Musing on the state of leaguewide USL fandom

Is the league garnering interest outside of club-specific support?

Last night in the Gold Cup, Jamaica beat Trinidad & Tobago by a 4-1 margin. The game wasn’t all that remarkable, but it did spotlight numerous USL players. Phoenix’s Kevon Lambert started for Jamaica alongside Damion Lowe, formerly of Phoenix and Tampa Bay. San Antonio’s Shannon Gomez started on the other side, and Miami’s Ryan Telfer was on the bench.

Oakland’s Neveal Hackshaw was also in the lineup for the Soca Warriors. Hackshaw is a USL veteran, making more than 70 appearances for Indy Eleven and the Charleston Battery while picking up all-league recognition. His participation in the game garnered this text from a friend:

So, some context. I was born and raised in Indianapolis until I went off to college, and I came of age right when Indy Eleven were getting off the ground circa 2014. My social group was at least aware of the Eleven from their NASL days onward; these are people that would know names like Eamon Zayed, Tyler Pasher, or Neveal Hackshaw.

The fact that one of those folks had no idea Hackshaw was still playing struck a cord with me. This is a very good player starting for a fun Oakland Roots team, one that rarely overlaps with the Eleven in terms of match window. He could be a draw on ESPN+ in a perfect world! The disconnect is indicative of something true of the USL and MLS: people support their clubs and don’t track the league at large.

Louisville City and Miami FC played the league’s only nationally televised game of the season in mid-May, garnering 60,000 viewers on ESPN2. That’s comparable to the 73,000 viewers drawn by UFC Unleashed on the same network in a similar time slot, and it indicates niche interest compared to, say, regular season AAC basketball catching five times as many eyes.

I don’t claim expertise on MLS, but I consume national sports news as much as the next guy. What stories have actually garnered wide interest outside of MLS fandom since the David Beckham deal in 2007? I’d argue that none did until the Lionel Messi signing. If MLS doesn’t break through consistently, what can the USL hope for?

MLS still blows the USL out of the water when it comes to general interest, and it receives coverage in a fuller way as a result. There simply aren’t any full-time USL-specific journalists at independent outlets. You get excellent coverage from Nicholas Murray at the league site and Jeff Reuter on occasion at The Athletic, and sites like Protagonist also do great work, but the gap is clear.

As someone with a moderate audience covering the USL, I can speak to the issues. When I write about broad topics like Paul McDonough taking over as USL President, clicks hit the floor. Cross-cutting stories about things like the Goodrum-Da Costa trade, which I called the “biggest deal in USL history,” weren’t much better off.

My recent article breaking down Fidel Barajas did better, doubling the views of those aforementioned pieces. Still, the leading source of traffic was the Liga MX subreddit by a mile; USL fans weren’t clicking in the same way. Charleston fans were in, but that was it.

Articles like my Top 50 USL Players ranking broke through, beating my average traffic by a factor of ten. Is that indicative of generalist interest? Maybe not. When I self-published power rankings in 2022, team-specific accounts tended to aggregate the blurb about their club only. I posit that people look for their team’s section and swiftly close the tab after that.

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So, back to the Hackshaw example. This is a player that was well-loved in Indy, but that connection didn’t lead to any further interest in the USL. Maybe I’m overly idealistic, but there’s opportunity here.

Who converts on that opportunity? Oakland has no individual interest in drawing general eyeballs when their main source of revenue comes at the gates. Ex-clubs like Indy and Charleston are in a similar lurch. You’d love for the league office to do something as the representative of the combined interests of every club, but they’re working with limited resources as is.

To an extent, this is a chicken-and-the-egg issue: the sports media isn’t covering the league, so there aren’t articles out there to click. When those pieces do appear, people aren’t reading them. Still, why should potential fans care if the USL is only covered once in a blue moon? It’s a vicious cycle.

I don’t have an easy answer, and I don’t know that this is a real problem outside of my internet-poisoned brain. Second divisions across the world simply don’t garner massive generalist interest. America is distinct and idiosyncratic, but we don’t like anything that sniffs of “minor league” status.

More broadly, the USL is growing splendidly without that fanbase, leaning into youth development and local engagement, but I’m still wondering what’s being left on the table in the meantime.