USL League One Announces Inaugural Season Structure
Today USL League One announced the structure of the 2019 season schedule. With the release, there was also confirmation of some of the rumored details surrounding the league’s inaugural season.
What do you need to know about the announcement? Let’s jump into the specifics of what we learned today.
10 Teams
The first piece of news that was confirmed by today’s announcement was the fact that USL League One will field 10 teams for the 2019 season. After the rebrand announcement there was some thought that there may, in fact, be 11 teams in the inaugural field but that will not be the case.
So far, we know nine of the teams that will compete in 2019:
- Chattanooga Red Wolves SC
- FC Tuscon
- Greenville Triumph SC
- Lansing Ignite
- Madison Pro Soccer
- Orlando City B
- Richmond Kickers
- South Georgia Tormenta FC
- Toronto FC II
The other two rumored teams are located in Dallas, TX and Riverside, CA. One can assume that the last team will come from those two locations and, perhaps, the other team will come into the league in 2020 along with Penn FC and the Rochester Rhinos.
28 Games
We also learned that each team will play a 28 game schedule. That means that each fan base will get 14 home matches!!! From the nine other teams in the league, each team will play eight other teams three times and one team four times.
Selfishly for Greenville, my hope is that we are matched up with either Tormenta FC or Chattanooga for our four-time matchup.
The season will kickoff the weekend of March 29–31 and will conclude on October 4–6. That is exactly 28 weekends. If the league does not build in any off-weekends, that would mean that no teams have to play any midweek games.
4 Playoff Teams
The league will operate as a single table with four teams making the playoffs. The semi-finals will be held the weekend of October 11–13 and the championship game will take place somewhere between October 17–21.
If Greenville makes it to the championship game, and why wouldn’t they, consider this my official pitch to have the inaugural league championship on my 35th birthday on October 17, 2019.
We can now begin our countdown. The inaugural USL League One season is only 21 weeks away. Get your popcorn ready!
