An Open Letter to US Soccer fans

Wake up, America.

As ridiculous and tragicomic as our failure to qualify for the World Cup may be (getting knocked out by a nation no larger than the city of Dallas) there is a potential silver lining to this otherwise coal-black cloud: we have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to effect real, systemic change in American Soccer, the change we desperately need to spare our children and grandchildren from ever suffering this indignity again.

Much has been written already about needed change, from the modest and obvious (new coaches, new players) to the more strategic (new US Soccer leadership, a different developmental approach), but at the head of the stream of all these issues is the Mother of Them All, looming so large that many American sports fans can’t even see it: we’re the only major soccer nation on earth without promotion and relegation.

That’s nuts, you may say. What does a league system have to do with our current woes? Let me break it down for you:

• Because we don’t have pro/rel (and instead have a closed, contrived oligopoly in MLS and USL), the game does not attract the sponsorship and TV rights to draw in more fans and, crucially, more TV dollars from the US and abroad.
• Because we don’t have pro/rel, we don’t have the competitive pressures or the money necessary to attract the world’s best players. Without those players, we cannot hope to compete at the international level because American players aren’t playing alongside them and improving themselves. There simply is no substitute for the pressure of pushing to send your team up to the next level, or that of fighting to keep from going to the next league down.
• Because we don’t have pro/rel (with its pressures or its money), lower division teams, deprived of the chance of league advancement, cannot afford to build out robust, competitive programs for youth and player development to develop local talent across our huge nation, so our oft-touted size is largely unleveraged. Leicester City, recent English Premier League Champions, is dwarfed by my own city of Chattanooga in size, yet without the opportunity to advance, teams in lower levels cannot attract the capital and the engagement to grow and expand. Academies attached to healthy second and third division teams (beyond the closed ranks of MLS’ handful of developmental programs in a few selected markets) would produce and identify thousands of talented American players.
• And because the lack of pro/rel means we’re essentially out of sync with the rest of the world, the US remains a reputational backwater of international soccer, where the sport is permanently relegated to lower-class status, failing to attract our best player talent, our best management talent, and the full corporate support it deserves.

Why, then, you may ask, isn’t this obvious to everyone? Why haven’t I heard more about it? Why is there no outcry to change it? Frankly, because American Soccer has been controlled by an incestuous, second-rate plutocracy comprised of people whose interest in American soccer is primarily in enriching themselves, not in what’s best for the American game.

Unlike the rest of the world, the US has closed, for-profit leagues (MLS and USL), built primarily to benefit the league owners, not to produce great soccer talent (and for what it’s worth, these leagues are now officially a worldwide joke by virtue of this colossal failure). When this closed system was contrived, the excuse given was that it was necessary to build a “greenhouse” system to nurture a fledgling league. If this was ever really the case, that day has certainly long since passed. As the prominent soccer economist Stefan Szymanski reminds us, the economics of “real” soccer in the rest of the world are this: all but the slimmest profits get competed away in the pursuit of better players. In MLS’ closed, single-entity world, however, all players work for the league and are leased to the teams, with salary caps, so that the whole entity can (theoretically) be more profitable. The free market cannot function effectively in this system, and it will never be able to, as the world player market keeps chugging right along even as MLS persists in keeping its head buried in the sand. As for the second-division USL, it’s poorly-designed franchise saddles teams with crippling franchise fees, hampering growth and preventing them from paying more for the best players they could otherwise afford. American players are therefore not exposed to the world’s best, and we languish in mediocrity.

As for why it’s not more widely discussed, it’s a poorly-guarded secret that the Major League Soccer/Soccer United Marketing/US Soccer oligarchy (all three have common leadership and are functionally a cabal) have had a running PR war on media discussion of promotion and relegation in this country. As unbelievable as this may seen, it is absolutely true. Because they effectively control the vast majority of soccer broadcast rights in the US- and thus American soccer media- this is quite easy for them to do.  I have witnessed multiple examples of American soccer’s sports personalities threatened, demoted, and even fired for attempting to express their views on the subject. Their silence is purchased relatively cheaply by their attornies with Releases and Non-Disclosure Agreements (just like Donald Trump’s and Harvey Weinstein’s) so we very rarely hear pro/rel openly discussed- much less advocated- in the media.

So why is MLS- whose billionaire owners are the real issue here- so afraid of pro/rel? As always, one simply needs to follow the money: because it would make doing business much more expensive for them. They’d have to compete on the open, world market for player talent, and their cost of capital would rise considerably as the possibility of being relegated down to a lower league would drive up the risk of lending money to them (because of the presumed lower sponsorship, TV, and ticket revenues there), and would lower the paper value of their teams, overnight. But what they’re missing is that the incredible double-edged drama of promotion and relegation- multiplied by the number of leagues in this country participating in such a system- would very likely dramatically increase the appeal of the sport and the engagement level of the fans, and the money in the new pro/rel system would likely soon dwarf that generated in the old, closed system. Would they still be able to get $250MM for the privilege of owning an MLS team, though? Nope, and too bad. American Soccer has suffered enough for their greed already.

Worst of all, the greed and stubbornness of the old guard owners in hanging onto their fake, closed system for fear of relegation has now collectively relegated all of us, as Americans, to the basement of world soccer for at least the next four years. If we can’t see that now, and don’t have the courage and fortitude to rise up and change it, then that’s where we belong to stay.

Wake up, America. It’s like being in The Matrix: once you see the truth, it isn’t complicated. Just walk out and demand the simple reality of promotion and relegation that the rest of the world already enjoys. If that happens, the US will soon be on a path back to becoming one of the World’s greatest soccer nations.  If it doesn’t, all this suffering will have been for nothing.