The 2024 USL Championship and League One regular seasons are in the books, we’re partway through the playoffs, and the winter break will be here before you know it.
In many ways, it’s been a banner year for the USL across the board. The Super League, a first-division women’s competition, hit the field. Television deals with CBS, NBC, and TUDN brought more attention to the USL. Players like Nick Markanich, the Championship’s Golden Boot winner, deepened the league’s pipeline to Europe.
That said, there are still potential pitfalls that loom over the USL’s future. The American soccer landscape is always changing, so what big questions loom for the league as 2025 approaches?
John Morrissey
1. Will MLS continue to enter USL markets?
The biggest storyline of the spring in the USL was neither on-field performances nor off-field progress.
Instead, the reveal of a bid to bring Major League Soccer to Indianapolis – home of the USL Championship‘s Indy Eleven – stole the headlines. Though little is known about the expansion effort, its arrival led the Indianapolis City-County Council to pull support from the Eleven’s previously approved stadium initiative in favor of a putative MLS facility.
The case of Indianapolis is yet another example of MLS either directly poaching or indirectly competing with existing USL clubs. The San Diego Loyal folded at the end of the 2023 season despite maxing out capacity at Torero Stadium, just over a year before MLS’s San Diego FC was scheduled to come to town. Nashville, Cincinnati, Orlando, Austin, and St. Louis have all abandoned ship to move up a tier in the past.
