So, let me try to summarize a few of my thoughts so far:

Stronger local soccer is one of the key pieces to stronger national soccer. I don’t see any way in which you can argue against this. #SupportLocalSoccer

“Support local soccer” really translates to “support lower-level soccer.” There’s more to soccer in the United States than those 20 MLS teams. There’s a good chance that there’s a local team near you — and a good chance you may not even know about them. There are now ~200 teams across the NASL, USL, NPSL, and PDL in the United States.

If you live somewhere that doesn’t have a club within a one hour drive, then go build one.

Admittedly, that last one is a bit of a doozy, so let’s unpack that a bit:

Creating a club from scratch is a lot of work, but it’s not impossible

Hey, we did it in nine months while having day jobs! There’s probably 500 different things you’ll have to do to get a club off the ground, and if you chip away at one or two of them each day — and you find some folks to help along the way, and you don’t quit when things feel impossible — you will get get them all done. Eventually.

For me, big difference between launching a tech startup and a soccer startup is that there are a lot more resources available online to help guide people through the process of building the former. So, maybe Stockade FC can help fix that.

Creating a club from scratch is expensive, but not prohibitively so

Our budget for this year will run approximately $50,000. Yes, you could build a club for cheaper and, yes, you could spend five times as much, $50K should hopefully get us pretty close to break-even. Our revenue comes from a mix of sponsorships, merchandise and ticket sales.

Think of it like a wedding. There’s four-to-six big ticket items that add up quickly: field rental, transportation, kits/gear, coaches/trainers, players, marketing.

Said another way, all this “starting a club from scratch” talk isn’t just lighting money on fire — there’s a legitimate way to make clubs work financially over time. We set up Stockade FC as a non-profit, we’re currently not paying our players, and we’ve gone very heavy on social media and earned media (vs. paid media) to promote ticket sales and merchandise.

Our story so far has been one of volunteers raising their hands and pitching in every which way to help make this happen (special thanks to Dan, Kale, Nick, Marjorie, JP, Randy and others!). The plan all along has been to keep our club on a strict and modest budget with the intent of sharing our financials so we could show others how it can be done.

(Note: Kingston Stockade Football Club is operating as a non-profit via fiscal sponsorship under Innovative Charitable Initiatives, Inc., (ICI) a 501(c)3 tax exempt charitable organization. A copy of ICI’s latest annual report may be obtained upon request by writing to Innovative Charitable Initiatives, Inc., 272 Broadway, Albany, NY 12204 or from the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau, 120 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, New York 10271.)

Creating a club from scratch has to be worth all the time and effort required

Creating a club from scratch obviously requires an investment of both time and money. And while it’s possible to create a break-even-or-better business from it, there are currently zero growth opportunities within the existing US soccer system.

Sure, you could grow your fan base, or sell more merchandise than you did last year, or even outgrow your stadium and need to find a new one with twice as many seats … but these are examples of successes “off the field”, not “on the field.” The fundamental problem with the US soccer system is that even if you build something truly great on the field, and even if your team can win consistently, there’s just nowhere for your team to go.

Compared to the way soccer works throughout the rest of the world, the US soccer system (aka: the US Soccer Pyramid) is broken. In most parts of the world, if you start a team at the lowest level and you prove that can win matches consistently, then you earn the right to get “promoted” into a better league. This can happen over and over and over again until you find yourself playing in the biggest and best leagues against the biggest and best teams.

The same applies for the teams that lose. If your team consistently plays poorly, you can get “relegated” — knocked out of the top leagues to make room for those up-and-coming teams. Throughout the rest of the world, playing in the top leagues is a privilege, not a right.

These two systems working together are called “promotion and relegation” (or “pro/rel” for short) and the leagues that support it are called “open leagues.” It’s easily one of the most awesome things about the sport around the world due to its extreme accountability — teams who invest and succeed are rewarded while teams who neglect and falter are punished.

Meanwhile, the United States is one of the only countries that does NOT support promotion and relegation.

So let’s say you start a club from scratch (Stockade FC!), you invest in discovering and developing great players for your club, and your team consistently plays well. Regardless, the only way for your team to gain access to a “better” league would be if you were to buy your way in. And by “buy your way in,” I literally mean writing a big check in the form of an Expansion Team Fee to join an existing league like MLS (reportedly ~$100M fee) or NASL (reportedly ~$5M fee). These “buy your way in” leagues are called “closed leagues.” There are no “open leagues” in US soccer that connect D4 to D3 to D2 to D1.

(By the way, our 4th Division league, the NPSL, is also a closed-league and the buy-in is around ~$12,000.)

Place this in context with the wide-open English Soccer Pyramid. There is no way to “buy your way in” in these leagues. Rather, instead of clubs paying the league to join, clubs are paid by the league as a reward for being promoted. (And this year, promotion to the top level in England, the Premier League, will pay more than $320 million to each newly promoted club … Congrats Burnley and Middlesbrough!)

In fairness, comparing any dollar amounts between MLS and EPL is very much apples-to-oranges, but this idea of “any club can compete, any club can win, any club can get paid … paid via the broadcast and sponsorship winnings that are shared with any club who earns their way into the league” is what we’re missing here in the US. I believe it is the lack of this “open system” that holds back major investment across lower-level soccer in the United States.

I think it’s easy to understand why there are plenty of soccer fans and supporters in the US that really want to see pro/rel work within the domestic soccer pyramid, and why the lack of pro/rel is holding the US back from getting better, faster.

If there are limited opportunities for a club to grow, then there are limited reasons to invest. And as long as there are limited reasons to invest, there will be always be a shortage of quality lower-level clubs. And if there’s a shortage of lower-level clubs, the entire US soccer system misses out on the benefits of these clubs busting their asses to scout, train, and develop high-quality players.

At the same time, I can understand how difficult it is to make pro/rel feasible in the current environment — and thus why MLS has opted to not support it.

Pro/rel involves solving for minimum stadium standards, funding travel budgets of smaller clubs, dividing broadcast rights and sponsorship dollars with teams moving between leagues, and the fear of losing the long-term stability of both smaller clubs and smaller leagues due to overall financial strain. It’s additionally complicated and polarizing because the conversation involves the owners of MLS franchises, some of whom have invested invested large sums of money in both marketing the league and building its infrastructure over the past 20 years — investments that have enabled soccer to even exist in the United States at this level in the first place; investments that could be threatened by relegation.

So, what can fans & supporters in the US do to make change happen?

Right now, there are plenty of people making noise about how much they want an open system and how frustrated they are that the top league in the US (MLS) has no intention of supporting it. However, pro/rel is something that needs to be applied across all levels and leagues across US soccer — not just MLS.

I’m always surprised how the criticism exclusively focuses on how the top needs to open up to the bottom:

• “MLS needs to open up!”

• “Give lower level teams a chance to get into MLS!”

• “D1 soccer is a monopoly!”

And while I agree with this, I honestly don’t think there’s any amount of bitching at MLS that will make a difference. They have a business, it’s working for them, and there’s no incentive for them to change.

If we (the fans!) want to restructure American soccer into an open system that rewards investment in the lower levels, gives the lower levels a chance at moving up, and incentivizes supporters of all kinds to rally to the cause of clubs like ours — it’s we (the fans!) that have to make that change happen. And it starts by wrapping our heads around the idea that it’ll have to happen without MLS in the beginning.

My advice to anyone really passionate about this space is to get organized and to starting thinking about how the lower-level leagues can create a pro/rel system amongst themselves. Imagine if multiple D4 leagues self-organized and created something that supported Premier League-esque promotion storylines that were more interesting than anything in MLS (hey, the NCAA Basketball tourney does it every year!). Imagine if D4 proves itself so interesting that some D3 teams are motivated to join the narrative too. Imagine if multiple lower level leagues worked together in an “open system” to create something fans found much more interesting than the “closed system” version of MLS — despite the lower payrolls and smaller stadiums.

Actively working on an alternative seems like a much better use of time than begging MLS to change its ways. Best Case: it works and MLS wants to play too. Worst Case: the lower-level leagues create an interesting alternative to MLS, one that is constantly churning out homegrown, American versions of the Leicester City story.

(Sidenote: Not to be Johnny Tech Guy™, but this is how it works in the tech startup world. You don’t beg Google and Facebook to make the app you want to use. You start from scratch and you build it yourself. And if you do a good job, if it grows and proves interesting and people love it, then you force the big guys to either copy you or work with you. The history of tech is full of stories like this — each one starting with someone’s “crazy idea” that kept going and going and going.)

Again, I’m not a soccer scholar and I don’t have all the answers on how to solve all the complex and nuanced details to make pro/rel happen in the United States. But I also don’t believe you need to have all the answers to all the problems in order to simply get started. In the tech world, there is the concept of a “Minimal Viable Product”— the smallest, scrappiest thing one can do to get the point across and to illustrate that something could actually work. So, what is the “Minimal Viable Product” for pro/rel within the lower level leagues of US soccer? That is, what should we be talking about and scheming to build, even if it’s limited to D4 to start (and even if MLS/D1 isn’t going to be open to the idea for years, if ever).