Does US soccer really need four first divisions? The answer isn't necessarily ‘no'

Yahoo

a day ago

Between this summer's Club World Cup, next year's World Cup, the enduring stature of the US women's national team, and MLS's steadily growing stable of teams and star attractions, soccer finally appears to be realizing its vast promise on US soil. Is there a limit to how much soccer America can handle? Several organizations are betting that the answer to that question is 'no'. In late April, the National Women's Soccer League – the oldest and biggest first division professional women's league operating in the US today – announced plans to launch a second division, despite concerns over the first division's financial sustainability and the NWSL's slipping status in a women's club game increasingly dominated by Europe.
That announcement came on the heels of news that the Women's Premier Soccer League, the longest-running active women's soccer league in the country, plans to launch WPSL Pro as a second-tier league late next year. Meanwhile the USL Super League, a first division rival to the more established NWSL, launched with eight teams in 2024; Sporting Club Jacksonville will become the league's ninth team when the second season starts this fall. There is nothing in the US Soccer Federation's rules to prevent multiple leagues from occupying the same division. From a single Division I competition two years ago, professional US women's soccer is now facing a future where it could very soon have two rival leagues at both first and second division level. Should all the proposed leagues launch as planned, there could be 50 women's professional soccer teams in the US by 2030. In 2023 there were just 12.
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The emerging patchwork of leagues, officiating bodies, and teams in US women's soccer can be bewildering to contemplate; keeping track of the growing family of acronyms alone – NWSL, WPSL, WPSL Pro, USL, and how they all relate to each other – is enough to induce a headache. But it's not only in the women's game that this kind of divisional competition is flourishing. In February the United Soccer League – the same USL behind the women's USL Super League – announced plans to launch a Division I men's league to rival MLS by 2027. This announcement came just a few days after a jury dismissed a civil anti-trust action brought by a former Division I rival, the now defunct North American Soccer League, against US Soccer and MLS over what it alleged was an unlawful scheme to curb competition in top tier men's professional soccer. Right when MLS imagined it might finally be clear of the threat posed by former and would-be rivals, USL – which already operates second and third division men's professional leagues – popped up to spoil the party.
With its vast media market, love of sports, cultural heft, and unquenchable thirst for consumption, America has long loomed as global soccer's white whale. But how much growth is too much? Excitement, innovation, expanding access to the sport, and giving fans choice: these are all, of course, the regular platitudes that accompany the announcement of new leagues, and this latest flurry of divisional growth in US soccer has been no different. 'By uniting people through soccer and bringing Division One to more cities, we're not just growing the sport – we're creating lasting opportunities while building a more sustainable and vibrant soccer ecosystem in the US,' argued CEO Alec Papadakis in announcing USL's plans for the first division league.
Unquestionably the US market presents a massive opportunity for soccer, even with all the obvious progress made over the past few decades, and in principle, assuming the startups meet all the customary financing criteria, there's nothing to hold the expansion in leagues and teams back. US Soccer's professional league standards – the requirements that leagues must meet in order to be officially sanctioned – spell things out clearly. All Division I men's competitions, for instance, must have at least 12 teams to apply (and 14 by year three); every stadium should have a minimum capacity of 15,000; and at least 75% of the league's teams have to play in metropolitan markets of at least one million people. Compare those metrics to America's raw demographic data and it seems obvious that the US market can support way more than the 30 men's Division I teams currently competing in MLS: there are more than 50 metropolitan statistical areas in America with more than one million inhabitants, and at least 11 of them pass the five million mark. This suggests a vast consumer reservoir just waiting to be tapped.
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The history of America's sporting experience points in a slightly less bullish direction: across the NFL, NBA, and MLS, leagues that have been around for much longer than MLS and are far more mature in their segmentation and capturing of distinct fandoms and consumer markets, it's rare for cities to have more than one team, and even the country's biggest agglomerations like LA and New York have no more than two home franchises in a single sport. Both MLS and NBA have 30 teams, while the NFL has 32; however confident commissioner Don Garber might sound in the league's prospects, MLS on its own may already be approaching the ceiling of its development and expansion in this country, and that's before we even consider the impact that new entrants like the USL will have on the incumbent's vitals. Yes, there is room for soccer to grow in the US, but it seems unlikely the sport can grow this much this quickly.
The sanctioning hurdles that have to be cleared for women's professional leagues, like the scale of the commercial ambitions attached to them, are smaller than they are for the men's game, which may lead some to conclude that women's soccer will stand a better chance of supporting the new profusion in leagues and teams. The NWSL is expanding healthily: the league will welcome its 15th and 16th teams, from Boston and Denver, next year, and a recently inked $240m, four-year media rights deal with ESPN represents a powerful boost in TV revenue. But these encouraging signs can't conceal the very real cultural troubles the league has had in recent years: most notably, a series of investigations in 2022 found that verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse was widespread and systematic throughout the NWSL, and a $5m restitution fund has now been established to compensate players affected.
Meanwhile the competitive threat posed by the European leagues, which are coming to be seen as the pinnacle of the women's game at club level after years of lagging America, continues to grow, causing jitters at the top levels of a league used to setting the global benchmark. In a bid to stay competitive with Europe and the upstart USL Super League, where there's no player draft and free agency rules, the NWSL and its player association last year agreed on a new collective bargaining agreement to eliminate its draft, raise the salary cap, and free other restrictions on player movement. The question now is whether the league's new era of spending can be sustainable – especially in an environment where many franchises aren't profitable, salary creep outstrips income growth, and an exodus of top talent to Europe means teams are overpaying for a more mediocre on-field product. As one general manager put it to ESPN last year: 'I think this league is growing too fast.' How can a competition facing headwinds and challenges like these credibly claim to be ready to stand up a second division?
Whether all of these leagues can survive together may ultimately be the wrong way of looking at things – and not just because they almost certainly can't. The story of professional sports over the last century or so is a tale of secession, insurrection, absorption, and consolidation, and the US, with its staunch tradition of anti-trust law and openness to commercial competition, has been a breeding ground for breakways and upstarts. The NFL, to take the most obvious example, matured through the competitive energies stoked by rival leagues like the AAFC of the postwar era and the AFL, which rose to become the NFL's primary competitor in the 1960s; eventually the AFL and the NFL merged, creating the NFL as we know it today. In the decades since, the NFL has faced periodic challenges to its supremacy, most infamously from the Donald Trump-aligned USFL in the 1980s, but it has seen off all competitors with relative ease; it's fair to speculate that the NFL might not be quite so hegemonic today had it not been hardened through battle. The real benefit of the upstart leagues may be to make the incumbents stronger.
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Can they also make the incumbents better? The challenge posed by the European leagues and the USL has already pushed the NWSL to abandon the player draft, which has been one of American soccer's defining features in the era of professionalization. Whether this is a good thing or not remains to be seen – league parity, after all, is one of the great historic strengths of US sports – but it's possible that this latest blossoming of league rivals could push sometimes recalcitrant incumbents to embrace long-resisted changes. The USL Super League, for example, runs a fall-to-spring season calendar that makes it an outlier in the US but aligns it with Europe – and could eventually become an example to emulate for the NWSL. In the men's game, the USL's plans to launch a first division competition put it firmly in line to run a three-tier professional pyramid with relegation and promotion. Could this push MLS, traditionally a bastion of resistance to pro-rel, to embrace a multi-divisional future? Or will these threats, combined, push MLS and the NWSL to overreach, spending and growing beyond their means in a rush to stay at the top of the sport?
Rebellion, secession, conquest, and expansion have long been central elements of the American experience. Now these themes are set to play out across US soccer, and the results promise to be every bit as unpredictable as the sputtering American experiment.