The ever-changing landscape of professional North American soccer outside of MLS has no shortage of drama. We try to rank each team against each other.

With Round 3 of the US Open Cup has passed, the ongoing debate for the best professional side outside of MLS continues, as all remaining pro teams left to get set to take on MLS sides in Round 4.

Frankly, that isn’t good enough for us.

In an attempt to determine who is the best club outside of Major League Soccer, we have developed our own way of rating each team. All 38 of them. With minimal overlap between USL and NASL (as well as USL East and USL West), we look add clarity to the discussion. Enjoy.

Rating Method

Feel free to skip this if you don’t care. Also, feel free to double check our work.

First, we asked ourselves the question; how could we quantify what makes a soccer team better than another? What stats or figures would you include? We considered all meaningful competitions Division 2 clubs participate in (i.e. the US Open Cup, Canadian Championship, and Caribbean Cup), and came up with the following formula,

(Total Goals Scored)-(Total Goals Conceded)+(Shutouts)+(Comeback Wins)+(Adjusted Road Points)-(Adjusted Dropped Home Points)= Index total.

Then, we took the index total and dived it by an adjusted match rate, to level a number of matches played by each team, for a final adjusted index total.

We used the 589 regular season matches from USL and both the Spring and Fall NASL seasons last year to adjust our point totals. Those matches saw 264 home wins, 157 draws, and 168 away wins. Considering each team’s total games across all competitions brought the average match count for each team to be just under 12 matches, which was used to find the adjusted match rate.

So let’s see how it turned out. We plan on updating this list monthly.