Tony Scholes is moving from the most popular top-tier league in the world to the newest one, which is still two and a half years away from kicking a ball.
The USL, operators of lower-division leagues in the United States, will announce on Monday that Scholes, the Premier League’s director of football, will be named president of its upcoming first division. The USL’s planned new competition will operate in US Soccer’s first division – the same level as MLS – and is set to start play by 2028. In his role, Scholes will oversee the launch of the still-unnamed league and participate in the USL’s implementation of promotion and relegation between that league and the USL’s other men’s professional competitions – the Championship and League One.
Scholes was wooed to the US in part by USL president Paul McDonough, who said his relationship with Scholes goes back to 2013, when McDonough was an agent and brought US international Brek Shea to Stoke City, where Scholes was chief executive. Scholes left Stoke to take up his role at the Premier League in 2021.
“You know, you obviously go through all the questions [Scholes has], like ‘Why would I do it? Why would I leave the best league in the world?’ And I said ‘Yeah, I don’t know why you would do it, but let’s just talk about it,” McDonough told the Guardian. “When you get to come to a new country and to launch a new league and a new system that aligns with the rest of the world, I think he’s really intrigued by that, because he can have a really big impact.”
Scholes will have plenty on his plate when he starts work at the USL, which he is set to do at the conclusion of this Premier League season. The specifics of how promotion and relegation will work are still to be decided, McDonough said, as is the small matter of the new competition not yet having any teams. McDonough said he anticipates that team announcements could come by the end of this year, and that Scholes’ hire, along with investment from private equity firm Belltower Partners, could persuade potential team owners to look more seriously at being part of the upstart league.
“I hope so,” McDonough said. “I do think it shows ambition, right? I hope we get better owners into Division One, that’ll be really important for us.”
McDonough admitted that Scholes will have some adjusting of his own to do as well. The US soccer scene is vastly different from that of the UK – a difference that manifests in everything from roster construction to teams’ efforts to get stadium deals done.
In a hint of what may be to come for the division one league, McDonough also made note of a key difference between UK and US soccer: the American predilection for playoffs.
“Playoffs are very, very important to the American culture, [so] how do we incorporate the purity of promotion and relegation, but also factor in playoffs?” McDonough said. “[Scholes] would look at us and say: ‘This is crazy. We don’t have that in the Premier League.’ But it matters to the business. It matters, what American fans are used to. So when you’re looking at this, you’re trying to blend together what is acceptable and kind of commonplace around the world. But then how do you Americanize it and make it a little bit different without the purist saying, this really isn’t promotion and relegation?”
McDonough added that this question, like many of the others, will be decided collaboratively by Scholes and the two other USL men’s league presidents, the Championship’s Jeremy Alumbaugh and League One’s Lee O’Neill.
“We haven’t got to a stage yet where we have to have a splitting of votes,” McDonough said of the existing relationship between Alumbaugh and O’Neill. “I think Tony will fit right in.”
