It may seem like a small inconvenience for players to have to sit on a five hour plane ride. The shortest road trip for an American team might be the longest for a club in Germany, Spain, or England. For American clubs, it’s an incessant component of week-to-week league play. Reduced Club Travelįor most clubs around the world, traveling across the continent is an occasional reward for doing well and qualifying for a big tournament. There are a few key benefits to compartmentalizing the soccer system. Fort Worth, TX** (formerly Austin Bold). So, apologies to the Pacific Northwest teams and Tulsa, but I did the best I could to keep everyone close and preserve rivalries. But as more clubs come to life, you can adjust the regional rosters to work as best as possible for everyone. And with large areas of the country without many teams, it can get especially tricky. This happens with divisions in American sports all the time. Whenever you divide teams up geographically, there are always winners and losers. So, we end up with five regional leagues, each with 18 clubs. To make it a round 90 total teams, I’m putting a team in Boise, Idaho. It also includes Canada’s three MLS entrants. This number includes all announced (or presumed) expansion teams in MLS, USL and NISA, as well as teams officially “on hiatus”. MLS and USL each actually have enough teams to split within themselves, but for fun, let’s divvy up all 89 professional men’s clubs in the US into five new leagues. With a geographic area so vast, the US could actually be split into even smaller areas, even some individual states, but let’s stick with five to keep it simple. Not unlike the United Kingdom’s England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have their own national teams and league systems. Imagine for a moment that the USA, at least for soccer purposes, was split into five different countries. Forget everything you’re accustomed to in American sports, and open your mind to a new possibility. What if we took the regional division concept and went a step further? Breaking the United States into completely separate regional leagues, as if it were actually multiple countries. So why isn’t it equally as silly that we do that here? Does the United States need to have nationwide leagues that span an entire continent? Simply because the NFL, MLB, and other sports operate that way, does it mean soccer has to follow suit? Think about how ridiculous a single, 30 team league would be for all of Europe. But maybe it’s our leagues are too big – from a geographic standpoint anyway. Arguments like “we can’t play a Fall-Spring calendar because the weather is too varied” or “promotion and relegation can’t work here because the country is so spread out” use our massive geography as a justification for the US operating soccer differently then most of the world.īut what if we looked at the issue from a different angle? Perhaps it’s not that our country is too big and there is simply nothing we can do about it.
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