The story of every professional soccer league in American history, bar one, could end with the same sentence: "Faced with mounting costs, uncertain revenue, and team owners giving up, the league was forced to fold." The exception is Major League Soccer, which avoided that fate by using an ultraconservative business strategy that involves open collusion between teams to keep costs down.
What even MLS die-hards might not remember, though, is that there was a time when MLS was just one of three leagues that might have been America's first division, competing with one boasting outlandish ideas and another upstart with team-based ownership.
Part of the reason that FIFA awarded the 1994 World Cup to the U.S. was to get a professional league going in America. In 1993, U.S. Soccer, the governing body for soccer in America, decided that it would give only one league its official imprimatur as a first-division league. Eventually, three proposals were considered.
One was a Technicolor, almost avant-garde proposal for League 1 America from an entrepreneur named Jim Paglia, who proposed a zany, circuslike re-imagining of soccer. Two nets at each end, nested inside each other. Extra lines on the field that certain players couldn't cross. Long-distance goals worth more points. You can only imagine the laughter from the rest of the soccer world had U.S. Soccer gone with Paglia's proposal. In the end, he wasn't really taken seriously as he received zero votes.
The other non-MLS proposal, though, was more serious. It came from the American Professional Soccer League (APSL), which was formed in 1990 and had been playing with some success. Despite being plagued by the NASL disease of an ever-changing roster of teams, the APSL had four years of experience running a national soccer league. Teams would have been owned by local owners, not centrally by the league. The MLS group and the APSL group did talk merger, but eventually parted ways over the question of central ownership.
In the end, U.S. Soccer's board of directors went with MLS by a vote of 18-5. Many felt U.S. Soccer had a thumb on the scales all along. Its president, Alan Rothenberg — who had also run the 1994 World Cup — was the key figure in the new MLS bid, a conflict of interest that eventually led to MLS players suing U.S. Soccer and the league.
Had U.S. Soccer voted for the APSL, it's possible that today's American soccer structure would be very different. Without central ownership, teams would be competing like traditional American sports franchises. There probably would be a multi-tier structure with promotion and relegation, like virtually every other country in the world uses to organize its soccer leagues.
Of course, without that conservative strategy, it's likely that sponsors, broadcasters and local-government stadium partners would have stayed away from the high-risk fledgling league. It would have meant that the APSL — faced with mounting costs, uncertain revenues, and flighty owners — would have been forced to fold.
