USL League One
American professional soccer league
USL League One (USL1) is a professional men's soccer league in the United States that had its inaugural season in 2019. The Division 3 league is operated by the United Soccer League, the same group that operates the men's Division 2 USL Championship, women's Division 1 league USL Super League, and other leagues. As of 2026, the league has 17 active teams that are scheduled to play 32 regular-season games, followed by playoffs. All teams also participate in the USL Cup, adding four games, followed by knockout rounds.
History
Early years (2017–2020)
The USL Championship was granted second-division sanctioning by the United States Soccer Federation in January 2017, leaving the third tier of American soccer unoccupied. From 1996 to 2009, the United Soccer League operated leagues at the lower divisions under various names, including the USL Second Division in the third tier. On April 2, 2017, the USL announced that it would launch a new third-division league in 2019, with a minimum of eight clubs and relaxed requirements compared to the second-division USL. The new league had the temporary name USL Division III (USL D3). The league announced that they would target cities with a population of 150,000 to one million, mostly in cities currently without a professional team.
In the following months, the league began searching for cities and markets in which to locate new member teams. A tour of prospective cities in the southeastern United States was conducted by the league's vice president from April to May 2017, followed by a visit to North Carolina and a similar tour of the Midwest in late May.
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This entry incorporates text from “USL League One” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.