it
I think pro/rel. would help increase the level of play, but the US is so big it would be a problem. You could have no teams on the west coast, or east coast. Could you image not having a 1st Division team in NY or LA? With pro/rel., that could happen. Now image MLS having talks with Apple or other broadcasters and streaming options when they don't have a team in a major market.
To work around this you would have to do pro/rel. by region. That would make the "M" in MLS look like it stand for "minor". US sports fans expect coast to coast teams in the top leagues.
I think dats y tac supports the Brazilian model
All good observations... I would add that for *true* pro/rel to take place and have it be really meaningful, MLS would have to dissolve the very foundation of its business model and have new teams created from scratch and become totally independent, self-sustaining entities from day one.
The mere fact that MLS is a single-entity league where all teams share revenues, impose salary caps and have "parity" as an underlying principle makes even the thought of implementing pro/rel not very logical...
Their plan it's to make çonferences like they already have in their other sports franchises. Same investors, same business strategy, that's why they are successful...🤷
In Germany, people are allowed to purchase stock in their favorite club.
I think Pro/Rel could certainly work, i just think the MLS needs to make some serious structure changes to do that. For example the owners need to be ACTUAL owners of their respective clubs. As of now they're just custodians that run the day to day for the MLS. Soccer is on the rise in the US, that can't be denied, but the MLS needs to make some changes to make the league the favorite of soccer fans in the US. If they dont they will just play second to the Prem or LigaMX or any other foreign league.
It's impossible for a top tier to have 30+ teams while doing pro/rel, but I have started to think. What if MLS remains a closed system, single entity, and caps out. Stops adding teams. But along with that, 12 teams from the USL Championship form a 1st division. It has to expand to 14 teams by year 3 of its existence. And then, maybe, USL implements pro/rel across three or four divisions, and that whole thing simply exists alongside MLS.
Could that work? Could we eventually have MLS with 30+ teams, a reserve system at tier 2 and 3 probably, and then a whole pyramid of 100+ additional pro teams from communities of all sizes, and the best teams at the top tier compete well with the best clubs on the rest of the continent.
The whale investors go to MLS, and all the other investors operate in the pro/rel pyramid. Could that potentially work? Could we have both systems, side by side and overlapping within the same country?
I think pro/rel isn't a necessity right now, but I think it probably will be in the future, it's just not something that's part of your guys culture, personally I'd like to see it though one day, it'll add another compelling storyline to US football (or US soccer as you call it, I just can't call it soccer, that's your guys word for it 😂) I think it'd be nice to have an open pyramid and give the opportunity for smaller clubs to dream, it'd be good for some players who get overlooked, to maybe go to a small club and prove there worth by potentially being a big part of a clubs rise, we see it here in England (look at Luton for example, in the 90's Fulham were in what's now known as league two and rose up to the prem) I think it'd be an overall good thing for you guys
I like pro/rel but believe that it should be regulated (team must meet league requirements) and all teams should playoff with the winner staying up. Not auto up/down.
The major thing about all of this is the idea of bringing all clubs in Americans soccer together. If you can do that its going to be massive for American soccer development more than anything... That's why it works for everyone in the world bar a few...
Seems baseball has had this conversation 150 yrs ago.
What's happening to soccer now is exactly what happened between NL and other baseball leagues ( AA, UA, AL, FL, PCL, etc).
Time to act now before it's too late.
Sports are a competition by definition. A closed league is not: so it's a fake competition parading as one. Why even watch it? More like a stage play than a league.
A "closed" league is designed to be competitive against other sports leagues... that's what you're missing here.
The "competition" within a "closed" league is among the players on two teams on the field of play on game day only...
The answer is no, pro-rel is just a massive waste of time and money, we only 32 MLS teams, theres room for a 2nd tier National league with 32 teams. and 64 teams in 4 regional leagues for the 3rd tier. nothing else is wanted or desired.
12:12 If a single person is not wealthy enough to qualify but you can gather 1000's you can form a corporation or trust to combine the wealth to do so.
Yes soccer in the us needs it. It drives interest in community level teams
There is logic, but I don't think there is any stomach for it from fans, owners or the MLS. You are looking at something that could take over 10 years to see any benefit if it all.
Pro/Rel is great for talent development! French Ligue may not be the best league in Europe but French football players are a hot commodity