United and Islanders Record Big Wins: Why USL is so Successful on the Pitch

The Islanders used two late goals to advance Wednes­day Night

Trop­i­cal Storm Hanna has reaked havoc on Haiti and it also delayed the start of tonight’s CONCACAF Cham­pi­ons League match between Puerto Rico and Ala­jue­lense. For the first time ever a Costa Rican club has been elim­i­nated from a CONCACAF tour­na­ment by an Amer­i­can club with the USL-1 side doing the hon­ors.  The Islanders won despite play­ing four matches in the last eight days all over North and Cen­tral Amer­ica thanks to the fix­ture con­ges­tion MLS and USL both seem to tol­er­ate. The US Open Cup final between DC United and Charleston at RFK Sta­dium was a show­case of the best Amer­i­can club foot­ball has to offer. This game was absent of the bad give­aways and poor pos­ses­sion play that char­ac­ter­ize MLS and are less preva­lent but still numer­ous in USL-1.

I have to say I am some­hwat offended that many of my col­legues and friends in the soc­cer blog­ger com­mu­nity have seem­ingly cho­sen to ignore the suc­cess of USL sides in this com­pe­ti­tion while con­tin­u­ing to dis­cuss MLS’ fail­ures in a vac­uum. Foot­ball writ­ers in Eng­land and Ger­many do not ignore their sec­ond divi­sions entirely and do not sim­ply make assump­tions about a product’s qual­ity with­out watch­ing it or try­ing to under­stand it. The dis­mis­sive­ness of many towards USL this year has been shock­ing: the assump­tion dur­ing the early rounds of the US Open Cup was that USL sides were essen­tially semi pro teams and that any loss by MLS teams was on them, not due to the qual­ity of play from USL. As one who fol­lows both leagues cloesly I can tell you while the most indi­vid­u­ally tal­ented play­ers are in MLS, USL-1 has a qual­ity to it unknown to MLS, some­thing which both Puerto Rico and Mon­treal demon­strated in their CONCACAF tri­umphs: valu­able mid­field and attack­ing pos­ses­sion play. USL sides I have noticed also in my trips to Trop­i­cal Park Sta­dium and on the FSC Fri­day night tele­cast don’t com­mit all of the cheap give­aways MLS teams do. Yet USL sides lack the flair and qual­ity in the final third to be as dan­ger­ous as MLS sides.

So basi­cally I would say at home in an inter­na­tional com­pe­ti­tion I’d take a ran­dom MLS side, while when I travel to Cen­tral Amer­ica or the Caribbean I’d take a top USL-1 side. While this sounds like I am sim­ply inter­pret­ing the results of the last eight days this is based much more in the style and sub­stance of play than on the results which of course do bear out my thinking.

USL sides are much more tec­n­hi­cal and com­posed on the ball: Charleston showed this again last night as well but they were fac­ing in DC, a side much more refined  and cul­tured than your aver­age MLS side. First touches in USL tend to be less exag­ger­ated than in MLS and while the best play­ers in the nation play in MLS, their are also a num­ber of devel­op­ment ros­ter player who later in the sea­son play sig­nific­gant roles in MLS: The major­ity of these play­ers would not make a USL-1 roster.

I’d urge my col­legues in the soc­cer blog­ger com­mu­nity and media to pay more atten­tion to USL-1. Sure the games aren’t played in the sexy venues and you don’t have a com­mis­sioner that likes to shoot off his mouth in sell­ing the qual­ity of his league, but the foot­ball itself is very reveal­ing. It is no coin­ci­dence as we enter the group stages of the CONCACAF Cham­pi­ons League, the top club tour­na­ment in this region that USL has as many teams left in the event as MLS.

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