The USL Championship kicks off its 2025 playoffs on Saturday. As it starts it will be a celebration of what has been an impressive season, but it's also a chance to look forward to the next stage for the league, which is beginning to take place. In March, the United Soccer League announced that promotion and relegation would be coming, starting in 2028. It's a move that could forever change the landscape of American soccer.
Promotion and relegation are standard in European leagues, but that hasn't been the case in America. The closed systems in the United States take out a lot of the jeopardy that comes with owning a soccer club, since every team is guaranteed a place in the league for the coming season. With the closed system, the top tier isn't a dream for everyone, but rather an exclusive group that a team literally buys their way into. Not only does it cap what a grassroots soccer team can do, but it can also have an impact on development. When asked about what American soccer would need to do in order to take the next step forward, Eintracht Frankfurt, who played preseason games in the U.S. over the summer, CEO Axel Hellmann immediately pointed to promotion and relegation.
"The most important thing is for the younger players to make an early step to Europe, because we have a more competitive system. It's tougher because of the relegation," Hellmann said. "That's what I'm always telling our American colleagues all the time, integrate relegation in your whole football system, because it means at the end you have something to lose, and then you go to maximum. Not only if you want to win a title or be successful in the playoffs, it's also that if you can be relegated, it's about life and death. And that is something that really makes you grow in your mind, makes you more successful, makes you more resilient to problems you have in a season or on the pitch, because you know what you can achieve."
Coming from a club that prepares young players for the next step in their careers, like Frankfurt, Hellmann's words show what could come to American soccer, along with promotion and relegation. With improving infrastructure and a growing place in the global market as player development improves in the USL, this is an opportunity to capitalize on that potential for the USL.
There are steps that need to happen first, such as figuring out which teams will be in the top division so that it can launch, USL League One and USL League Two, but these are being worked on behind the scenes. With new clubs joining, such as Atletico Dallas, the volume of teams will be there, while still more are working to meet the league's stadium requirements. There's also the work that needs to happen on exactly how relegation is being implemented, which is part of why, even after the announcement of promotion and relegation coming, there will be years before it can be fully realized.
While that's getting sorted, the league is also working on something interesting to improve competition. The Premier League has parachute payments when a team is relegated, so that it can deal with the drops in revenue, but with those drops not being as significant in American soccer, the USL is working almost on a reverse payment to help teams with operating changes if they are to be promoted.
"Our bigger concern is when teams get promoted, the cost of execution, whether player salaries, referees, TV, all those things, travel, those are the bigger requirements that are on the teams that get promoted. Our concern is not where people get relegated, because it is shown over time. If you're a community-based club, you know, we have teams that finish, are finishing towards the bottom of a league, but they're still selling out games, because it's a part of the fabric of the community," USL president and CEO Paul McDonough said.
"Our bigger concern is how we take care of the teams that get promoted and all of a sudden have an uptick in the cost of running their clubs," He added. "If sustainability matters, which it does, then we have to address that. So we're looking at things, and we're talking with our sporting committee, and we've got owner meetings, and we'll talk to the owners about some of those things."
In looking at things that way, USL can do something that's almost the opposite of England, where promoted teams usually go back down to the division below, as helping with the transition can create an ecosystem where it doesn't matter what division a team is in, and that they can still be successful where they are. A soccer utopia may not exist, but with the inclusion of promotion and relegation, the stakes will be there with every match.
"Every match needs to matter, and we think that promotion, relegation, we can find a path in the competition structure to try to find out where every match will matter," McDonough said.
We may be a ways from seeing the fruit of all of this, but if executed properly, the 2026 World Cup will be a celebration of soccer in the United States before 2028, is a new frontier for American soccer.