United Soccer League (1984–85)

The United Soccer League was a professional soccer league in the United States in the mid-1980s.

History
By the end of 1983, professional outdoor soccer in the United States was crumbling. The North American Soccer League only had nine teams planning to return for the 1984 season (down from a peak of 24 in 1980), and the de facto second division American Soccer League had just limped through a season featuring only six teams. Both leagues had seen an almost constant turnover of clubs from year to year, and neither organization had figured out how to translate the attention generated by high-profile players such as Pelé and the recent surge in American youth participation in soccer into stability or profitability for the professional game.

When the owners of the ASL's remaining teams came together in Atlanta for their annual meetings in January 1984, the Pennsylvania Stoners and Oklahoma City Slickers announced plans to go "dormant," and Stoners president William Burfeind also resigned as league president. This left only four active teams plus the Rochester Flash, who had planned to re-activate after sitting out in 1983. Meanwhile, a proposal to grant an expansion team to a group in Fort Lauderdale (hoping to capitalize on the fan base left behind when the NASL's Strikers had been moved to Minnesota) was shot down because the ASL's by-laws allowed dormant owners to still retain voting rights and control over territories despite not fielding any active teams in those territories. At this point the owners of the Jacksonville Tea Men and Dallas Americans, Ingo Krieg and Bob Spears, decided that the situation was broken beyond repair, and they took steps over the weekend to start a new league that they would call the United Soccer League. Almost immediately, the Detroit Express and the Fort Lauderdale expansion group elected to move over to the new circuit. Burfeind agreed to be the new league's commissioner. David Fraser, who had stepped in midseason to bail the Oklahoma City Slickers out of a financial crisis in 1983 but then released his controlling interest following the season after learning that the club was still deeply in debt, seized the opportunity to revive, rename and reorganize the operation with a financial clean slate in the new league. Similarly, a new ownership group led by Felix Sabates gave many of the front office staff and players from the Carolina Lightnin' the chance to keep pro soccer alive in Charlotte after principal owner Bob Benson chose to fold his ASL side. Initial excitement for the new league was strong enough that two NASL teams, the Tampa Bay Rowdies and Tulsa Roughnecks, considered moving over as well. By late March, Rochester chose to follow the crowd, and the ASL quietly ended operations.

By the time the dust settled, Tampa and Tulsa decided to stay put in the NASL, and Detroit elected not to field a team due to the new league not being sanctioned by the USSF. So the USL started play in May 1984 with nine teams organized into three regional divisions: three direct transfers from the ASL (the Jacksonville Tea Men, Dallas Americans and Rochester Flash), two "re-booted" ASL clubs (the Oklahoma City Stampede and Charlotte Gold) and four new teams (the Buffalo Storm, Fort Lauderdale Sun, Houston Dynamos, and New York Nationals). Fiscal responsibility, regional rivalries, year round operation (including an indoor season in the winter months), and measured expansion were a few of the cornerstones on which the organization was to be structured. A league rule allowed only four of eighteen roster spots be taken by foreign players. In addition, a salary cap was imposed on member clubs. To control travel costs, the teams played an imbalanced 24-game schedule in which they played 12 games against the other two members of their regional divisions (allowing the road team to travel by bus and often return home the same night) and 12 games against the six teams in the other two divisions. They also arranged the schedules so that when teams did make their only visit to the opponents outside of their divisions, they visited all three cities in a division in one sweep (meaning only two stretches of just short of a week each during a season that teams would need to travel by plane and stay in hotels between games).

On the field, the 1984 outdoor season was comparatively stable and successful. Because the NASL was shrinking so rapidly, several high-quality players were available and joined the rosters of teams throughout the league. Parity in the standings reflected competitive play on the field, and even the top two teams (Oklahoma City and Fort Lauderdale) only managed 15-9 records. All nine teams completed their full schedules, though there were some troubling signs (such as the Buffalo Storm declining the opportunity to host a home playoff game and the New York Nationals starting 5-0 but then collapsing to a 10-14 record after losing their head coach and several key players a month into the season ). The Sun, whose roster featured former NASL Fort Lauderdale Strikers players Teófilo Cubillas, Keith Weller, Jim Tietjens, and Ernst Jean-Baptiste, won the league title in a three-game series against the Houston Dynamos.

Off the field, the league found itself in crisis heading into the winter of 1984/85. While attendance was on par with the ASL in its last season, revenues did not keep up with expenses despite the league's more conservative fiscal structure. Team owners could not cope with the losses. The indoor season planned at the league's founding never materialized. Last minute merger negotiations between the USL and NASL took place in hopes of shoring up the finances of USL clubs and keeping the NASL from shrinking to the point of collapse. But these ended without an agreement and were called off on March 5th. By the end of the month, the NASL had abandoned plans for a 1985 season, and Houston left the USL to be independent while five other clubs (New York, Rochester, Buffalo, Charlotte and Jacksonville) folded altogether. Only Dallas, Fort Lauderdale (who were renamed South Florida Sun), and Oklahoma City (who had re-located in December and re-branded as the Tulsa Tornado's) chose to return. The El Paso/Juarez Gamecocks were added to bring league membership to a paltry four teams for the 1985 season.

After a hasty schedule re-organization, the league began play in late May with a round-robin style exhibition series for the "USL Cup" with hopes of attracting more teams to join the league for the second half of its season. Signs of trouble were all around. Bill Burfeind resigned as commissioner, the Tulsa team fell behind on stadium rent and forfeited two games when unpaid players and coaches refused to take the field, and the Dallas Americans were forced to offer their players stock options to cover unpaid salaries. The league had initially announced that the top two teams in the standings at the end of the round-robin set of games would face off to determine the winner of the cup; however, this game (which would have pitted South Florida with their 4-2 record against Dallas at 3-3) was called off, and the league declared South Florida the cup winners. As a harbinger of things to come, no actual trophy was presented to them, causing Sun player-coach, Keith Weller, to quip, "There ain't no cup." No new teams had joined the league by June 22, when the "regular season" was scheduled to begin. The Tornado's/Gamecocks match scheduled for that night was cancelled (sources differ as to whether another walkout by unpaid players or stadium rent disputes was the cause), which may have been just as well, as the Gamecocks owner had already quietly ended his relationship with the league, paid his bills and salaries through the end of the month and released his players. The Sun beat Dallas 3-1 at Lockhart Stadium on the same day in what would turn out to be the USL's final match. A few days later, creditors locked league officials out of their offices, and play was suspended for good on June 25th.

The collapse of the USL and NASL (which would never realize its stated goal of relaunching in 1986) meant that for the first time in over fifty years there was no professional outdoor soccer league in the U.S. This was a temporary void, however, as the Western Soccer Alliance and third incarnation of the American Soccer League would form and grow in the latter half of the 1980s, eventually to merge into the American Professional Soccer League, precursor to the USL First Division.

Teams

 * Buffalo Storm (1984)
 * Charlotte Gold (1984)
 * Dallas Americans (1984–85)
 * El Paso/Juarez Gamecocks (1985)
 * Fort Lauderdale Sun (1984) → South Florida Sun (1985)
 * Houston Dynamos (1984)
 * Jacksonville Tea Men (1984)
 * New York Nationals (1984)
 * Oklahoma City Stampede (1984)
 * Rochester Flash (1984)
 * Tulsa Tornados (1985)