In many places around the world, teams within a sport operate within a pyramid. For many sports, it is a highly organized, bureaucratic pyramid in which entire teams can move up or down a level within the structure.
In the United States, most sports are in a pyramid, but it is a pyramid where players can move up and down within the structure depending on health and overall competency. For most, local age-group recreational programs are the lowest level of the sports pyramid. Then, you have U.S. high schools and sometimes (depending on the sport) club programs which command the attention of the player full-time. Above that pyramid are NCAA schools. Above that are professional teams.
For this story, I’m going to make my remarks about women’s soccer here in the United States. Before 1994, there was no structure to speak of for women’s postgraduate soccer. Then, in 1995, the U.S. Interregional Soccer League (which would eventually be rebranded as the United Soccer League) started a women’s league with about 20 clubs in a single-tier league.
By 1999, and the win by the United States in the third FIFA Women’s World Cup, moves were being made to create a U.S. Soccer Federation-sanction top women’s division. The first attempt, the National Soccer Alliance, collapsed without playing a game.
The second, the Women’s United Soccer Association, attracted global media, players, and a small handful of dedicated sponsors. The league, however, would fold after its third season. A third top division, Women’s Professional Soccer, came on the scene and, in 2010, would have its first major ownership crisis when St. Louis Athletica folded. Later that year, Dan Borislow bought the Washington Freedom, which became a story unto itself. WPS would fold by the spring of 2012.
While all this was going on, the grass roots of amateur and semipro women’s soccer has been blossoming, to the point where there are more than 200 clubs in both the USL’s “W” League and the Women’s Professional Soccer League, which had been a breakaway group from the USISL in the 1990s, but has spread across the country.
So, why am I bringing all this up? In the last couple of years, the United Soccer League formed a second USSF Division I women’s pro soccer league called the USL SuperLeague. The SuperLeague was given more or less co-equal status with the multimillion-dollar NWSL.
As we noted when this was announced, I found it odd that several of the eight teams in the league were in, more or less, direct competition for eyes, fandom, and dollars in several existing NWSL markets, such as the District of Columbia, North Carolina, New York, and the state of Washington.
It is in the latter where the latest bit of uncertainty within the U.S. women’s soccer pyramid is building. Last week, it was announced that Spokane Velocity of the USL Superleague would be folding before the start of the 2026-27 season later this year.
As things stand, at least within the USL Superleague, there are going to be eight USL SuperLeague teams going forward, with three expansion candidates in Iowa, Arkansas, and northern New Jersey slated to begin in a year’s time.
Which means that soon, there could be three USSF Division I women’s pro soccer teams within 20 miles of midtown Manhattan. I’m very skeptical about this, given the fact that the owners of Spokane Velocity (third-lowest league attendance according to one metric) saw what was happening with the Seattle Reign and Portland Thorns.
I have a feeling this isn’t the only leg that will be kicked out from under the USL SuperLeague.