LaBonta, Chawinga score goals and Current beat Spirit 2-0
Temwa Chawinga scored her second goal of the season and the Kansas City Current remained undefeated with a 2-0 victory over the Washington Spirit in National Women's Soccer League play on Saturday.
Elsewhere in the NWSL, the Seattle Reign beat North Carolina Courage 2-1; Bay FC eased past Racing Louisville 2-0; and the San Diego Wave took care of the Utah Royals 3-2.
Lo'eau LaBonta gave Kansas City the lead from the penalty spot in the 56th minute, firing into an open net after sending Spirit goalkeeper Aubrey Kingsbury the wrong way. It was the 10th successful penalty kick of the Kansas City captain's NWSL career.
Spirit head coach Jonatan Giráldez turned to his bench to bring on U.S. Olympian Trinity Rodman, who appeared to make an immediate impact with a goal in the 61st minute, but it was offside.
Chawinga, the reigning league MVP, made it 2-0 just before the final whistle, scoring on a counterattack sparked by a long ball up the field from Hallie Mace.
The contest was played in front of a sold-out crowd of 19,254 at Audi Field, the third straight home sellout for the Spirit going back to the 2024 playoffs.
Bugg rocket seals Seattle win
The Reign's 18-year-old Jordyn Bugg scored her first professional goal in the 56th minute at First Horizon Stadium in Cary, North Carolina. She collected a high clearance, took a touch, and then smashed the ball from 37 yards out into the top right hand corner of the net to make it 2-0.
Jess Fishlock made her 200th career appearance for the Reign, and marked the occasion by opening the scoring in the first half.
Aline Gomes pulled one back for North Carolina just three minutes after Bugg's goal.
Lema stars in Bay road win
Rookie Karlie Lema intercepted the ball on the edge of her own box, and then dribbled almost the entire length of the field at PayPal Park before striking a swerving shot into the corner of the net to make it 2-0 in first half stoppage time.
It was Lema's first professional goal and she also becomes the first rookie to score for Bay.
Joelle Anderson opened the scoring in the 12th minute.
Louisville midfielder Savannah DeMelo left the match because of lightheadedness and was taken to the hospital as a precaution.
Wave holds off Royals
Gia Corley scored the winning goal and the San Diego Wave held on for the win at Snapdragon Stadium.
With 16 minutes left in the match, Corley intercepted a poor goal kick from Utah's Mandy McGlynn and immediately lasered the ball into the net to make it 3-2.
Corley earned an assist on the Wave's opening goal, weaving her way along the touchline and sliding a pass across the face of the goal for María Sánchez to tap in. Delphine Cascarino had a breakaway dribble and pass to set up Adriana Leon from point-blank range for the Wave's second goal.
The Royals responded when Claudia Zornoza curled a free-kick over the wall and into the back of the net in the 61st minute to make it 2-1. Mina Tanaka tied it with a goal in the 72nd minute.
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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer
Theo Lloyd-hughes, The Associated Press
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Chicago Tribune
11 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Chicago Stars players started trivia nights for fun. The result was a stronger team bond.
The NWSL season is long, with games starting in March and rolling through November. The Chicago Stars have found a fun way to release the pressures of the year — and bond. The soccer players meet up weekly to try their hand at Waddayaknow Trivia, a free event started in 2008 at multiple bars in Illinois to keep family and friends connected in the Chicago area. Everyone needs a break, but trivia keeps the mental — and competitive — juices going. 'It's really nice to connect to something that's not on the field,' said defender Sam Staab, who has one goal and one assist this season. While Staab and the rest of her teammates knew each other to a degree, they were not the 'closest of friends' starting out. But playing trivia has brought them closer than ever. 'Now they look forward to hanging out every (week) and shoot the s—,' Staab said. 'Eat, play some trivia, hang out and catch up. So it's fun, and not soccer, which is really fun, too.' For the 1-2-8 Stars, formerly the Red Stars, they discovered these trivia nights at a normal team hangout at a bar. The club met up in 2024 to watch Caitlin Clark — whose Indiana Fever visited the Chicago Sky at United Center on June 7 — break the college basketball scoring record in her senior season at Iowa. A worker came up to the group with a suggestion. 'We were having dinner at the place and they (said to) come up and sign up for trivia and it starts in 20 minutes,' Stabb said. 'We all looked (at each other) and said 'Oh my gosh, we should totally play.'' The competitive spirit of the Stars looks the same whether on the pitch or guessing trivia answers. Once a year, there is a Tournament of Champions where over 300 teams compete for a grand prize. The Stars take the event 'seriously,' as well as the weekly qualifiers. 'You wager what you think is best for each answer, so Sam is also our wagerer,' midfielder Shea Groom said. Staab added: 'And I keep people on track as well. I'm a control freak, if you couldn't tell.' The Stars won their most recent round of trivia, with a full squad on hand: Along with Groom and Stabb, the group included forward Catherine Barry, defender Hannah Anderson, midfielder Maitane Lopez, forward Ava Cook, goalkeeper Halle Mackiewicz and defender Justina Gaynor. Each player has their individual role for answering questions, with random knowledge a necessity. Hailing from different areas of the globe brings a worldwide perspective to the trivia team, which is an advantage. 'We all went to college for different things, where maybe other teams work together and are in the same field,' Groom said. 'Ava is our music expert, Alyssa (Naeher) is pretty much random knowledge and I like to claim U.S. geography and African geography. We really balance each other out.' 'We have this diverse background,' Staab said. 'We're able to answer a lot of questions, or just have at least educated guesses on a lot of things. And we just kind of kept going with it.' The squad — named Cheeseburgers in Paradise — is on a winning streak now, claiming victory in their last two trivia outings. They usually finish in the Top Five, with the first-place prize a $50 restaurant credit. 'We got into a streak where we were up to probably $300, then we started (buying) dinner and actually eating,' Groom said. There's not a certain method of training for trivia days, as any question in any category can pop up on any given day. Categories can sway from old sitcoms to presidential history. Groom tries to stay prepared each week, as much as she can be, at least. 'I memorized the entire map of Africa,' Groom said. The trivia nights are 'pretty chill,' a welcome feeling for any professional athlete. And when sports is your day job, you might as well play that card when it helps. 'There was a question about the World Cup that Alyssa (Naeher) knew, and we wrote on the bottom (and asked) if we get extra points if we have a winner,' Groom said, referring to the Stars goalkeeper's two World Cup wins. 'And they did give us extra points.'
Forbes
11 hours ago
- Forbes
How This Buyout Pioneer Built A Fortune From Private Equity To Soccer
Lauren Leichtman wasn't always into soccer. That changed after she watched the 1999 Women's World Cup final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, where Brandi Chastain scored the winning penalty kick for the U.S. women's national team—and her celebration, which included falling to her knees and ripping off her shirt, made front pages across the country. Over the following years, she and her husband, Arthur Levine, who lived in Los Angeles, would often drive past the UCLA soccer field while picking up their daughter from school. They soon started donating to the university—including helping rebuild the soccer team's locker room—and struck up a friendship with the team's coach, Jill Ellis, who would go on to coach and win two World Cups with the U.S. women's team and then served as president of the National Women's Soccer League's San Diego Wave from 2021 until last December. Leichtman's growing passion for soccer culminated in the couple's purchase of the Wave for an estimated $113 million last October. "We started looking at buying a women's sports team about three years ago," she says in a video interview from her home in Miami, with framed photos of her family displayed on a bookshelf behind her. 'It's something that interests us, it's a good investment, and it's something we can do together as a family.' Two of her three kids are involved in supporting the team's management, and Leichtman and her family attend as many games as possible. In May, Alex Morgan—who won two World Cups with the U.S. women's national team and also captained the Wave until her retirement in 2024— joined the Wave as a minority investor. Leichtman knows a thing or two about good investments. In 1984, she cofounded Beverly Hills, California-based private equity firm Levine Leichtman Capital Partners (LLCP) alongside her husband, investing in small businesses that needed money and targeting successful founders who had built companies with $30 million to $40 million in revenues. Over the next 40 years, the couple built their small wife-and-husband shop into an $11 billion (assets) buyout firm with blue-chip investors ranging from the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) to publicly-traded asset manager Hamilton Lane. While they stepped back from day-to-day management in 2020, Leichtman and Levine still own the firm, which makes up the bulk of their fortunes. Add in their private investments, real estate and the San Diego Wave—the team is now worth an estimated $165 million—and Forbes estimates that Leichtman and Levine are each worth $1.3 billion, ranking Leichtman 26th on Forbes' 2025 list of America's Richest Self-Made Women. Throughout the years, Leichtman and Levine have stuck to what they know best. They invest in businesses with positive cash flow. They look for experienced entrepreneurs and management teams who want to stay on to run the company and keep an ownership stake after the deal is closed. And they use a combination of debt and equity to ensure regular cash payments from interest on the debt. "We created this strategy when we were doing this to find a way to fund our lifestyle without investing all our capital as equity," recalls Leichtman. 'We didn't have any other money, so we came up with the idea of investing a portion of the capital as a debt security and another portion as equity. At the time it was two-thirds debt and one-third equity, and the debt got a 13% cash coupon which was paid to us every month.' Since they started raising money with outside investors in 1994, LLCP's funds have invested in more than 100 companies and sold investments in 80 of them for a total of $11.5 billion, compared to an aggregate investment cost in those sold businesses of $4.8 billion. That nearly 2.4 multiple of invested capital rivals those of private equity heavyweights from Blackstone to KKR. LLCP now has eight offices in five countries, including four in the U.S., and invests across three broad categories: middle-market U.S. companies with revenues from $50 million to $250 million, smaller U.S. firms with less than $50 million in revenues, and foreign—mostly European—companies with revenues around $30 million or higher. Some of its best-known investments include restaurant franchises Tropical Smoothie Cafe and Wetzel's Pretzels, but the firm has also scored big exits in industries ranging from pipe fittings to air quality control. "They've got a great eye for finding these specific niche businesses that have a ton of potential and then matching up appropriate management to go do it," says Harley Kaplan, CEO of aerospace and defense component firm The Thermal Group, who previously led two LLCP portfolio companies as CEO. Another key to their success has been their partnership. Levine, a former accountant, sourced deals and focused on their numbers, while Leichtman brought her expertise in law to help management at portfolio companies grow their business. "It's that combination of skills. They complement each other," says Kevin Fritzmeyer, who ran FlexXray, a company that provides x-ray inspection services for food safety, when it was owned by LLCP before it was sold in 2021. "Arthur's a salesman, he is going to be out front and getting things done, and [Lauren] is making sure that things stay between the lines." From their wedding in 1979 to running the firm together and then investing through their family office, it's been a successful partnership. Says Levine of his wife's strengths: "It's her judgment and her rationality and calmness. I can get very excited about doing a deal and she doesn't. And that's why it's very important." She jumps in to add, "Arthur's extremely good on the numbers side. He can really see things that I just don't see, but it all has to work together. I'm seeing other things that he doesn't see." Alex Morgan retired as the San Diego Wave's captain in October, the same month that Leichtman and Levine bought the team. Seven months later, Morgan joined as a minority investor. The team's value has already increased by 46%. "They're so undervalued, it seemed like a no brainer," says Levine of the investment. Leichtman was born in Los Angeles in 1949. Her parents divorced when she was three years old. Her mother, a housewife, later remarried and Leichtman was raised in a mixed family of five stepchildren. When she was 10 years old, Leichtman remembers her mother telling her that she regretted never pursuing a career of her own. "She was kind of trapped in, being supported by her husband," says Leichtman. "She had two kids when she divorced my father. So I just said, 'that's not going to happen to me. I have to be able to support myself.'" She started working odd jobs at 14 and continued through her undergraduate years at the University of Colorado and Cal State Northridge, working as a file clerk, bank teller, waitress and cashier. In college, she wanted to become a psychologist, so after graduation she spent nine months as a residential counselor at a treatment center for emotionally disturbed kids, before moving to a community mental health center in South Central L.A. for six months. But Leichtman realized she wanted to pursue another career, so she applied to graduate school for law and architecture, and got into both. 'I was not that great with numbers, believe it or not," she says, laughing. "I was afraid if I built something it might fall down, so I went to law school. Basically, it was a crapshoot." While she was studying law at Southwestern Law School in L.A., she met her future husband, Levine, at the University of California, Los Angeles' law library in 1975. At the time, the New York state native was working as an accountant and attending night classes for an MBA at UCLA. "I did not want to get married until I knew I could support myself," says Leichtman. "He kept asking me, I kept saying no. Finally he gave up and said, 'just let me know when you want to get married.' Three months later, we got married." After marrying in 1979, the couple then decamped for New York, where Leichtman got an advanced degree in securities law—an L.L.M—at Columbia and then worked in the Securities and Exchange Commission's enforcement division. Levine—who had by then gotten his MBA—attended law school at Columbia, but he kept traveling back-and-forth between L.A. and New York for his work at radio network Westwood One, which he had cofounded three years earlier. The firm was growing rapidly following then-President Ronald Reagan's deregulation of the radio industry in 1981, the same year the couple's first son was born in New York. In 1982, the pair moved back to L.A. so that Levine could focus on Westwood One. Leichtman got a job at a law firm in Los Angeles, but after a year there she decided to leave. 'It was a horrible working environment for a woman," she says. "I had a little boy, I wanted to work part-time. They didn't want me to. It was just not good in a hundred ways." She spent a year and a half practicing law on her own, helping lawyers with securities cases and depositions. Then in 1984, after helping take Westwood One public as its president, Levine decided to sell his shares in the firm and leave the company. (Between 1984 and 1986, he sold an estimated $10 million of stock, according to industry magazine Channels: The Business of Communications.) The couple then decided to start investing their money. 'I said, 'What are we going to do? He said, 'I don't know. We're going to figure it out as we go along.' And that's basically what we did," says Leichtman. Adds Levine: "We had no partners, no management fees, no nothing, just ourselves.' Their first investment was in IDB Communications, a satellite transmission business that did live transmission of concerts around the world. When they sold it in 1987, they netted 150 times their initial investment. "I said, 'hey, this is an easy business, just give a guy money,'" says Levine, chuckling. "Then the stock market crashed.' Their strategy of structured equity—a combination of debt and shares—was attractive to cash-strapped companies during the crisis. Business owners at the time, especially in hard-hit California, didn't want to give up too much equity, but needed financing. Their next deal was for software and video game developer The Software Toolworks, then chaired by radio announcer and TV host Les Crane, which produced the popular chess computer game Chessmaster 2000. "They didn't want to sell equity. They really needed help. What we were doing was helping them professionalize their companies," says Leichtman. 'If they went to a private equity firm at that time for any kind of help, the firm would say, 'okay, we want 90% of your business.' So we were able to take 25% of the business and leave them with the rest. That's how we came up with the structure." Photos, From Left: Daniela Amodei, Selena Gomez, Gwynne Shotwell. Illustration by Ben Kirchner for Forbes In those early years, Leichtman sometimes faced pushback in an industry where few women rise to the top. "Initially, we'd have meetings with people who would come in and they would wait for Arthur to come in. Finally, a couple of years in, I just said, 'Look, Arthur's not coming in, so if you're interested in us investing in you, you should talk to me. Otherwise we can end the meeting right now,'" recalls Leichtman. As the firm grew in size and prominence and later raised funds from institutional investors, Leichtman's track record spoke for itself. "After that, it just got easier and easier." By the early 1990s, they had made back 15 to 16 times their money on the seven deals they had invested in together. But they also started running into a problem where the companies they were investing in needed more capital than they could commit—and Levine was against bringing in third-party investors. Then one night in 1993, while watching TV, they saw an announcement from the treasurer of California looking for companies willing to invest in the state. Levine and Leichtman reached out to her and applied to CalPERS, the largest public pension fund in the U.S., for seed money to expand their firm and invest in more companies in the state. "We asked CalPERS for $100 million, thinking they'd give us $10 million to $25 million," recalls Levine. Adds Leichtman: "After nine months of due diligence, they gave us the hundred." After their first fund did well, the couple raised a second fund in 1998, bringing in outside investors beyond CalPERS, including pension funds in Arizona and New York. Through downturns like the bursting of the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s, the couple honed in on 'recession-proof' businesses that returned a profit even during tough economic times. "Our ability to grow our private equity firm had two components. One is our ability to return cash to our partners,' says Leichtman, recalling fundraising meetings in the early 2000s when she would often meet small pension funds in New England who told her that LLCP was the only firm returning any cash to them, thanks to its strategy of combining equity investments with debt. 'Also, our ability to compete with private equity funds and offering these new entrepreneurs who had just some sweat equity the ability to really have a meaningful piece of the company." The deals came fast, with LLCP making successful exits from companies as diverse as fast-food franchise Quiznos and oil & gas pipe fittings manufacturer Hackney Ladish, which they sold for more than three times their investment in December 2008. That same year the firm raised its first billion dollar fund. Since handing the reins of the firm to co-managing partners Michael Weinberg and Matthew Frankel in 2020, Leichtman and Levine have turned their focus to succession planning and managing their family office. Leichtman runs the San Diego wave as the team's governor and has also expanded the couple's philanthropy, focused in southern California. Among her most notable gifts is a $1 million pledge to Southwestern Law School, Leichtman's alma mater, to provide financial assistance for students interested in business and provide them with a mentor at LLCP. The pair have also donated to UCLA's soccer program and established two endowed chairs at the university—one for women's health research and the other for astrophysics, held by Andrea Ghez, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. Leichtman and Levine haven't lost their eye for investing. They've put their own money into AI and robotics companies that are doing "extremely well," per Levine. But after four decades in private equity, Leichtman is enjoying bringing the couple's three kids into the family office and the family's charitable foundation. That's where she believes she can make a greater difference with the fruits of her success. "We've been so fortunate. One of the first things we did was to call Planned Parenthood and UCLA and give them a million dollars to build a building they had asked for,' says Leichtman. 'I just feel like we don't need to buy another car or another painting. These are things that are really, really important."
Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Yahoo
Does US soccer really need four first divisions? The answer isn't necessarily ‘no'
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. Advertisement Related: The reckless fantasy of austerity as a panacea is coming for European football | Aaron Timms 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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.
