USL PRO Starts Foray into West Coast with Pali Blues Offshoot in Fullerton
Nick Green of “100 Percent Soccer” reported yesterday that a USL PRO team will begin play in 2011 in Fullerton, California. Green reports that sources affiliated with the team stated they would play the majority of their games at Titan Stadium on the campus of Cal State Fullerton in Orange County, California which is 26 miles from the LA Galaxy’s stadium, Home Depot Center.
The report also says the team will be an offshoot of the USL’s W-League’s Pali Blues.
USL PRO is the newly renamed and reorganized USL league formerly called USL-2 [Division III]. Last year the league hosted 6 teams but after deciding to drop its Division II teams and focus on Division III, it has announced 13 teams. Press releases continue to state that the league will have 16 teams in 2011 with a national footprint and regional conferences to save costs. The 13 teams announced have all been East Coast or Caribbean based.
USL’s President Tim Holt told IMS last April that his organization planned on expanding into the West Coast for 2011. But things do not always go according to plans, and several teams that had hoped to make the jump to USL PRO, like the PDL Kitsap Pumas in Washington State, had to pull back because of the economy. There are a number of teams in the Southwest who are actively talking to the USL about franchises but for most organizations that would not happen until the 2012 season. The addition of a team in LA makes sense for a league that planned on expanding west, but flies in the face of the new USL PRO concept of regional conferences to reduce travel expenses. Fullerton is 2,500 from the closest USL PRO team so far listed, which would be the Orlando franchise.
USL PRO will play a 24-game regular season schedule with league alignment, schedule, and other details to be announced in December.
Comments are closed.
Fullerton would be a good stadium for a pro soccer team.
I will wait to see something official but if this is true it will be interesting to see how they make the schedule work with the other teams which are mostly on the east.
I can’t see the USL officially announcing this team for league play for this year unless they have 3-4 other West Coast teams lined up as well. We’ll see.
@treefire
As long as USL gets their franchising fee, I’m pretty sure they’re happy as clams to let the chips fall where they may.
Treefire and Tevor, I expect that USL will pretty much prop them up this year but are doing it so they can get a jump into the market. That would play out in two ways. It would beat NASL if they had any interest in that area, which I’m not sure they did, and it would build trust in other clubs in the S.W. who are on the fence about joining.
In other words they already have one club there now others can safely join knowing they have something to build around for a western conference. Even if NASL may not be interested in the LA area, they are interested in areas where other teams may be on the fence about who to join. USL now have the proverbial foot in the door.
The west coast has not been involved all that heavily in USL in the past few years and considering the level of teams they could have put up it would be surprising if now there are a bunch of California teams willing to travel at all to play at the Div 3 level. If something happens now it would have been tailored specifically for them on a even more regional type of level. LA could have a whole region of USL Pro Div 3 all by themselves and all the teams would be only an hour away from each other. It would be an adult version of the Coast Soccer League. As the Div 3 regions expand into more teams playing in a smaller geographical area the individual teams will become less visible because there will be so many of them know only in their own region.
That will give a lot of separation between what Div 3 is then (the first step at the local semi-pro level, just like it is in other countries). and NASL will be seen as the clear next step down from MLS because they will also be a national league.
With time it will all become very clear who everybody is and what the next stepping stone is from where they are currently at to get up into the top league.
This whole next step is good for all of us because now even the USL has to re-invent themselves and find something that works better than before. Competition at the level under our top league will improve all involved in the long run.
More is better.
Hey Trevor,
Speaking of fees, how much do you think Gary Hartman of San Antonio was charged for joining NASL? I would bet it was north of $500,000.
But that is just chump change to the enormous amount of money USL charges, correct? Oh, yeah , USL charges, at best, somewhere around $125,000 for a USL Pro team.
Who has the true incentive here? Actually, both of them do (and you thought I would stick it to NASL
).
That is the whole point that all of this is a business. For territorial expansion to occur, which if done correctly creates balance, each league needs to expand.
Of course, I would argue that NASL needs to expand proportionally more than USL. Atlanta has a 3 year deal with Traffic, according to BQ’s report. Once that is done, NASL will need to find another team to replace it, as Boris will not feed the team. Montreal, as the world knows, is gone after this year. And who knows what will happen in 2011.
So it goes with professional soccer here in the good ole US of A.
BQ,
Anything new about the proposed Western Soccer Conference (featuring the Pheonix Monsoon)?
Through the grapevine, but nothing official it sounded as if the group members that seemed the strongest in that group faded and some others ended up popping up that weren’t in the original group. As I just stated, nothing official but it sounds as if it’s been pretty touch and go with this very loosely organized group.
@Trevor, others: My comment is based on my (perhaps misguided, of course) belief that this is a new USL, that is interested in long-term survivability, and with more decision making power in the hands of the team owners, including some ability to decide who comes into the league. I can’t see a bunch of East Coast team owners, who are in D3 primarily because they don’t want to deal with national travel costs, agreeing to add a single team on the West Coast that would have to play in one of their divisions. I also can’t see the single West Coast team salivating to jump up to D3 so that they can have to fly across the country for every game. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Can this club survive being so close to the Galaxy & Chivas USA, or is it set to fail from the start?
It could totally handle being that close. LA is so huge and if you place your team in the right area it could draw well for USL PRO. The same would be true for an NASL team. If someone put a division II team in and around Cub Stadium or north of there in the Polish section of Chicago I would guess if marketed correctly, they would draw plenty of fans. But it has to be in the city and not way out there like they did at Bridgeview or like in Houston with Frisco.
LA is a long and exspensive way for USL teams to travel. The travel alone I think will kill the NASL after a year, unless traffic keeps paying. BUT the LA market is big enough so I am happy they are coming. New york is getting USL too? is it close to RB?
No and please remember, in huge cities like these with high densities, you could be close and probably still make it work if you market it correctly. RB Arena is in New Jersey which for a lot of New Yorkers they just aren’t going to make that trip unless they are big time MLS fans. That’s why Garber is talking about a second MLS team in NY.
Here’s a Google map of the two locations.
http://is.gd/hQweH
Isnt the NASL just a one time charge vs the USL Pro yearly charge Bart.
Dan,
Nope. NASL charges annual fees as well. I may be wrong, but I think they are much higher than the USL fees. Leagues have to have fees coming in to offset administrative costs.
I guess the better question is how much Traffic gets in fees from NASL on this arrangement, since they are funding so many teams. The teams cannot pay back the monies, so NASL must have some arrangement with Traffic to repay.
can someone say exactly how many tean TRaffic is finanacing? So it can be clear cause I keep reading they are investing in “soo many teams”. Exactly how many?
Nothing solid but beside obviously Miami FC, it looks like they may be picking up the contracts for the players in Minnesota and Atlanta. Carolina was publicly looking for investors during the season but I havent seen anything about Traffic being involved in with them or not but it is entirely possible.
Jspec, I don’t think anyone knows that for sure. Right now we know they own Miami FC, and are a partner in Atlanta. Minnesota will be a league owned team so that means Traffic will also have a hand in that but it so will other owners in the league. A question to me is if other teams own MN why will they have incentive to make MN a competitive team if they are in direct competition with their own teams.
Traffic will control Miami, Atlanta and Minnesota, they will start having press conferences this week, beginning in Atlanta on Wednesday.
Traffic will also have to assist in funding the NASL front office, so that the USSF minimum staffing is established as well, and Davidson wants a Commissioner (spell that lot’s of moolah) to be announced shortly as well.
BQ, your question is an easy one to answer. …. Traffic simply needs to park players and to do so, in the short term, it needs 8 teams, irrespective of competition. The game plan in theory, is that once the league is established, to sell off those Atlanta and Minnesota interests so that Traffic may recoup its money.
Without Traffic, this scheme simply does not work. It is an artificial propping of artificial teams to pass sanctioning.
For the team owners, such as Selby, et al., this whole theory is premised upon the base assumption that there is intrinsic value with each team. Meaning, if MLS costs $40,000,000, then a D2 team has to be worth half that, or $20,000,000, irrespective of the fact that the D2 team will lose $1,000,000 each season.
For the billionaire boys club folks that comprise the MLS team owners, this is a drop in the bucket, much like you and I splurging on an expensive dinner and cognac once a month. For NASL owners that have a net worth of only $20,000,000, this is a big chunk of change that erodes their net worth rather quickly.
It is called filling the gap. Traffic is the gap filler. It is also called buying a league…..
If this works, Davidson and his motley crue will be considered pure geniuses, and I will be the first to applaud them.
Traffic appears to be the NASL version of the Hunt brothers that helped kick-off the MLS in the ’90s. He is the NASL’s sugar daddy at this point. And, unfortunately, we need one (especially those of us who live in MN).
The Hunt/Anschutz/Traffic analogy falls flat in a couple ways.
1. Hunt and Anschutz built stadiums.
2. Hunt’s and Anschutz’s primary aim wasn’t the owning of players.
I’m there with Bart, and will applaud Traffic if they mange to pull it off. It will be interesting to see how the league is run this season. Maybe they really have been holding back because they weren’t in charge of everything. I really will try to hold back my critiques for a couple years.
I understand the Traffic concerns, but maybe it would be best for us to put this in perspective. I’ve read comments of them “owning the league” and “controlling the league”. Just how many players will they be “parking” in the NASL? Since I acknowledge that many of you have a greater insight into Traffic than I do, how many did they “park” at Miami in 2010? I looked at this year’s roster and see 15 of the 28 players listed with previous MSL or USL experience (teams not controlled by Traffic) so those players did not seem to fall under the young, foreign description. If it’s less than half on the team that they outright own, not sure if it would be more/less on a team that they are investing in. So tops…..how many are we looking at? Roughly 160-180 players in the NASL (8 teams x 20-24 players) so just trying to determine the big picture impact.
I don’t understand the concerns about selling players. Every league in the wold, outside of the Big Three, makes a majority of their money this way. How do you people think Toronto FC got the money for that beautiful real grass pitch? Maurice Edu-to-Rangers ring a bell? That is the whole goal of a lower-teired league…move players to the top leagues. It is a successful business-model all over the world.