The United Soccer League on Community Powering the League's Growth and Fan Engagement

The Footballco Business Podcast is back and we're kicking off our second season with the fastest-growing football organisation in the world, the United Soccer League (USL).

For this show, we spoke with Greg Lalas , Chief Marketing Officer for the USL to find out how the USL has grown so quick and the role community plays in how its clubs engage fans. We also got some perspective on football in the US and the USLs plans for the future.

We've picked three highlights from that conversation but if you want to listen the show now, you can get it here or search for the Footballco Business Podcast in your favourite podcast app.

Or, watch the show on YouTube.

Scale and Community

For many fans outside of the US, football in America is MLS. But as Greg points out, a league with 28 clubs can't bring football to a country the size of the United States, let alone have those clubs mean something to the fans who live in those cities.

For perspective, Greg pointed out how many clubs there are across the four or five biggest countries in Europe (roughly the same audience as the US) and how we couldn't imagine a region that big having fewer than 28 teams in it.

For an example of a club representing its community, Greg talked about Detroit City FC . Detroit is a large market (one of the top 15 in the United States) but without Detroit City, fans would need to travel four hours to get to their nearest MLS team.

They [Detroit] have professional NFL, NHL, NBA and MLB teams, and they have a USL Championship team… as a club they are hyper-local they are very focused on representing what the new Detroit is all about and that is expressed for them in how they impact their community…

They’re also saying, this is the best soccer in the Detroit area…The nearest MLS team is either Chicago Fire FC or Columbus Crew or Toronto FC . So this is where you can have an amazing world-class soccer experience right in your local town and we represent your local town. We are what new Detroit is all about. It's gritty and it has pride in itself and it is ‘Detroit strong’.

Understanding the audience

Greg references that football fans in the United States are the youngest of sports fans and football over indexes in the millennial and Gen-Z demographics. Also, it has been stated that between 25 and 40 per cent of football fans in the US are Latino.

This large Latino audience and the USL having a number of clubs in areas with a strong Latino demographic (El Passo, San Antonio and Tampa Bay) make understanding that market very important.

I think in the United States, from a marketing perspective understand the difference between the Latino audience and the Spanish-speaking audience.

We know that Latinos in general want to consume, whatever it is, at the highest level possible, just like anyone else would. For us, our strategy around that is to provide the best content possible.

Club by club we will do things in Spanish, at the league level we're starting to put together a Spanish-language strategy and talking to Spanish-language media partners so we can understand how we can go towards that audience.

Could the USL bring in promotion and relegation?

The topic of promotion and relegation comes up a few times in the interview. While it is unusual in US sports to have such a system, Greg admits that it is something that the USL has commented on publically and is looking at as the league focuses on ways it can innovate in US sports.

It is complicated and would require a lot of time and effort to understand but we're doing a lot of due diligence to understand what it could look like because I think it could be very exciting if a soccer league in the United States was to implant some form of promotion and relegation system.

It would certainly be a differentiator in sports it would help us align more with the global game in general, which we believe is important, it could present more opportunities for exciting games from within the league's structure and maybe generate more interest from fans and teams from other leagues.

Remember, to listen to the show in full and hear more about USL and the clubs that make it unique, download?the episode in full from here.

If you're interested in more episodes covering football in the US, try these:

Atlanta United:?Creating fan culture and engagement from the ground up with then President Darren Eales

LAFC: LAFC's Rich Orosco joined us for our panel at Soccerex Americas on football having its 'Yankees moment'