New USL owners stay mum as confusion reigns

While the new Atlanta-based owners of the United Soccer Leagues remain behind closed doors, a soccer group in Ottawa quietly filed an application on Tuesday to join a league that some team owners are threatening to leave.

This has added to the heavy fog created late last week when when Rob Hoskins and Alec Papadakis of NuRock Soccer Holdings were given the keys to the USL universe by founder Francisco Marcos. The NuRock officials, who have been named the USL’s chairman and CEO, respectively, have not returned messages from Atlanta Soccer News seeking comment.

Several owners in the USL’s First Division, including the Atlanta Silverbacks, have threatened to leave the USL and form their own league because they want a greater say in how the league is operated. They were shocked and angered by the USL’s decision to sell to an entity that does not own a team in USL-1, as the First Division also is called.

Although the Silverbacks did not operate a USL-1 franchise this season (those rights are now held by NuRock), they remain a part of a consortium called the Team Owners Association, which has been haggling with Marcos for a number of years. The Silverbacks still operate a women’s amateur team in the USL-owned W-League.

Silverbacks chairman Boris Jerkunica was out of the country on Tuesday and unavailable for comment, and vice chairman John Latham also could not be reached. General Manager Michael Oki said the Silverbacks were “shocked” by the USL’s sale to NuRock, and that the organization was trying to figure out its options:

“We’re just trying to assess where we are and how we might move forward from here. At this point we can’t say what’s going to happen because we don’t know what they [a NuRock-run USL] are going to do.”

NuRock and USL issued this initial statement on Friday to announce the sale but neither Hoskins nor Papadakis have made any comment since. They own the Atlanta Blackhawks of the USL’s Premier Development League, an amateur circuit two tiers below USL-1.

Here’s an analysis of what happened after Nike gained a nearly-total ownership stake in USL last year, and which proved to be a tipping point for the Silverbacks:

“The financial structure of the league was also in question by the team owners. They claimed the league did not share in the losses and held no accountability to the teams. The USL is structured in a way that teams pay a one time franchise fee and then have yearly renewal fees. If a team was having financial trouble and would drop its franchise, the league would just repopulate and claim another franchise fee. Some owners were frustrated by this as many USL teams lose hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The annual operating expense for an average USL-1 team is between $1.5 million to $2 million. The long distances between USL-1 cities does not help with the cost of airfare and it’s said that most teams will spend more on travel expenses for one game than they will make in revenue in a home game. The average break even point for most teams is a home attendance of about 5,000.”

Here’s another semi-sympathetic take from the owners’ perspective that expresses the general mystification with what has taken place, and what still hasn’t been fully explained:

“I don’t know much about this NuRock Soccer outfit, beyond what we all can read in the usual cookie cutter corporate-speak press release. Maybe they’re great guys.

“Personally I agree with the TOA: it’s time USL became a real league, owned and operated by and for the teams themselves which is, by the way, exactly how FIFA says it should be done.

“As long as the interests of a third party are involved – be it an individual, a public corporation or a private partnership – then stuff like long term development and the good of the game are going to take a back seat to the bottom line. USL1 isn’t a chain of muffler shops or fast food joints and it can’t be run as if it was.”