ProRelForUSL – a new tradition unlike any other, but like so many others
ProRel4USA is here. Tell what’s his name. It’s finally here. Kinda. It’s here for the USL at least. The league announced on Wednesday that it is planning to start a promotion and relegation format starting with the 2028 season. It will feature a three tier pyramid in a yet to be determined exactly how it will all work system.
To be sure, this is a notable step for American soccer. The promotion and relegation debate has raged for years and while the discussion has been loud it’s never been clear how the setup would work in the unique landscape of the sport in this country. Major League Soccer is the top domestic league in terms of viewers and revenue, but it is a closed franchise based system where owners are effectively buying into the league as much as they are owning a team as opposed to the club based model most of the rest of the world uses.
That distinction is important and one that the league tries very hard to move focus away from to some degree of success by focusing on the community aspect of the support the fans have created over the years. That community looks an awful lot like what might be seen abroad, but when push comes to shove an owner will make a decision that leaves that community behind for whatever their own interests are.
USL will bring promotion and relegation into this scene meeting somewhere in the middle of the MLS single entity structure and club systems based elsewhere. It will bring with it the romantic notions and expectations of pro/rel where teams have to fight and bleed for every point lest they suffer the unimaginable fate of the drop, miss out on bazillions of dollars in promotion rewards, create a competitive environment that football nations like Spain, Argentina (sorta), and Azerbaijan enjoy and in some cases have won the World Cup because of, and will make soccer more popular than the other sports that are played in the country. That’s the dream at least.
The reality will be that the USL pyramid will be uniquely American. The league will be competing against MLS for attention and will have to fight to attract fans or bring new ones in and along with them the sponsors and media deals that are the source of why the Premier League is so successful. It’s also why Spain is able to leverage the competition that promotion and relegation creates to be successful internationally, apparently. At the end of the day, the reason the top five leagues in the world are so good is that they get the most investment and revenue – gobs of untold fortunes are what builds rosters worth $1.5 billion full of the best players in the world playing soccer everyone wants to see, not promotion and relegation. That doesn’t mean that it won’t work or be successful, but to start seeing the benefits that the structure supposedly brings USL will need to have the financial resources that are behind the success of those leagues and the national team players who play in them.
That said, MLS is the elephant in the room when it comes to how investment, commercial conditions, and the structure of the American soccer pyramid work for and against developing the sport in the country. MLS has a salary cap and roster rules that the owners use to limit their own spending so that the league has greater competitive equity and makes it more profitable for franchisees. It is claimed that owners do not need to invest more into their clubs to improve the league overall. While USL may see changes to this, how successful the league is in gaining investment and viewers that might otherwise go to MLS will ultimately determine how the league leverages promotion and relegation to be more profitable.
The USL plan uncovers a deeper issue behind all of the talk about promotion and relegation. American soccer will have a competitive structure that the rest of the world enjoys, but it will still be missing the central elements that has made the sport the most popular in the world. The sport has enjoyed generations of tradition, cultural relevance, club loyalty, and commercial investment that the USA is still trying to catch up on. In the end, promotion and relegation will change the importance of games for teams in the USL, but will need to deliver on the commercial and cultural foundation of the best leagues in the world in order for the vision of American soccer as a global force to be realized.
