Where do Silverbacks stand in USL fiasco?

That the United Soccer Leagues is in a state of flux these last few weeks is to apply very polite phrasing to what’s becoming a full-fledged disaster.

Ever since the Atlanta-based NuRock Soccer Holdings Inc. was named the shock new owner of the USL system earlier this fall, franchises in USL-1, where the Atlanta Silverbacks played until the past season, have been threatening to break away.

Just to serve up a little more background before I update this story:

The Silverbacks reportedly have been involved in these breakaway efforts, although club president Boris Jerkunica has not had any official comment.

According to an official USL release, NuRock was to take over franchise rights for a USL-1 franchise from the Silverbacks, who did not field a team in 2009 because of Jerkunica’s differences with USL management on a number of issues.

This summer NuRock operated Atlanta’s entry in the Professional Development League, an amateur entity in the USL system, after moving the team from Augusta.

The Silverbacks continued to field a team in the USL-run W-League, a women’s amateur league, ostensibly to keep a competitive toehold in USL. The Silverbacks women reached the W-League playoffs, in fact.

Now, on to the latest twists in an already melodramatic narrative:

Over the weekend, USL president Tim Holt told players in Miami, Carolina and Minnesota that they were being released from their contracts because those teams had not renewed franchise rights for the 2010 season.

Those three teams, along with the Silverbacks, formed an entity called The Owners Association (TOA) when the breakaway effort began. Also reportedly involved in TOA are Vancouver and Montreal, which have reached the upcoming USL-1 finals and which have been admitted to Major League Soccer or have MLS aspirations, respectively.

Today the excellent Inside Minnesota Soccer site picked up on a North Carolina report that USL and TOA representatives were meeting in New York with U.S. Soccer Federation head Sunil Gulati.

I contacted Jerkunica again today to find out where the Silverbacks figure in this situation and I got the following reply. It’s not much, but it reflects the general chaos and uncertainty about the fate of minor league soccer in North America:

“There is a lot of stuff going on. I can’t divulge much right now. The only thing I can tell you is that this battle has been going on for over two years and is one of the reasons the Silverbacks pulled out of the 2009 season. Hopefully, it will be cleared up soon.”

That all parties involved in this have been together with Gulati ought to be an encouraging sign that perhaps some accommodation can be made in an increasingly bitter dispute. Says Carolina owner Brian Wellman, who’s had some loose lips from time to time during it all:

“It seemed like at least a lot of the tension has stabilized because everyone finally got to meet face-to-face and everyone knows what everyone’s goals are.”

Then again, there’s this: Tom Dunmore over at Pitch Invasion came across this link describing how the USL has botched the scheduling for the USL-1 finals.

“No wonder many USL-1 teams want to break away from the league office,” Dunmore wrote on Twitter.

Some previous posts I’ve written about all this can be found here, here and here.