When you hear about the life of a professional athlete, you think about guys making a lot of money, playing games in front of tens of thousands of adoring fans, and generally living the dream of millions of kids. But what is it like to play in the USL (minor leagues) as a professional soccer player in the US?
MLS players in the US in general live a lower-profile lifestyle than their counterparts overseas, as well as professional athletes in more popular sports in the US, with maybe a few exceptions. If you go down a level or two on the soccer pyramid to the minor leagues, the lifestyle is not nearly as glamorous.
You live in a small apartment in a rundown neighborhood. You practice on a bumpy field. The facilities are a step down from top and mid-level college programs. Your paychecks barely cover your expenses. If you’re lucky, your home games get a few thousand fans if the weather is nice, but sometimes on a rainy away day in a small town, you’re playing in front of a few hundred people.
But you still get to play soccer for a living, so there’s that.
There are definitely positives and negatives to this experience, and many of these aspects are not what I expected when I signed my first contract. To be transparent, many of my experiences are from a decade and a half ago, but the landscape hasn’t changed so much – many players today experience similar challenges to me. Let’s have a look at what they are.
The Positives
Overall the positives outweigh the negatives, at least while you’re in-season. Playing at a higher level tests your ability in ways that improve your game immensely. Spending time with a group of guys going through the exact same mental struggle builds a unique and long-lasting camaraderie. And the opportunity to potentially make it to a higher level inspires you to keep grinding.
Competitiveness
The best part of being a professional player, even at a lower level than the MLS, was the competitiveness. Not only is the level a step above college ball (even D1), but the environment is more serious too.
Everyone on your team and everyone you play against is trying to get to the next level. This can bring out the best in you as a player if you enjoy this type of competitive environment. The training sessions are more intense, since there is less disparity between the best and worst players on your team and everyone wants to play on Saturday. If you don’t get in the game, it’s a long week of practice. There’s no school, so all of your focus is on the field.
And when you get in the game, you’re playing against another group of very good players who are going through the exact same thing with their team, which makes for intense and competitive matches. A step up from college for sure. Especially since there is a good mix of grown men and younger players – it makes for a more challenging environment going up against wily veterans.
It truly is the best place to see how good of a player you are, and for you to improve to see how good you can become. For those who love the idea of “mastering your craft”, this is it.
Opportunity
The opportunity to move up to the next level keeps you going through the grind. You see MLS games and national team games on TV, hoping you can reach that level. You play against MLS teams and national team players, and think to yourself “they’re not THAT much better than me” (with the exception of a few players, who really are that much better).
This hope keeps you going. You tell yourself that a good season moves you up a level, and that anything can happen if you get on an MLS squad. You grind through hot summer practices on a bumpy field, believing that you just need one chance to make it at the next level. You pray for an MLS opponent in the next Open Cup draw, so you can impress their coaches and get a call for their preseason next year.
Now there are some guys who just want to play at the minor league level for a couple years before starting their “real” life. While it is fun, these guys move on quickly, as the pay, lifestyle, and bodily sacrifice get old quickly.
You definitely have to believe you will make it if you want to stick it out. The truth is, very few do. From my days in the USL, we had two guys from our squad make it to the MLS. And they were both backups at that level.
Camaraderie
Much like playing in college, the friends you make along the way are the best part. I have lifelong friends from both my college and professional playing days. You spend all day of 6-7 months with the same people, and luckily you’re all in the same situation and can relate quite well to each other.
Bonding with these guys was incredibly fun and provided some of the best experiences of my life. Even though we were all broke and competing against each other, it made for the best part of this experience.
Road trips
Road trips were an extension of the fun. Your meals are paid for, you get to stay somewhere marginally nicer than your apartment (not saying much), and if you’re lucky you can get a night out in a different city. You can also lose half your paycheck playing cards on an 8 hour bus ride…
“Big Time Charlies”
Our British coach loved calling us this term. If we won on a Saturday night, we had a post-game event at a sponsor bar downtown where we’d get a couple free drinks. Then we would have a good night on the town. The next practice he’d get a laugh saying we were walking around town like a bunch of “Big Time Charlies.” Proper old-school British banter.
But yeah, it was fun to go out and tell girls you play professional soccer, even if you make less than a living wage and sleep on a bed with no frame. In retrospect, some of the antics were a bit cringey, but as a 22 year old male who lives in a competitive environment every day, it was a positive.
Some guys took this too far and were out on the town way too often for a professional athlete to stay sharp. I fell into this trap on some occasions. It’s fine when you’re winning, but when you’re not winning, this habit becomes an easy scapegoat and you pay the price. Plus, it’s the fast track to a short career (which is probably short anyway, so just enjoy it every now and then?).
The Negatives
I keep calling it a grind for a reason. I’ve already alluded to some of the more difficult aspects of playing a sport for a living.
Your body
Training every day in an intensely competitive environment takes its toll on your body. You can’t give up an inch if you want to make the starting lineup, and often you’ll sacrifice your body rather than take a day off, just to make sure you keep your place.
The training load is much higher than any other level I played at before. Even college pre-season wasn’t as bad, because that was only 10-14 days or so.
Pro preseason is 6 weeks with about 10 exhibition matches (you have to try a bunch of guys out). Most days are two-a-day sessions. And you get half pay for preseason.
During the regular season, you have 2-3 days per week that are double sessions, except when it got brutally hot. And the practice field was not great. Maybe if you win on the weekend, the coach would take it easy and only have one session per day for the week or give you a Wednesday off, but usually Monday and Tuesday were two-a-days. And one of these sessions was purely 90 minutes of fitness – you don’t even touch the ball. Those were brutal.
After 6 months of this, your body feels broken. You’re carrying a couple small injuries most of the time, or playing through what is probably not a small injury. Guys were getting pain killing injections before games. And we didn’t have the resources of higher level teams to put towards recovery. We did have a great personal trainer, but we did not have the rehab facilities of even a lower level college program.
Eventually this wear and tear catches up with you, even in your early 20s.
Pay
The club would pay for our apartments and most guys were making between $800-$1,500 per month on top of that. A couple guys made more. In 2007 this was enough to buy food and pay your car insurance. Buying stuff was off the table. You had to be really stingy with your grocery shopping to make ends meet, and no one was saving any money.
Some guys worked second jobs out of necessity, but given the physical toll of training, it was not easy to do that either.
You can only live off this type of pay for so long before it becomes demoralizing. That’s why you dream of making a quick jump to the next level, so you can at least try to make enough to have a cushion.
Pressure
The increased pressure leads to more competitiveness, which I found as an upside of playing in the USL. But there was unexpectedly a lot of pressure at the minor league level, and a different kind of pressure. It was a shocking amount given how much money we were making.
Teams were folding all the time. If you had a few losses at home, next thing you know attendance isn’t enough to break even on game day expenses. Management gets mad at the coach, and the coach starts getting mad at the players.
The coach cared about winning home games more than anything. We had to keep the crowd happy and coming back. Or else we all might be out of a job the next season. We went through a bad stretch one season, and the tension in the locker room made every day difficult and took most of the fun out of the grind. People were pointing fingers and losing tempers very quickly. Not fun to be involved in this situation.
In college there was a lot of pressure to win, but not like this. At least you know your performances wouldn’t dictate the existence of your program next year.
As an American soccer player, this was my first experience with this kind of pressure. In other countries, they deal with this type of situation every year (with relegation to a lower league), but it was a harsh reality check for me at the time.
Off-season
Our season ran 6-7 months in those days (I think the USL season is longer now). While it’s a long season, you don’t get paid in the offseason, meaning you have to find a job that is ok with your seasonal schedule.
Some guys made this work well with coaching gigs or seasonal work (one guy worked on a fishing boat in the offseason, which made him enough money to support his soccer habit for the year). Others scrounged around and found manual labor work or other odd jobs, while some started businesses on the side. I managed an internship and some coaching, which got me through ok.
Overall, it was tough switching gears to a long off-season, regardless of how well you had your situation figured out. Going from a competitive environment every day to a normal workplace definitely took some getting used to psychologically. Basically, it was a long, boring off-season working some job you didn’t want, just waiting for the next season.
Road trips
Although travel was fun and exciting, as previously mentioned, going on the road on the budget of a minor league team had significant downsides.
After away games at night, for instance, instead of staying in a hotel, we would just take a red-eye bus trip home. Not ideal to have to get directly on a bus for a 8+ hour trip right after a tough game.
We stayed in budget hotels, ate enough Subway and Denny’s for a lifetime, endured 8-14 hour bus trips, and didn’t have the time or money to do much in away cities. Plus the away cities were usually smaller towns that didn’t offer much entertainment. Sometimes we’d get out, which was fun, but it was a rare occasion.
While the camaraderie was great, we mostly just practiced, ate, hung out in the hotel, slept, and played our game(s). Pretty boring, and sometimes we’d have 2-3 games within a week, all on the road. That’s a long time to be away from home with spartan accommodations in some no-name towns or the dangerous part of a semi-major city.
Competitiveness (within your team)
This part was tough. In the professional game, it’s every man for himself. Even on a close-knit team. This goes against a lot of what you are taught growing up.
I played goalkeeper, and we had two on the team. Only one of us could play, and both of us wanted to play at the next level. This created an interesting environment in training and games. You still want to be a team player and be supportive, but you also want the starting spot so you can have your chance. Most positions had this dynamic.
We all managed to get along, but just beneath the surface you could feel the internal competitiveness. You knew that if you were out of the lineup for too long, your career could be done.
Uncertainty
All of the downsides tie into the uncertainty of it all. Not knowing if you were going to make the lineup was the biggest concern, and almost all of us did not make a career out of playing soccer. Some of us knew we had a season or two of fun, then it was off to a real job. Others had some hope of making it, but you know your window is small – if you’re not moving up the ladder by age 23 or so, you’ll probably be stuck in the USL forever until you decide to call it day.
Still others knew they were going to coach for a living, so playing professionally actually helped in that regard. But you had to stop playing to coach at any serious level (you need to be available on weekends).
You’re barely making enough to survive, so everyone faced financial uncertainty. Something like a broken-down car, for instance, could wipe out your bank account. But in the back of your mind, you knew it was self-inflicted. You could quit and get a real job anytime you wanted, and live a nice boring life.
I think the biggest uncertainty was not knowing when it would be your last REAL game. Mine was at home in an almost empty stadium, as a lightning delay cleared it out. We played the game after a lengthy delay, lost 3-1, putting us out of playoff contention, and I was benched for the rest of the season. Not a storybook ending.
Not ending on your own terms was difficult, but you move on. By the time it was over, I was so burnt out from all of the uncertainty, lack of a bank account, and body aches, that a nice boring life seemed like a relief.
Worth It
At the end of the day, it was well worth the time spent in the USL. Even considering all the downsides. The hope that I could make a lifelong dream come true was enough to make this two year stint a gamble worth taking.
And you need a pool of people like this to create the competitive soccer culture for the diamonds to form. Plenty of players have made their way from the USL to contribute to the national team, for instance (Tim Howard and Matt Turner, among others).
The people I met along the way and the experiences off the field were a bonus. Some of it was hard. I can’t imagine putting my body on the line for any longer than I did for the amount of money I was making, or could even potentially have made, which would likely not have been much, even if I had made it to the MLS.
