Charleston Battery owner Rob Salvatore was on the stage at his club’s annual “Fan Fest” last month for a question-and-answer session with supporters when a fan stood up and asked something Salvatore wasn’t expecting.
Did USL’s announcement in February that it intended to launch a Division 1 league mean that it would institute promotion and relegation next?
“When I said I was for it and I hoped our league can figure it out, it was the loudest cheer of the night outside of introducing (coach) Ben Pirmann,” Salvatore told The Athletic in a phone interview.
The moment stuck with the 49-year-old entrepreneur, who leads the ownership group that bought the team in 2019. Founded in 1993, the Battery are the oldest continuously operating professional soccer club in the United States. They were the first non-MLS club to build a soccer-specific stadium back in 1999. And in a setting with between 400 and 500 of its most diehard fans – people who had followed the club for decades – the desire for promotion and relegation sent a clear message.
“I was not expecting that to happen,” Salvatore said. “I didn’t know the question was coming and I certainly didn’t know a rousing cheer was coming. But I went home and I was like, ‘Whoa. They really want it.’ … I think this is a product and an audience and a consumer decision that makes a lot of sense. I see that demand, I see that signal. and I’m like, ‘Man, we’ve got to do this.’ And I think everybody read that in their local markets, and I think the league did a great job of realizing we can do this now and we really, in a way, have to do it now.”
As first reported by The Athletic, USL owners voted Tuesday to adopt promotion and relegation, becoming the first professional soccer league in the history of the United States to do so. Owners passed the vote with a supermajority.
The plan is for USL to implement pro-rel in 2028 when it launches the new D1 league.
The USL previously had discussed implementing pro-rel in 2023, but had not been able to get enough support to bring it to a vote. But Salvatore’s experience in Charleston wasn’t an anomaly. It created a buzz for USL, and owners continued to discuss the option before calling the vote.
“I’ve always said that it was just going to take time, and we were doing the work,” USL president Paul McDonough told The Athletic in a phone interview. “The owners did the work. We did the work. We had a lot of discussions. And everyone realizes the opportunity to be bold and ambitious and be a first mover in this area.”
The vote could be a key moment in the history of the sport in the U.S. It certainly will lead to different types of discussions around the USL, which is, of course, the point. But there are areas of the game’s governance that will have to be considered, too. U.S. Soccer’s division sanctioning includes rules around the size of a team’s stadium and the net worth of its ownership group. Promotion and relegation will force conversations about those standards — though it is worth noting that the federation has often provided waivers for leagues.
Brett Johnson has ownership stakes in the USL Championship club Rhode Island FC as well as Premier League club Ipswich Town. Johnson invested in Ipswich when it was in England’s third tier, League One, and so directly experienced the benefits and romance of promotion and relegation.
He’s been an advocate of the system for years.
“The journey with Ipswich Town and seeing what (promotion) does to revitalize a club and, by extension, a community, I truly believe there’s nothing like this construct in sport,” Johnson said in a phone interview. “Every single game matters. It requires excellence on and off the pitch. And I’m excited to adopt it on our shores and I think for USL, it’s a brilliant move, if you will.
“I think USL is already creating itself as one of the best developmental leagues in the world. I think it will take us to another level. The timing is perfect, because I think increasingly, a lot of eyes are looking to America with the World Cup coming up.”
Johnson said his group specifically targeted a club at the third division level with the goal of getting a team back to the Premier League. Things don’t always work out as planned, but the fact that more investors have targeted this type of investment gives Johnson hope of what could come down the pipeline for the USL.
It was no easy task to bring USL owners to a vote. Years of discussion took place. There were false starts on league-wide votes. But the momentum was there after the D1 announcement, and with the World Cup approaching there was a belief that the status quo would not be enough for USL to grow.
Rhode Island FC enjoyed plenty of success in its inaugural 2024 season in USL Championship. (Photo by: David DelPoio/The Providence Journal/USA TODAY Network)
“It clearly passed with a very strong mandate,” Johnson said. “Everything’s about timing, and I think it took a while for a lot of people to get their head around it. But it was really clear that the time was right here. I give everyone, collectively, a lot of credit. This feels like the right time to do this. And I think we’re all in the right mind space in terms of trying to now do what’s necessary, which is to execute effectively to make this a reality.”
The vote Tuesday was very much a first step. There is a lot of work to do.
USL will work with owners, TV partners and fans to determine what exactly its pro-rel system will look like. McDonough pointed out that an American league has a unique problem: it needs to put a spotlight on both its playoffs that determine a league champion, as well as pro-rel battles. How it balances those two respective competitions is crucial.
But the league had “to try to do something that’s going to cause a level of differentiation,” McDonough said. “With everything going on in the country and the opportunities for growth with the World Cup, it just doesn’t make sense to stay the status quo.”
USL will study variations of pro-rel, including the possibility of having the top teams from a lower division play in a playoff against the bottom teams from the higher division to determine if teams move up or down. Much is still to be determined, including the number of teams that will go down and up from each division, respectively. USL also still must determine how many teams will play in Division 1. Currently, it’s aiming for 12 or 14 teams. The third division, USL League One, would be the bottom of the pyramid, and teams would not be relegated from there.
Whatever format the leagues settle upon, McDonough said the USL feels confident promotion and relegation will drive growth for the whole.
“People want something different,” McDonough said. “A lot of people now in this country relate a lot to European soccer, because so much of it is shown on TV and they play over here. People are drawn to that. And they see what happened at (a club like) Wrexham. They romanticize about something like that.
“Now that’s not going to be us initially, but if this can help push the relevance of soccer in our communities and nationally across the board to become more relevant, then you’ve got to do it.”
Salvatore went back again to that night in February and the overwhelming response from fans. It eliminated any doubts he had that this was the right next step for USL.
“I was very happy to see that not only it passed, but it passed decisively,” Salvatore said. “I just felt that at the end of the day, we’re businessmen and women who own and run these teams, and you’re going to listen to the market. If you think there’s that demand, you gotta go get it.”
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(Top photo: David DelPoio/The Providence Journal/USA TODAY Network)
