In one form or another, the USL has been around since 1986 when Francisco Marcos founded the Southwest Indoor Soccer League with five teams owned by the operators of indoor soccer facilities in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

The USL launched its first men’s outdoor league in 1989 and first pro men’s outdoor league in 1995.

In 2025, the USL includes the Championship (24 teams), League One (14 teams) and first-year Super League (8 women’s teams) at the pro level and two national amateur leagues, League Two (144 teams) and the W league (93 teams).

That’s a total of 46 pro teams and 237 amateur teams, 182 men’s teams and 101 women’s teams. 

Almost 300 teams!

But after 30 years of operating men’s pro leagues under myriad names, the USL is at a crossroads.

Three weeks ago, it announced plans to launch a Division 1 men’s league, above the Division 2 Championship, which kicks off its 15th season in its current form on Saturday.

The USL plans to launch its new league in 2027 or 2028 to take advantage of the interest generated by the 2026 World Cup among fans, corporate supporters and investors. The latter will be critical if the USL is to achieve its goal of operating a successful Division I men’s league. 

Paul McDonough, the USL president, is realistic about the upgrade that will be needed — across the board — on the current USL Championship.

“Everything, when people watch it, it has to be better than what we have now,” he told AFP. “The stadium feel, the stadium capacity, how they fill it, what it looks like on the field, it has all got to be better and that’s what we’re focused on.”

Not all Championship owners will have the means or desire to take the next step, which is why new investors will be needed. The opportunity to operate a team in a “Division I league” will certainly be an attraction, opening the doors to investors (and foreign clubs) who might not have been interested before. 

But the USL will need time to get new stadiums built or existing stadiums expanded, and U.S. Soccer will have to grant waivers or the modify its existing Pro League Standards for D1 men’s leagues. 

As it stands now, it would be impossible to expect the USL to meet, in 2027 or 2028 or any time in the near future, the requirement that a league has a minimum of 12 teams, and their stadiums must all be enclosed (for controlled access and security) with a minimum seating capacity of 15,000.

The one thing McDonough emphasized is a long runway: “We are going to need some time.” The stadium construction process is slow, painful and costly, often full of setbacks. 

MLS opened its first soccer-specific stadium in 1999, and it was almost two decades later before it had a dozen constructed. The pace at which new stadiums have opened has picked up since then — 11 teams have opened new soccer-specific stadiums in the last decade with two more being constructed, Miami Freedom Park to open in 2026 and NYCFC’s Etihad Park in Queens in 2027.

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The current state of the Championship reflects the challenges the USL faces. Many USL Championship teams play in soccer-specific stadiums, but they are small.