By Ashe Burr
November 4, 2024
Soccer is a sport that has rapidly become one of the most popular sports in the United States. But off the pitch, the United Soccer League faces an uphill battle against Major League Soccer as the United Soccer League’s grassroots style comes into battle with billionaire franchises.
Football. Soccer. Whatever you call the sport, the globe’s most popular event has seen numerous eyes turn toward the United States in recent years. Whether it be with the announcement of the 2026 Men’s World Cup being held across the U.S., Canada and Mexico; the U.S. Men’s National Team signing former Premier League manager Mauricio Pochettino as their manager; or superstars of the sport like Lionel Messi and Luis Suárez joining the list of world-renowned players — such as David Beckham and Zlatan Ibrahimović — to play in Major League Soccer (MLS).
Despite all the attention being showered on the MLS at the moment, there’s another professional soccer organization in this nation that has existed in the shadows of the MLS while offering more than the MLS provides. This is the United Soccer League (USL).
The USL consists of five different leagues: the men’s professional leagues USL Championship and USL League One, the men’s semi-pro/amateur USL League Two, the women’s professional league USL Super League, and the women’s pre-professional league USL W League. Comparing this to the MLS, which operates only a singular professional men’s league, it’s apparent that there are so many more opportunities for the sport in the USL—especially since it also has development leagues, allowing teams to provide opportunities for youth players in the areas surrounding the team’s location.
Outside of the USL, the only other women’s professional league in the nation is the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), which operates completely independently of the MLS. With the rapid rise in the popularity of numerous women’s sports internationally, the USL has a leg up on the MLS.
The MLS has also been known for the obscene cost to even get the idea of a new team off the ground. The most recent addition, San Diego FC, paid half a billion dollars to get their foot in the door. This sum does not include any player contracts, stadium construction, and so much more. Contrast this with USL League One’s additions costing around one percent of San Diego’s buy-in to the MLS, the lower financial barrier of entry allows for the USL leagues to create a sense of community in a localized area, such as Michigan.
The USL has a strong hold in Michigan, with eight men’s clubs currently based in the state. This puts Michigan in fifth place for the most clubs in the USL, bested by California, Florida, New York, Texas, and tied with North Carolina. These clubs span across the lower peninsula; from Grand Rapids to Hamtramck with a slew of cities in between.
Five of these teams have a women’s side: Detroit City FC (DCFC), Kalamazoo FC, Midwest United FC, AFC Ann Arbor, and Flint City AFC. These teams all play in the USL W League’s Great Lakes Division. As a “pre-professional” league, many of the players on the teams also play collegiate soccer. With only 12 regular season games for each of these teams, this makes for a short regular season, with games from May to June, and playoffs in July.
Lansing itself has a team, Lansing City FC. The USL League 2 team is in the Great Lakes Division—which almost exclusively has teams from Michigan—and play’s most home games at Grand Ledge High School. Much like the clubs in the USL W League, the regular season is short and sweet, overlapping heavily with the schedule of the W League.
Detroit City FC (DCFC) is the only men’s USL team in Michigan that is not based in USL League 2. Despite only having joined the USL in 2022, the club has qualified for the USL Championship playoffs in every season. The club has created an atmosphere that the USL have claimed to be the best in the nation. The atmosphere at DCFC matches is so immense that even when they were nothing more than a semi-professional team, London-based sports journalism outlet COPA90 did a documentary on the club, stating that Detroit was a “battleground for the soul of American soccer.” This was supplemented by MLS commissioner, Don Garber, stating that, “Detroit was once front runners for an expansion team,” but the bid fell through. When asked whether an MLS team in Detroit would work, the Northern Guard, DCFC’s fan club, co-founder Ken Butcher stated that “a Detroit team that is not Detroit City is not going to work. It would have no soul.”
In a sport where grassroots clubs are the norm globally, the MLS bucks the trend by operating the league in the franchise style seen in other professional sports leagues in the United States. This means that unlike most other leagues, where the worst performers get relegated to a less prominent league, MLS’ bottom feeders go unpunished. Rather than adopting the system that has proven to work internationally, Garber seems intent to make the MLS a league with a seemingly infinite number of teams.
The route to achieve these means, seems to target cities with clubs in the USL Championship. In a 2019 announcement, Garber said that “the cities of Las Vegas, Indianapolis, San Diego, Detroit, and Phoenix were clubs interested in joining the MLS.” At the time of the announcement, all five of these cities had well-established community teams playing professionally. Now, four of these cities currently play in the USL Championship, and the San Diego Loyal, a club that was incredibly popular in San Diego, folded with the encroachment of San Diego FC, the MLS’ newest club. Additionally, a number of the recent expansions in the MLS, such as FC Cincinnati and Nashville SC, were poached from the USL. There doesn’t even need to be concrete plans for a new MLS club to come into a city for a USL team to get the short end of the stick. Despite Garber stating that there would likely be a lull in MLS expansion following San Diego, there were rumors of a new MLS team coming to Indianapolis. This saw the city’s previously approved stadium construction for the Indy Eleven rejected and leaving the club in a limbo state.
As the United States continues to rise in prominence within the soccer world, much of the attention is on the MLS and the 2026 World Cup. The sport was built upon community teams, such as Aston Villa of England and Internazionale (better known as Inter Milan) of Italy. The USL continues to strive toward the community aspect of soccer, even if corporatism dominates sports in the United States.
Ashe Burr is a junior majoring in Professional and Public Writing and Japanese, with plans to be a novelist in the future. When they aren’t writing, they can be found spinning with the Spartan Marching Band and State of Art Winterguard, working at Impact 89FM, or watching soccer highlights from Detroit City FC and Sønderjyske.