And what I want to say is this, what the USL is doing is the most constructive thing anyone has done for soccer in the US since hosting the world cup in 1994.

MLS or a top level equivalent was always going to happen. The US is too big to not have a top flight league of some kind. And through some bumps and scrapes, even folding for a few hours in the 2000s, it has provided increasingly good top flight soccer in the US. But thanks to some of those same mechanisms that has allowed MLS to survive, it has also done a pretty good job of stifling, or at the very least not promoting, domestic soccer outside of itself.

For one, any time a lower division team has shown signs of life, they have been poached by MLS. Portland, Seattle, Minnesota, Vancouver, Orlando, Montreal, and now Cincinnati were all teams hanging out in the second division before getting “promoted”. Imagine for a second what a USL/NASL merged league would look like with this lineup:

Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Orange County, Las Vegas, Reno, Phoenix, San Antonio, St Louis, Oklahoma City, Austin, Indianapolis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Orlando, New York (Cosmos), Ottawa, Tampa Bay, Miami, and North Carolina. Yeah that’s a helluva what-if league.

But the thing of it is, MLS is going to look out for itself. And poaching the best teams from the lower divisions? Well, in a weird way, isn’t that what happens in the rest of the world? Except instead of relegation, the league is still growing to cover a country that is physically the size of Europe, so it doesn’t necessarily need to shed teams. In that sense, you can begin to justify this even to the most ardent soccer snob.

And ever since MLS was founded in 1996, the lower divisions beneath MLS have been a mess. Teams being founded and folded so fast you forget the NASL had a Virginia Beach team on its website for a year. Leagues change names, merge, split, and merge again. Teams jumping from league to league, chaos looks less like a ladder and more like monkey bars.

And out of that mess has come this newly focused USL. I don’t want to rehash history because that’s not what this piece is. But while the USL was founded in 2010, I think taking 2014 or 2015 as the start of this newly focused USL is more true to the situation on the ground. This newly focused USL has been an absolute godsend for lower division soccer. The league started off looking for stability, which it found with the MLS 2 teams. Now I know soccer purists hate the MLS 2 teams being in the USL and the second division of US soccer, but those same soccer “purists” like to forget that this is true in Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands as well. And yes, the Real Madrid and Ajax reserves win those leagues all the time.

The MLS 2 teams, along with very smart expansion and a lower cost of doing business compared to the rival NASL, allowed USL to flourish. And as annoying as some of the USL bureaucracy has been for FCC, it has grown leaps and bounds in just the few years Cincinnati has been a part of the league. Adding dedicated media production has increased the quality of broadcasts by an insane amount. Getting added to ESPN+ has been amazing for fans of the league and fans of soccer. Letting teams spend within their means has meant that the league doesn’t have a salary cap but individual teams need to make sure they don’t spend themselves into the ground. It’s a setup that allows for the acquisition of more and more talent, both on the field and in the coaches box. So much so that many of the remaining NASL teams jumped ship to the USL.

USL has made the second division in the US legitimate. And that’s no small feat. Which is why I am personally excited about the league’s plans for division three and below.