Premier League Chief Football Officer Tony Scholes attends the Premier League Season 2024/25 Kick-Off at Embankment Galleries, Somerset House on August 13, 2024 in London, England.
Getty Images for Premier League
If the goal was for United Soccer Leagues to make headlines with its first big hire since announcing the league’s Division One initiative, then mission accomplished.
If it was to put the ambitious effort on a strong strategic foundation, it may prove inconsequential or even foolish.
On Sunday, the Athletic reported the soccer league operator had hired current Premier League Chief Football Officer Tony Scholes to be its new Division One president, a competition which is intended to serve as a rival to Major League Soccer for American top-flight men’s professional soccer. That was later confirmed to the outlet by USL president Paul McDonough, who said Scholes won’t begin his new role until after the current Premier League season concludes.
Here more of what McDonough told The Athletic:
“When you can get someone of Tony’s experience and network knowledge, he automatically jumps to the top of the list,” McDonough said. “We’re bringing Tony because of who he is, what his experiences are, and he believes in what we’re doing. … We know we have time on our side. He and I will meet with our leadership team to update him on what we’re doing, what we’re thinking, and as he gets more educated on the system, then he’ll weigh in as time goes on. But it was just really, really important to Tony and to us that he end his time in the Premier League in the right way. We’re comfortable that when he joins us in the summer, we’ll be up and running.”
Selling Authenticity
The hiring of Scholes could certainly impress casual soccer fans who view England’s top flight as not only superior, but also more legitimate than MLS. It’s pretty clear that USL will be marketing itself as a more authentic alternative to MLS, which has been criticized at times for having a salary structure that is too restrictive and a league system that lacks promotion and relegation known throughout most of the world. (The USL plans to eventually institute pro/rel across its three divisions.)
And to be fair to McDonough, his comments reflect an expectation that Scholes will face a steep learning curve in understanding the challenges of pro soccer in America.
But if the eventual intention is to have Scholes serve as a strong executive similar to MLS commissioner Don Garber, it’s fair to wonder whether McDonough really understands the challenges USL is facing.
Scholes’ entire football executive experience is in England, which boasts the oldest and most famous league system in the world. Before taking his EPL role, Scholes was CEO at Stoke City for 17 years, a run that included 10 consecutive Premier League seasons. Before that, he worked his way up to the same role at Preston North End, which earned promotion to the League Championship during his tenure.
The expectation from Scholes’ experience should be that he possesses a wealth of knowledge about running football businesses in an established ecosystem with a ceunury’s worth of cultural collateral supporting them.
A Very Different Task
The challenges facing USL’s Division One are almost exactly opposite.
More than anything else, the success of Division One will depend on convincing owners, fans and even players that the competition is capable of rivaling or even surpassing MLS in terms of a “major” domestic league despite a lack of previous history. And from building stadiums to selling TV rights and signing players, ensuring success will involve convincing other stakeholders to make a leap of faith for a project that history suggests is more likely to fail than succeed.
While MLS may have a 30-year history now, previous competitions like the pre-World War II American Soccer League and the more-recent original North American Soccer League both folded after less than two decades. There hasn’t been a truly successful “rival” major professional league in other North American sports since the American Football League of the 1960s, which eventually merged with the National Football League in the latter part of the decade.
Maybe Scholes can help the USL combat those challenges. But there’s literally nothing about his previous professional experience suggesting it’s his area of expertise. And if McDonough and others are relying on Scholes to be the lead visionary in that effort – which may not be the case – there’s a chance it could go very, very wrong.