The second division North American Soccer League (NASL) is facing another imminent fight for its survival. Having somehow managed to escape what appeared near-certain extinction last winter, the NASL is under the gun again to try and hold all of its teams together and cheat death once again. After each of the last two seasons, NASL has lost multiple teams, several of which have defected to other leagues. The league currently has 11 teams (including inactive clubs in Fort Lauderdale and Oklahoma City) with an expansion announcement in San Diego expected soon. The US Soccer Federation (USSF) has stated that NASL needs to reach twelve teams in 2018 to retain its current D2 sanctioning, though this statement is up to interpretation.

Meanwhile the competing second division USL looks healthier than ever with 30 teams and more on the way. In a competition of closed leagues with a franchise-based system, the league that offsets costs better, limits travel expenses and provides a strong league structure seems destined to be the winner. USL understands how to play the closed-league game in a manner NASL never did. At the time of this writing several sources on the condition of anonymity tell me that multiple NASL club owners are in discussions with USL currently about potentially defecting to the rival league for next season or 2019.

Following last season, two of NASL’s more successful sides off-the-pitch Ottawa and Tampa Bay defected to USL and several others were rumored to be considering the move. The previous year, San Antonio is a complicated move switched ownership and leagues from NASL to USL and Atlanta which was supported by the NASL’s owners folded, only to be revived months later by the former owners in NPSL. After last season, Fort Lauderdale and Oklahoma City took a year off (though in neither case did the league make a formal announcement of this) and Minnesota moved to MLS.

All this tumult has put the league on the brink of finally going bust after seven seasons.

NASL’s struggle for survival is directly related to several factors. The most talked-about issue with the league is an inability to control costs by maintaining a sprawling league that spans from Puerto Rico to Edmonton and the continuing escalation of player salaries when compared to USL. NASL squads on average spend a lot more per team than USL clubs do.

Yet when MLS reserve teams are not factored in, USL thus far this season is averaging higher attendance per team than NASL. Right now NASL lacks any sort of relevance in the bigger picture of US or global football and exists in a vacuum as far as domestic media is concerned. NASL results don’t mean much and few good young players that fans would want to track for future success play their trade in the league.

Much of this spending has been misplaced and based on short-term considerations and that has led to the league instead of developing young talent and setting up academies for its clubs to instead overspend on journeymen players leading to the highest average age among leagues in the world that have been studied according to SocTakes Nipun Chopa, an NASL expert. 

5) Average age of @naslofficial players is 27.4 . According to the report,makes it the oldest league in the world re: average age of players

— Nipun Chopra, PhD (@NipunChopra7) January 12, 2017

Ultimately, the failings of NASL though numerous were likely exacerbated by the unwillingness of its owners and the league to properly embrace promotion and relegation. In 2015, then-NASL Commissioner Bill Peterson spoke out to The Telegraph about the subject and won plaudits from this dissatisfied with the system.

Without engaging every community in this country then all you have is a regional phenomenon, similar maybe to ice hockey in the United States, where if a city has a team there’s interest but if you don’t have a team there’s not much interest.

We believe that the global model is the right model – I learned this personally from living in England [working for NFL Europe]and having people pound me over the advantages of having a tiered system with promotion and relegation versus a closed system and they were right.

However, within hours the NASL issued an official league statement backing off Peterson’s comments to The Telegraph. My sources told me at the time this was due to the anxiety of owners in NASL who had paid a franchise fee to deal with potential relegation to a lower league. My understanding at the time as well was that many NASL owners felt the league could create a rival closed first division alternative to MLS with different rules but without the risk of relegation. The idea of challenging MLS, an established market leader for more reasons than just their Division one sanctioning was foolhardy unless you truly have a different ecosystem you are living in or create.

NASL has proven incapable despite several resets and changes in direction of playing the closed league franchise-based model game. MLS and USL have perfected exploitation of. NASL’s attempts to create an “independent” franchise-based system where team “controlled their own destiny” and owners could spend as they saw fit has failed. On three different occasions NASL owners have been forced to prop up struggling clubs in order to keep the league at a minimum number of teams required. Allowing owners to spend freely in a closed league has also led to the overspending on players and technical staff as evidenced above.

What NASL in retrospect needed to do was embrace Peterson’s call for PRO/REL regardless of what political trouble it created the league with the USSF and however much in irritated large contingents of the soccer media in the US. Large swaths of fans in this country feel unrepresented by the current US Soccer pro league structure which partially explains why matches at the bottom-end of the Premier League table garner more often than not  a higher US television audience than regular season MLS games. But NASL’s attempts to court this disaffected base of soccer supporters have consistently been thwarted by the league’s politicking within a closed system. NASL isolated itself with its rhetoric and independent model without fully embracing the alternative, leaving it in absolute purgatory.

NASL’s last best hope for survival is to embrace PRO/REL in linkage with the newly-formed third division NISA. Unless, the league embraces a truly open model with the ability of community-based teams outside of NASL markets to elevate themselves while leading the efforts for an alternative pyramid, the league will eventually fall into the dustbin of history.