The Interview: USL Super League President Amanda Vandervort
I will happily bet you money that Amanda Vandervort will be the president of U.S. Soccer someday. There are a lot of reasons I think that. Her soccer background is incredibly varied, she does a lot of different things extremely well, and she has an innate ability to connect with people and understand how she can help them. That has led her to her current job as president of the USL Super League. To learn more about her, check out our interview!
Grant Wahl:
Our guest now is one of the most impressive people I've met in American soccer. Amanda Vandervort is the president of the USL Super League, a second division women's pro league set to debut in 2023. She also has one of the most varied and intriguing backgrounds in the sport, from player to coach to executive, that you will ever see. Amanda, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on the show.
Amanda Vandervort:
Grant, thanks! What an intro. Thanks for that. Back at you, my friend.
Grant Wahl:
Well, I've known you for a really long time, and I'm thrilled to have you on the podcast making your debut. And I'm really excited to hear about what you're doing as the president of the USL Super League and what it's about and where you are right now in the preparation. So could you fill me in a little bit?
Amanda Vandervort:
Yeah, I'm so happy to be here. I know we've talked about being on the pod for a while, Grant, so to be in this place and be president of the USL Super League and get to share with you what we're building at the USL is just a delight. And so yeah, let me give you a little kind of overview. We're launching the USL Super League, which will be a professional division two status league here in the United States in 2023. We plan to have 10 to 12 teams. A little broader scope, too, the USL across all the women's soccer properties, in 2022 we're launching the W League, which is our pre-professional league, and the academy as well. So what we're really building is a pathway for women and girls across all levels of the soccer ecosystem.
Grant Wahl:
For the Super League, how many cities do you know that you're in? How many do you still want to figure out?
Amanda Vandervort:
Yeah, well, we're going to start announcing Q1 next year. So you'll see those cities start to roll out. We're looking at 10 to 12 markets across the country. I think the big goal for us here is to increase the opportunities for women and girls to be involved in soccer, in particular professional soccer. There's going to be in this coming year, there'll be 12 pro [women’s] teams in this country. But when you look at the gap between the number of playing opportunities and actually the playing pool of women in America and around the world, it's vast. We know there's at least 40,000 players in the collegiate system on the women's side. That's D1, D2, D3, NAIA and through the mix, but that's a substantial number for only 250-ish professional jobs today. So we want to close that gap.
The other thing to know about the women's soccer landscape, and us coming into this space, there are seven times more men's professional teams in America today than there are women’s, but the playing numbers are pretty even. So actually we're coming into this to create these opportunities for players, which I just addressed, but executives and coaches, and really helping professionalize the game in this country that much further.
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Grant Wahl:
That makes total sense. Are existing USL men's pro teams going to be connected to the teams in the women's Super League?
Amanda Vandervort:
Yeah. I mean, so we just had our USL Winter Summit, which was this last week here in Tampa, Florida. And we had all of our owners and executives come together to really talk about the future of women's soccer among other USL key topics across the board, but certainly women's soccer and the launch of the USL Super League and the W league and our pathway was a huge topic. So yeah, you'll certainly see our ownership group really excited and getting behind the women's Super League. And we'll certainly see teams aligned with our men's side.
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Grant Wahl:
I mean, do you expect that when we talk about this pathway, that this could potentially even end up producing future players for the U.S. women's national team?
Amanda Vandervort:
Yeah, absolutely. I think producing future players, we need to give women and girls a space to play. We know that when we do create access and opportunity for women and girls to play, they do, and they excel. And listen, Grant, we can look back to the establishment of Title IX in this country and what it did to create opportunities for women to play college soccer. And I think when you create the space, they play, and when we professionalize the game and create opportunities for players, as they will in the USL Super League, being able to play elite professional soccer, it will only advance the game in this country. And yeah, it would be an honor and a dream to be part of that path for players in this country, certainly.
Grant Wahl:
So when you talk about professional soccer, that means players are getting paid. What kind of standards are there going to be in your league for, I guess, minimum salaries, living wages, things like that?
Amanda Vandervort:
Yeah, I think we're in a really fortunate position right now because we just completed the CBA negotiations on the men's side with our Championship division. And there was a lot of work put into that and a lot of thought. And so what we're committing to on the women's side is comparable, the same standards that we've agreed to on the men's side with the CBA, in the Championship division, division two professional level standards, will be the same for the USL Super League, and we're committed to that across the board.
Grant Wahl:
Nice. And just what's your day to day like, your job, as you're preparing for all this?
Amanda Vandervort:
Yeah. Wow. My job is incredibly varied. I actually think that's one of the reasons I was so compelled by this role, Grant, is because my background in soccer stretches from executive management to being a player. It stretches from digital social media content to being the head of the global players union for women. So my day to day touches a lot of those different areas, and that's what I find so compelling and also so challenging.
I might be with our CEO, Alec Papadakis, talking about his innate drive to build the women's property and his true belief in equality and building this league and the standards therein, to meetings with our designers and our content team about how do we talk about the future of the women's game or talk about women in the men's game? Like, what does the evolution of that conversation look like, and how do we engage and inspire people around this platform? So yeah, it's great. It's varied, and it's challenging, and it's really, really exciting.
Grant Wahl:
So we see on the men's side, there's kind of a relationship between the USL and MLS, the first division league. Is there going to be something like that between USL Super League and the NWSL?
Amanda Vandervort:
Well, I think we're all building the women's game together. It's a great question and a great opportunity for us to look at where do we want the women's game to be 10 years from now, 15 years? I think this actually about the game as a whole, women's and men's soccer, where do we want to see the game 10 years from now? And then how do we build to get there? And how do we build within our business, within our league, creating the opportunities for players, coaches, executives, partners, owners, investors in the game, in driving this collective vision for access, opportunity and the professionalization of the game?
Grant Wahl:
Because you have such an interesting soccer background, I want to get into your story, because I think our listeners will find it as interesting as I do. How did you get connected to soccer in the first place?
Amanda Vandervort:
I played. I played as a kid. I played as a kid in AYSO. I grew up in the Arizona youth soccer system. I mean, that was back in the days when ODP camps were, I was part of the, you know when you bring together the different states, like there were two kids from Wyoming, two kids from Arizona. And of course, California had four teams of themselves at ODP camp, because historically they've always been so strong.
But yeah, so I was a player. I played in college, and I just fell in love with the sport and everything it gave me as a kid. I mean, I had a challenging childhood, and soccer was my escape. Soccer was where I made my friends. It was where I learned leadership skills. It was all those things to me. So yeah, I mean, fast forward a couple of years and here I am now being, I'm in a position, A, to create those opportunities for others, but also be able to deliver on that opportunity that I had and give back to the game.
Grant Wahl:
I'm not going to let you fast forward over all that! We're going to move back. We're going to rewind. Did you go from playing into coaching, or was there something in between?
Amanda Vandervort:
Okay. I played at the University of Wyoming, and I went to New Jersey, where I was a graduate assistant. So I was a GA at The College of New Jersey, which is a division three, very successful soccer program in central Jersey. And from there, I spent two years there, doing my studies in educational technology, which is what I have my master's degree in. And then I went to NYU in New York, where I was the head coach for a couple years before I went to California to help launch Women's Pro Soccer. So I stayed in playing, I went into coaching, but then I knew that I wanted to be in the business of soccer in my late twenties, early thirties kind of period. And I had just heard that Women's Professional Soccer was making a comeback and I wanted to be involved in that.
Grant Wahl:
I think when I first got acquainted with you was you were to me the social media sensei, the guru, the gold standard. And did that come out of WPS?
Amanda Vandervort:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, WPS. Well, I mentioned my master's degree is in educational technology. So teaching people how to integrate technology, and my degree specifically is in education, so it was teaching teachers how to integrate it. But I quickly applied that skillset in soccer. So I was working with coaches, with C-suite executives in the game, trying to help integrate social media and digital technologies and really see actually there's a really ... We were in back then, it was the mid-2000s. And we were in this incredible space where it was hard to get women's soccer news and information out publicly, but there was this thing called Twitter.
So actually, in 2008, what we did was the first U.S. women's national team player allocation. You might remember those days, when we distributed the players among the WPS teams at the time. And it was really hard to get traditional media to cover us. So we said, you know what, let's use this Twitter thing. And it was great. I mean, within a couple of months we had 250,000 people on our Twitter account. The players were all getting on board with social media and really driving this awareness and excitement around Women's Professional Soccer authentically and organically through their own voices on social. And I mean, my path in soccer really paralleled, I think, the growth of the social media industry. And it's no surprise to me why that is.
Grant Wahl:
And you were with MLS for a number of years as well, right?
Amanda Vandervort:
I was at MLS. So WPS folded in 2011. It was about that time I started working at MLS. I came over to lead the social media strategy actually back then. And then that grew over my decade with MLS. It grew into digital media and content, specifically I did a lot of work on direct to consumer marketing. So when I was there, at any point if you got something on your email or your cell phone, you got a text message, that would've come from my team. So anything that came out direct to consumer.
My last two years, actually, I was doing more work on the research side. So I would travel to all the clubs around the country and sit down with all the club presidents and their staff, their executive team, and work on growing the fan base. So how do you engage fans in your local community? Why is it that they're engaging, and what is it that we can do to help fans really connect with the game in your city?
Grant Wahl:
But then you've had this international aspect to a lot of the work that you've done. And what has that included? How did that get going?
Amanda Vandervort:
Oh yeah. Well, I feel like we've gone in a little bit of a linear fashion about my career, which is great, but concurrently I stayed, so I was a coach, but I never left coaching. I still feel really like coaching is close to my heart. So I served on the board of the soccer coaches, United Soccer Coaches, for, I don't know, 15 years. In 2016, I was the president of the coaches association. So I know that's domestic, not international, but I think that kind of works into the international conversation because I was also consulting for FIFA.
So I was working on a project called community development courses. And we would go to countries around the world. I mean, we were in Tanzania, I was in Delhi, India, where we brought together like 12 countries from around the region to talk about women's soccer. We were all across the Caribbean, from St. Lucia to Jamaica to St. Kitts and Nevis. I mean, all around doing these courses to help federations connect with both sponsors in their local communities, build women's soccer profile, developing marketing and strategic plans for their women's soccer properties.
So I think the combination of both of those and my work with FIFA led me to this last summer, after I left MLS in 2019, I went to France and got a little spot in Paris to spend my time at the women's World Cup and really get to know the international space. I felt that I wanted to be both in the international space and women's soccer. And if there's one piece of advice I tell young aspiring executives, it's be where the people are that do the job you want to do. And I wasn't sure what the role would look like before I started with FIFPro and the global players union, but I knew that those were the elements that were important to me to have as part of it. So yeah, all of those pieces kind of led me towards working in Europe, and moving and being part of the global player union family at FIFPro.
Grant Wahl:
What did you learn from that experience about what the global player on the women's side is experiencing?
Amanda Vandervort:
Well, I mentioned at the beginning of this call about the professionalization in this country and the professionalization of women's football around the world is something that I would say it's in its nascent stage still. I mean, if you look at a country like Italy, the women in Italy weren't legally allowed to be professional players until just this year, right? And now you've seen Juventus in the Champions League moving onto the next round. So we're actually seeing that professionalization of the women's game has direct impact on the success of the athletes and the level of play that they're able to achieve, because they can spend their time honing their craft as professional players.
So I think Italy is an example, but we've seen, whether it's how they respect women's football with equality kind of at the center in Scandinavia. And you're seeing all of the teams across Scandinavia qualify for European tournaments, which is tremendous, but I don't think that that's, it's intentional, it's intentional because they're creating pathways and they're building programs to elevate the level of play and create access and opportunity for players to be pros.
So I think that all wraps back into what we're building at the USL Super League. It's the opportunity to compete as a professional at the elite level, and hone your craft, be a pro. We're creating a league where players want to play and coaches want to coach. And I'm hopeful that my experience in the world of soccer, both here in America as a player, but then abroad as an executive in the game, and having seen that, I'm hopeful to bring all that together and create a really dynamic league here in the States.
Grant Wahl:
When this league starts in 2023, how many of the games are going to be televised?
Amanda Vandervort:
Yeah, great question. Those are all discussions that we're working on now. I mean, you can imagine the space that we're in now, we're working with our ownership group to identify those markets and build those fundamentals. For me, it's important that we're developing those in concert with our ownership group and making sure that we're building out a strong foundation to launch in 2023. And so those are the kind of conversations that we're having now.
Grant Wahl:
I mean, are there any particular things that you specifically want to see in this league that we haven't talked about when it starts in ‘23?
Amanda Vandervort:
Well, we've talked about I want to see great fan environments. I'm excited to help create and curate this fan experience in the women's game that we see all over the world right now. I mean, if we go back to the international game and the experience that I've had, if you see what's happening actually in Mexico right now, the fan bases down in Mexico, I mean, I know you've seen it, Grant. What's happening in Sweden for a league game a couple of weeks ago was unreal.
And in England, the numbers, even the FA Cup final just a couple weeks ago was something, what was it, 50,000, something like that. And so creating these experiences where fans can express their passion for the women's game is something that I can't wait for.
Grant Wahl:
Amanda Vandervort is the president of the USL Super League, a second division women's pro league set to debut in 2023. Amanda, thanks for coming on the show.
Amanda Vandervort:
Thanks for having me, Grant. It was great.