Rocco Commisso, the owner of the New York Cosmos, who has made waves in the US game with his anti-trust legal actions against US Soccer, Major League Soccer and Soccer United Marketing, has offered to put half a billion dollars into the North American Soccer League over the next 10 years, provided he receives certain guarantees from the federation.

In a series of letters obtained by the Guardian in recent days, Commisso wrote to Carlos Cordeiro, the new president of US Soccer, earlier this month, outlining his plans to put a $500m investment package, including $250m of his personal fortune, into the NASL, where the Cosmos have played since their return to active play in 2013.

The offer is contingent on the national governing body guaranteeing the league a 10-year window to reach the federation’s professional soccer compliance standards, and the federation itself restructuring to remove what Commisso sees as the professional conflicts of interest that favor MLS and by extension its player development partner USL (where multiple MLS sides operate de facto reserve teams).

In the letters, Commisso offers to meet with Cordeiro to discuss his potential investment – though the correspondence also contain the mix of grandstanding and polemic that has marked Commisso’s arrival onto the US soccer stage, and his criticisms of what he sees as the “intertwining” of US Soccer and MLS and their joint marketing venture Soccer United Marketing.

Commisso has characterized that partnership as an anti-trust issue that “disenfranchises” other stakeholders in the American game. When NASL lost its D2 sanctioning at the end of 2017, Commisso, believing his league had been treated more harshly than the competing USL, initiated an anti-trust law suit, that is still ongoing.

Commisso also laments the historic failure of the federation to fulfill a mandate to initiate the Fifa standard of promotion and relegation in the US – attaching a letter from then US Soccer president Werner Fricker, written in 1988, in which Fricker envisages the game going into the 21st century with “a sophisticated professional league structure encompassing three divisions in a promotion and relegation system”.

It’s that backdrop that provides the context for this month’s exchange. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the single response from Cordeiro is cautious – after Commisso’s initial offer letter on 13 April, Cordeiro replies six days later claiming that his support duties on the World Cup bid have kept him from replying sooner, and that those duties will prevent him from meeting in the near term. He does suggest sending someone from US Soccer’s leadership team to meet with Commisso, though requests “at a minimum, a detailed and transparent outline” of the initiative before determining that “the meeting you propose has a chance of being productive”.

The Guardian reached out to both US Soccer and MLS for comment but did not receive any reply at time of publication on Monday morning, though US Soccer did issue a statement through a spokesperson later in the day, saying: “It should be clear that we sent another letter yesterday again saying we are open to meeting. Since Carlos is traveling internationally it will be Federation and Board representatives.”

In one further reply, Commisso expresses surprise that Cordeiro should prioritize the World Cup bid over meeting, claiming that: “During the 8 years leading up to the 2026 World Cup and long after the thrill of being a host nation has faded away, this significant infusion of capital would produce immediate and long-lasting benefits for the game of soccer in this country.” He also demurs on providing more detailed proposals, since “USSF, at least during (former president) Sunil Gulati’s administration, has been too closely intertwined with MLS/SUM and has behaved discriminatorily and unfairly toward the NASL and its teams.” He suggests that neither MLS or SUM would be required to share budget or strategic plans with US Soccer leadership in similar circumstances, and that an initial meeting between himself and Cordeiro should be to “determine if we can re-establish a sufficient level of trust and goodwill to allow us to move forward in good faith”.

Commisso signs off by saying that he will not be making the correspondence public before 27 April, which is when the Guardian received its copies of the letters.

‘We need a revolution’

Speaking with the Guardian this weekend, Commisso acknowledged that going public with his offer would partly be “a media play” to try and push the conversation into the open, though was also dismissive of the possibility that his brinksmanship in potentially embarrassing Cordeiro could backfire politically:

“We need a revolution. Egos or no egos, we need to deal with the consequence of why we’re a failed nation … What the hell have we done wrong in not winning anything the last 110 years, other than in the 1930 World Cup (the USA reached the semi-finals). What’s needed in America to change that? MLS hasn’t done it. What have we accomplished? Yeah we’ve built stadiums. But MLS is the 5th ranked soccer league in television ratings in the country. Why?

“That’s the state that we’re in. All led by a bunch of people that knew nothing about soccer before they got involved on the administrative side, and they’ve ruined this game. I think of the rich investors in this country, I’m pretty unique in the sense that, besides the mind that I have, I’m the only one that played soccer.”

Commisso also doubled down on his insistence that while everyone in the US Soccer community could get behind a World Cup bid, its legacy impact would be limited compared to his proposal of sustained investment in American players.

“Just bringing the World Cup and making NFL owners – because a lot of these games are going to be played in NFL stadiums – rich and successful, is not enough. We want to see soccer at all levels succeed. We want to see soccer follow the Fifa rules that made other nations very successful … The sickening and arrogant mentality in America is that we say we’re Champions of the World when we’re playing the Superbowl. When we play the World Series we’re Champions of the World. But you’re paying among yourselves! You’re not playing teams from other countries. There’s this sense that ‘we have to Americanize the sport’. It’s been going on for 40 to 50 years, because ‘Who the hell are these other countries – why do we have to listen to them?’”

The NFL references are in part a reference to the current pre-eminent sports league in North America, and partly a dig at the former NFL executive Don Garber, who has been commissioner of MLS since 1999. As Commisso sees it, Garber’s building out of MLS on a closed-shop American major league sports model, and US Soccer’s complicity with that, has been damaging to the game in America. He sees the SUM initiative as hopelessly compromising the Federation, and Garber’s empire-building as a major structural problem.

“If we continue having people like Garber involved, I don’t have a lot of faith that we’re gong to change it, in a way that makes America successful. Do you think the guy from Austria who owns Red Bulls (Dietrich Masechitz) or the guy from Abu Dhabi who owns NYCFC (Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan) gives a shit, excuse my language, as to whether America succeeds in the World Cup? I do. I think that having an MLS that is similar to the NFL is not good for soccer in this country. Period. End of story. All communities in this country should have the ability to excel. MLS, and those 23 stupid teams that they have should not be the only ones given the opportunity to succeed, and that’s the job of the US soccer federation.”

For their part, MLS and Garber have long maintained that SUM was a necessary part of the triage operation to save top level professional soccer in the slump the fledgling league went through in the post-9/11 economy. At a crisis moment in 2002, when two MLS teams were forced to fold, wealthy investors like AEG’s Phil Anschutz, Lamar Hunt and Robert Kraft temporarily consolidated ownership of all the MLS teams to save the league. SUM was founded at the same time to try and monetize marketing and TV rights for league and national federation alike. At the very least Commisso believes that arrangement to have outlived its purpose. At worst, in his eyes, it has imposed an unhealthy monopoly.

Like fellow NASL owner Riccardo Silva’s offer of $4bn to MLS provided they adopt a model of promotion and relegation, this tactic could feel like an offer made to be refused. This latest sum targeting NASL is more modest, but just as pointed a symbolic challenge to the existing ecology of soccer in the US. In his latest letter, Commisso cites Anschutz, Hunt and Kraft and claims that “All I am asking is that USSF afford me the same opportunity to help my league grow.”

But his price for investing would come at the cost of Cordeiro acknowledging and addressing what Commisso sees as the wrongful nature of the current structural and financial relationship between US Soccer and MLS – something Commisso must know there is little political will to do from the current regime. So he’s left with his law suits and to paint a public picture of what he thinks could be, in the hope that one or both forces a concession.

“There’s a side of me that…I’m 68 years old and I want to affect this game and one, help to save the Cosmos and two, try to find a way of helping to change the game in this country because it’s embarrassing. It’s truly embarrassing. We joined Fifa before Brazil and Uruguay – look how much Brazil and Uruguay have won. And now, with TV, American kids are more aware of Salah in Liverpool, Messi, or whoever, in Europe, than the people who play in this country. Now they (US Soccer) have got an issue. How do you deal with that? And that’s what I’m trying to bring to the front here.”

