The American Pyramid: Venue TBA - A Proposal

This article is a response to a piece that ran yesterday. If you’d like to read that piece, click this link.

I’m an idea guy, always have been. I like to dream and scheme. When a problem presents itself, I like to attack it logically, but with a healthy dash of “what if.”

So when facing this venue issue in amateur soccer, I have an idea. It changes all the time, as more people offer input, but this is the current idea:

A group-funded trust that buys land, builds fields, and operates them for local sides.

The Funding

I’m a big believer in ground funding, probably because of dabbling in socialism in college. Everyone tosses what they can into the pot, we all eat. Group funding has become a wonderful way to fund all sorts of causes, from new cars to medical treatment. So why not soccer fields?

What is daunting to most clubs or organizations looking to purchase or build their home field is the initial cost. How do they lay out funds for land, fields, bleachers, offices, changing rooms, parking, the list keeps rolling on. So let’s focus on what it would cost to the individuals who would pledge. I can’t speak to the finances of every person reading this article, but I can for myself. I am a middle class guy, not rich, not poor, got a mortgage and a car payment, but I still have enough free cash in the monthly budget to go out to eat 5 or 6 times, buy a soccer kit, a new pair of shoes, go to two or three soccer matches, etc. There’s some disposable income there.

So if I subtracted $25 a month, would it kill me? Not at all. If 10 of us did that, we’d raise $250 a month, $3,000 a year. What if a 100 of us did that? Add a zero, $2,500 a month, $30,000 a year. You can do the math. Protagonist Soccer Twitter account has almost 2,300 followers. Let’s say 10% of those followers committed to this. That’s 230 dedicated $25 a month pledges. That’s almost $6,000 a month, $70,000 a year. That’s an operating budget. And it doesn’t include a soccer club that pledges $100 a month or a well-off donor who tosses in $1,000 one time gift. If we all pull together, we could create the necessary funding.

The Trust

It would be absolutely important for the Trust to impartial, devoted to the idea of growing the game organically, and open to all geographic locations. The Trust would have to be made up of pragmatist types who want to stretch the dollars as far as possible, but who are also willing and able to dream big. The number of trustees could be determined at a later date, but at this point, 6-10 trustees would be a good starting point. The size of the Trust leadership could be voted on by the donors.

The Trust would be a non-profit group without a budget (unpaid). This is vitally important for the goals of the funding to be achieved. So many non-profits eat up funds by paying their managers salaries. The Trust will operate without pay, allowing funds to flow to goals of the project. That is not to say that funds won’t be used for business cards or incidentals, but it is to say that time, effort, and sweat will be a donation.

To ensure accountability, the trust will post monthly recaps with pertinent information for the body of donors. Once every five years, the trustees will be voted on by the donors. Each donor would receive a single vote and the winners of the vote would be elected to 5 year terms. If, for some reason, a trustee is considered to be not serving with integrity, the trustee group can vote on their ouster. That vote must be a super majority (75%).

The Concept

The funds donated are accumulated on a monthly basis. During this accumulation period, the Trust researches potential sites for soccer fields. This research will include studying demographic factors, local need, cost effectiveness, municipal funding, city permitting and zoning regulations, potential grant funding, local soccer leadership, etc. Three potential sites will be considered each year (or as funding allows). Each January, three trustees will prepare a presentation of the sites and these presentations will be made to the donor class. This could be done easily through digital means. Once the prestations have been made, the donor class will be allowed to vote. The voting process will be over the following 24 hours, to allow for research and considering by the donors.

Once a site is chosen by the donors, the Trust will begin to take steps to advance the site (which will happen in a long-term approach).

  • Securing supporting grants

  • Purchasing the land

  • Preparing long-term, segmented growth plans

  • Preparing the field(s)

  • Building bleachers

  • Installing fencing

  • Building office space on-site

  • Building showers/changing rooms/bathrooms

  • Lighting

  • Watering system

  • Parking

  • Supporting infrastructure (food, ticket booth, merch booth)

The Trust would also designate some funding in a trust to allow for operations costs and upkeep. Ticket sales, merch revenue, concessions, and any other revenue raised on site would be split with the “home” tenant and the operating cost fund.

Expansion Ideas

Once the site has been purchased, a local trustee will be chosen from the area to supervise the long-term upkeep of the facility. An alternative idea might be to sell the site to local clubs in amateur leagues (with stipulations to potential clubs and use those funds generated for future expansion). But the goal would be to involve local clubs in the upkeep. Partnering with a local club playing in a national league would be optimal. Aside from this club who’s field this would be as a “home field,” the goal of the project is to build or partner with a local league to use the site for matches, facilitating the growth of local soccer.

Aside from this relationship, we’d propose the idea of a dedicated group of volunteers, 5-10, who would work with the trust to obtain their referee licenses, paid for by the trust, with the understanding that they would be available for matches at the site, free of charge to the clubs. This would require people dedicated to growing local soccer, focused on the health of grassroots soccer, willing to donate their time.

Naming rights of the site would be offered to the donor class, voted on when deemed necessary. The name would be perpetual and unavailable to sell as long as the Trust exists. The only change allowed would be if the donor class designated it necessary and, even then, never for monetary reasons.

What’s Next?

There’s no clean answer to that question, it honestly depends on the desire and inspiration of all of us in the lower league community. How much do we want change? How much do we want growth? How serious do we think this problem is? How much will we sacrifice for the cause?

I have seen so much fracturing within the lower leagues, I am hopeful that there is a unity in purpose as well. Let this idea of a Trust, be the beginning of a conversation, not the end.

- Dan Vaughn

The American Pyramid: Alternative Models

Previous pieces in this series touched on the need for a lower Division that would formally oversee a semi-pro/elite amateur level of soccer currently missing from the U.S. pyramid and the barriers travel would create for such system of regional leagues. A further piece touched on the necessity for a partnership among such regional organizations in order to have a stable environment for clubs and leagues to prosper. This piece will bring together the ideas behind those pieces and offer some practical propositions on how to begin to structure the lower tiers of the U.S. soccer pyramid.

The piece that focused on the hurdle of distances between clubs at the regional level argued that the English pyramid doesn’t offer the best blueprint for the U.S. system. Other major European pyramids offer better examples but still don’t have to deal with the physical size of a country as large at the U.S. Better models might be found closer to home.

The Mexican football league system is often overlooked by the average U.S. soccer fan. But the structure of their pyramid can be instructive for ways to organize the U.S. system. The Federación Mexicana de Fútbol Asociación (FMF) administers four levels of professional soccer. The first two levels are fully national professional leagues: Liga MX; and Ascenso MX.

Tier three of the Mexican pyramid is the Liga Premier, also a national professional league. But, the FMF has split Liga Premier into two distinct leagues, Serie A and Serie B, with Serie A being the higher level of competition within the third tier. This tiering within a formal tier allows an additional level of flexibility for leagues and clubs that would be beneficial for the lower tiers of the U.S. pyramid. In addition, each year, the FMF divides Serie A into regional groups to cut down on travel between the teams. While Mexico isn’t quite as large as the U.S., it is possible for a professional club to travel similar distances. For example, the second division, Ascenso MX, currently has teams in Juarez and Cancun. The overland distance between those clubs is 2100 miles, a distance similar to Los Angeles to Chicago.

The fourth tier of the Mexican system is the Liga TDP. It currently consists of over 200 clubs split up into 13 regional groups. The groups function as leagues and the clubs play full home and away schedules within each group. The top clubs from each regional league advance to a playoff tournament for one promotion spot to the third tier. Clubs at this level are lower professional and semi-pro organizations with stadiums seating in the low thousands. The leagues also have relatively small geographical footprints that keep travel to a minimum and engender local rivalries.

One more system that might be helpful to look at is the Brazilian pyramid. An important factor to consider is that Brazil is roughly the same size as the U.S. The Confederação Brasileira de Futebol (CBF) organizes four levels of professional soccer: Série A, B, C and D. Much like Mexico, the top three tiers are national leagues with Série C split into two regional group in order to cut down on travel.

Série D is the formal fourth tier but the format is different due to the interesting nature of Brazilian soccer. Brazil contains two different overlapping pyramids. The first is the national pyramid outlined above, the second is a series of independent state pyramids. Clubs in the national pyramid also play concurrently in state leagues.

Rather than a series of regional leagues, Série D is a large tournament (68 teams in 2018) made up of the best clubs from the state leagues. The first stage are four-club groups played home and away. The following stages are two-legged knockout ties with the final four clubs promoted to Série C. Brazil’s version of a fourth tier also provides an alternative that gives flexibility to a system that isn’t as perfectly hierarchical as the traditional European pyramids.

To avoid confusion the term league when used in an example is meant to mean the grouping of clubs who play each other. An umbrella organization that has “League” in its name but manages league play (the current UPSL and NPSL for example) is not the league for this example. The conferences or divisions within the umbrella organization would be considered the leagues.

In addition, promotion and relegation is the third rail of U.S. soccer commentary. The competitive movement of clubs up or down the soccer pyramid is such a small part of the overall discussion of the U.S. league system. But so much has been invested in the phrase itself that its meaning has lost most of its power to influence. In this piece most of the discussion is focused on how the structure of the pyramid might give the most freedom for clubs to grow and move up (or down) rather than specifics on how to do that via competition.

At its most basic, the main proposal is to simply build the fourth tier Regional League System from the leagues and clubs currently understood to make up the informal Division 4; the NPSL and USL League Two. As of today, the NPSL includes 91 clubs and USL2 includes 72 clubs. A Regional League System of over 160 clubs would mean a robust start while still providing some room for expansion into underserved areas.

NPSL-USL2 Teams.PNG

A look at the location of the clubs (NPSL in red and USL2 in blue) shows a good coverage of the country’s major population centers. Though, a few major locations seem to lack the expected number of tier four clubs. The Chicagoland, Denver and Phoenix metro area each only have one “Division 4” club each. Those areas would seem ripe for regional tier four leagues. Also, historically St. Louis was once a major hotbed for U.S. soccer. An honest question: are those days really over or is the area ready for rejuvenation?

NPSL-USL2-UPSL-GCPL Teams.PNG

Loading in clubs from the UPSL Midwest, Colorado, Southwest and Mountain Conferences (in green) provides a better idea of how those geographical gaps might be partially filled up. In addition, the up-and-coming Gulf Coast Premier League (in purple) shows how the currently-empty Gulf Coast could be covered. While these UPSL & GCPL leagues and clubs may not be able to hit the ground running as tier four operations, formalizing a structure giving them the base to work toward that goal would be beneficial. Administering them as a tier four B league would allow growth toward tier four proper for both individual clubs and the leagues themselves. These groups of clubs are just a few examples and, as there is obviously more ground to cover and many worthwhile grassroots organizations to provide direction in those areas, not nearly the end of this discussion.

A second possible alternative would be a situation where the structure is imposed from above rather than formed at the grassroots. The USSF could be a primary mover for such a scenario but that is an unlikely situation since the federation has shown no interest in managing grassroots soccer. Perhaps a more likely situation would have MLS, in partnership with a lower tier organization, moving in to the grassroots soccer realm in order to create a formal feeder or minor league system. Their interest could push USSF’s involvement into the creation of a formal fourth tier using MLS’ preferred model as its underpinnings. Such a better-resourced endeavor would likely create a winner vs. loser scenario that might leave some of the current leagues and clubs out in the cold.

Could a hybrid using part of the Brazilian model work? In such a version, the leagues would continue to operate independently but provide promotion, either through league results or a separate tournament, to a competition akin to a “regional champions league”. The promotion mechanisms would move teams from those independent leagues into the next season’s RCL that would also take place concurrently with the league season. Rather than the disparate leagues, such a RCL tournament could be the formal tier four and provide better clubs the ability to compete at a higher level.

As it is practically infeasible for a Regional League System to be created and filled wholesale by completely new clubs, any such system will by necessity be made up at its core from teams currently in the NPSL, USL2 and other such leagues. So, it would seem the best option for those organizations and the clubs in them would be to have an agreement between current leagues to form a partnership before a structure is imposed upon them. Having club input on how the creation of this new tier would move forward would also be greatly beneficial to ensure a necessary level of grassroots buy-in and perspective.

Practically though this is difficult to envision as soccer organizations in the U.S. have historically had an antagonistic relationship with each other. This barrier might overcome by the formation of an independent entity that would handle the negotiations between the parties involved while also providing advice and oversight to the process. Once the system is built and running, this entity would continue to oversee and administer the leagues.

This set of articles on the creation of a transitional Division IV in the U.S. soccer pyramid is nowhere near a comprehensive or perfect plan on how to do so. The options put forward and the rationale behind them are presented to hopefully help move forward the discussion of the continued growth of grassroots soccer in this country. We are at an inflection point in the history of the sport where the U.S. finally has a viable Division I league but the lack of direction from above on the local game continues to be sorely lacking. Rather than wait for mandates handed down from on high, it is imperative that the U.S. soccer community takes advantage of this moment and guide it toward a more holistic club- and fan-based version of the sport.

- Dan Creel

Check out the first two articles of this series: Part 1 Part 2

The American Pyramid: The Problem with Our Geography

When we imagine a country’s soccer pyramid, the top few levels are leagues that are national in scope. Below that are the levels with leagues that are regional in scope and further down are the leagues that are local and community-based. In the U.S., we don’t have a pyramid, so much as an inverted four-sided die balancing on top of constantly churning mass.

The U.S. soccer system has never been in good shape. The lack of organization is apparent throughout history and currently, except for the very top, is not conducive to the growth of a stable, equitable club game especially at the lower levels. We need something akin to a theory of change where we strategize about the long-term goals of the sport and then map the pathway backward to define action steps on how to move forward.

One piece of that plan is the need to formally create levels below the current ones. As of right now, the USSF only sanctions the three national professional Divisions. Every other league and club is sanctioned via the amateur USASA. That creates a practical gulf for aspirational clubs with no room to easily grow from an amateur or semi-pro organization into a full professional one.

How many levels are needed between the amateur and pro game is up for debate. Some might see a hard break between the amateur and pro levels. Some might see a more transitional division where there is some mixture of pro, semi-pro, and amateur clubs. What is truly vital, though, is that there is at least one formally sanctioned level where clubs can grow from amateur/semi-pro to professional.

One important part of that “transitional” Division is that the leagues within it would not be national in scope. From competitive, financial and social bases, such amateur or semi-pro teams should play against local or nearby rivals and not have to travel far. Travel costs are a major factor for sports teams and expecting lower level clubs to travel vast distances will have a detrimental effect on those clubs. It is one thing if an individual club can’t compete due to resources. It is another if a league’s short-sightedness creates anti-competitive outcomes itself.

What such a Division of regional leagues would look like is an excellent question. How many of these leagues would be necessary? To begin to get a handle on this question, I took a look at the English system. For most U.S. soccer fans, the English football pyramid is the blueprint for which the American system should be based.

The National League is the fifth step in their pyramid and is lowest nationwide league in the English system. The National League is made up of mostly pro teams with some semi-pro teams, while the two leagues below, which make up tier six, are mostly semi-pro. So, in England, a top semi-pro team might be expected to travel the entire nation.

From the top of England to the bottom is roughly 300 miles. I took that as my starting point from what a similar semi-pro club in the U.S. should be expected to travel in a regional league if we used England as our blueprint. For the sake of argument, if the USSF creates a new “transitional” level it would currently be Division IV (below the fully pro, national Division III). The classic pyramid system has 16 leagues at level four.

As such, I took the largest 16 metropolitan areas in the U.S. and roughly mapped areas 300 miles across on top of them. In theory, these would be where the most soccer players and clubs would form, so it would roughly constitute the regions of these 16 Division IV leagues.

Regions 300 miles.png

Two things immediately jump out: how much of the U.S. is left out of these regional leagues; and how little travel is necessary for English clubs even at the top levels. Four of the metro areas are found grouped together in the northeast. That leads to their regions overlapping, hence the additional colors where they do.

We will be sorely disappointed if we try to restrict the future travel budgets of U.S. semi-pro clubs to an English standard. English clubs have an immense advantage due to the compact size of their country. U.S. clubs and leagues don’t have that luxury. A theory of change that relies on such a travel restriction would have the effect of leaving all clubs in an immense swath of the country on the outside.

I next took a look at the Germany, French and Spanish systems. Those countries are slightly bigger than England and the maximum distance a semi-pro team might travel when in the lowest nationwide league would be roughly 600 miles. I mapped those areas as on the prior map.

Now those 16 theoretical regional leagues with a travel restriction of 600 miles cover most of the contiguous 48 states. Adding only a few more leagues would cover the rest of that area.

From a travel standpoint, clubs in those regions would only have to travel 600 at most in the top division of that region. A similar exercise would happen as lower tiers are added within a region.

This is obviously a theoretical exercise. The number and placement of these “transitional” Division IV leagues would differ greatly from the simple breakdown I’ve outlined. But, whatever the makeup of such regional leagues, it should not be overlooked how important it would be that every year, clubs would know how much to expect in travel-based expenses.

Perhaps more significantly, a league would know, again from a travel distance standpoint, if they should, or more critically could, admit a new club. Currently, when a good club from a relatively far distance wants to join a league, the league allows it more often than not. And that honestly makes sense. Leagues and other clubs want good opponents to raise the level of the league. But, the travel distance of a relatively distant club puts a strain not only on that club, but also the other clubs who now have to spend more on their travel budget. It would be more advantageous if the system was one where a good club had a good league available that contained other clubs a reasonable distance away.

Those brown and tan areas on the maps are also important to note. Those are where regions overlap. That allows leagues for those regions to find the best place for those clubs to land. A club might go to one league or the other based on a combination of league needs, distance to other clubs, rivalries with other clubs, and community engagement.

It is important that the organizations in those regions and communities to have a say over the organization and management of their leagues and regions. And, since all of these regions would have interactions with their neighboring leagues and Division colleagues it is vital that partnerships be created between them.

I’ll be writing more about partnerships in Part II.

- Dan Creel