The USL Championship is one of the most successful professional soccer leagues in the world, reaching a population of more than 84 million and fueling the growth of the game across North America. Headquartered in Tampa, Florida, the USL provides unparalleled club support with a growing team of more than 100 professionals across 20 departments, ranging from operations to marketing, communications and sponsorship.

The USL Championship has national media partnerships with both ESPN and CBS, showcasing matches across CBS, CBS Sports Network, CBS Sports’ 24-7 soccer fast channel Golazo Network, ESPN linear networks, and ESPN+. The League also operates USL Productions, which includes a state-of-the-art facility that produces more than 600 matches and 1,200 hours of live content for local, national, and international partners making the USL the most widely accessible soccer league in the United States.

HISTORY

The USL Championship was formed when two existing professional leagues were combined into a single league property before the 2011 season. The league was designed to help ensure the long-term stability of professional soccer in North America and featured 12 teams in a pair of six-team divisions during its initial campaign. Among the league’s founding members were five longtime USL clubs with more than 100 years of operation among them – the Charleston Battery, Harrisburg City Islanders, Pittsburgh Riverhounds SC, Richmond Kickers and Rochester Rhinos.

Over the course of the current decade, the sophisticated business model that provides the foundation for the USL Championship has allowed the league to grow, with more than 24 current members that include world-class ownership groups. The league’s current club owners also hold stakes in teams that compete in the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, Minor League Baseball and the NBA G-League. In January of 2017, after a thorough application review process, the U.S. Soccer Federation granted the USL Division II status beginning in the 2017 season, recognizing the significant investment and high level of operating excellence within the USL Championship and its member clubs.

2024 Teams

Expansion Teams:

• Brooklyn FC (2025)

• Milwaukee Pro Soccer (2025)

• Sporting JAX (2025)

• USL Pro Iowa (2025)

The pinnacle of the USL Championship’s season brings together 16 teams - the top eight teams from both the Eastern Conference and Western Conference - to compete in the USL Championship Playoffs. The fixed-seed format concludes with the USL Championship Final, which is held at the home of the conference champion with the best regular-season record.

The USL Championship has seen strong, continued growth both as a league in its membership and in attendance across its venues. The league surpassed 2.28 million total attendance in 2023 with clubs averaging more than 5,900 fans per game, almost tripling the average attendance of the league’s first season in 2011.

Now in its 109th edition, the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup has crowned a champion since 1914 in every year except 2020 and 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The history-filled tournament is conducted on a single-game-knockout basis and open to all professional and amateur teams affiliated with U.S. Soccer. In 1999, the oldest ongoing national soccer competition in the United States was renamed to honor American soccer pioneer Lamar Hunt.

The 2024 U.S. Open Cup winner will earn $300,000 in prize money, a berth in the 2025 Concacaf Champions Cup and have its name engraved on the Dewar Challenge Trophy – one of the oldest nationally-contested trophies in American team sports – now on permanent display at the National Soccer Hall of Fame in Frisco, Texas. The runner-up will earn $100,000, while the team that advances the furthest from each lower division will take home a $25,000 cash prize.

All 24 USL Championship clubs entered the tournament in 2024, beginning play in the Third Round.