USL president: FC Cincy pushing league forward
If anyone’s going to jump into Major League Soccer expansion, United Soccer League President Jake Edwards said he’d certainly prefer it be a USL team.
Whether or not Edwards thinks Futbol Club Cincinnati is one of the USL teams likely to make the jump remains to be seen.
"It could be. It's not really for me to say," Edwards told The Enquirer during a Saturday interview at Nippert Stadium prior to Cincinnati's friendly against Crystal Palace FC.
One thing seems a certainty for Edwards: That FC Cincinnati will continue to challenge USL norms as long as they remain in the league.
FC Cincinnati recorded on Saturday the largest-ever attendance mark for a game involving a USL team – 35,061 – and continues to pace the league in home attendance with more than 16,400 per game.
“Success attracts success and, in some cases, challenges the older teams… The new guys like Cincinnati are challenging some of the older teams,” Edwards said.
But FC Cincinnati is just one piece of the textured and shifting USL landscape.
Edwards' USL is in the midst of a wave of rapid yet thoughtful expansion as it works toward a three-conference realignment. The league introduced six teams for the 2016 season with more set to come online in years to come. They turned away about a half dozen prospective ownership groups in the last year alone, Edwards said.
Edwards also recently helped announce USL's new Nashville franchise and is nearing the announcement of additional expansion cities, he said.
All this is happening as the league awaits a decision from the U.S. Soccer Federation regarding a petition to be considered the second division in the U.S. soccer pyramid. The league is currently the third rung of American soccer.
Suffice it to say Edwards is overseeing a lot of moving parts.
He discussed some of the issues facing the league during the Saturday interview.
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USL expansion, attrition
The USL’s goal, Edwards said, is to have three conferences – one each in the western, central and eastern U.S.
Edwards said the league, currently slated to have 32 active franchises by 2018, isn't far from having the teams necessary to make the conference switch.
“We’re in advanced dialogue with about half a dozen markets that are going to be set to come in in 2018 and 2019,” Edwards said.
He declined to comment on specific markets where USL would expand, except to say the league is focusing heavily on America's southwest and southeast regions.
“We feel strongly that there are a significant number of quality markets left that we know will sustain pro soccer,” he said.
Of course, not all current USL teams are committed long-term. Edwards acknowledged MLS is likely to tap at least a couple franchises for expansion into America’s top flight.
If and when the MLS comes, Edwards seemed to indicate he wouldn’t stand in the way of a USL team’s opportunity at the big time.
“I’d much rather it be our team, to be honest with you, in the marketplace that goes up," Edwards said. "Otherwise, your teams left in a marketplace trying to survive against an MLS team. It’s not going to work. The challenge then is for the time you’re in our league, can you build a quality organization. Build a great fan base. Have a stadium solution.
“That’s the uniqueness about USL. We’re proud when, whether it’s a team or coach or player or front office executives or a market, builds something with us and moves up. That’s OK. That’s alright in my book.”
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Can USL infrastructure support FC Cincinnati?
Locals are still mostly unsure about what transpired during the first half of Cincinnati’s July 6 game against the Rochester Rhinos. The live YouTube stream was down for almost the entire first half.
The stream was restored before halftime and held up the rest of the game, but it caused frustration for FC Cincinnati’s fans and called into question the league’s ability to meet demand in the Cincinnati market.
Edwards dismissed the idea the USL couldn’t support a team as big and as popular as FC Cincinnati, saying the live stream problem doesn’t reflect USL’s ability to accommodate teams of that size and quality.
“We want these kind of owners, these markets (like Cincinnati). These stadiums. This is what we are working toward,” Edwards said. “Make no mistake, this is the league we’re trying to build here.”
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Facebook as a broadcast distribution partner?
To combat broadcasting issues, Edwards said USL will launch next season a $7 million project to take control of broadcast productions and create a uniform broadcast standard.
Commentary and production teams will be housed in a south Florida broadcast center. The TV signals will also be beamed into and out of that center. These steps, Edwards said, should eliminate personnel issues, inexperienced camera crews and inadequate technologies that occasionally hamper live streams on the league's YouTube channel.
Teams that already have good crews and “do things at a really high level themselves will continue to do so,” Edwards said. “That’ll be the case in Cincinnati.”
The league also used FC Cincinnati’s friendly against Palace as a test run for its first-ever Facebook broadcast, which was in-keeping with the league’s digital-first content strategy.
“The good thing about our league right now is that we’re one of the few leagues in the world that has broadcast rights available. We’re not locked up,” Edwards said. “Every other soccer league in America has its rights locked up. We’re not. So, we’re looking for a distribution partner for next year. Could it be Facebook? We’ll see.”
Edwards said he and other league officials believe the future of sports broadcasting will be on platforms provided by Facebook and Amazon, along with other websites of the like.