U.S. Soccer plans new rules, including enforcement, for pro teams after abuse scandals

The U.S. Soccer Federation is planning to enforce new rules on the nation’s professional soccer leagues in order to combat abusers and enablers of abuse.

In an announcement Monday, the governing body unveiled a proposal for additions to its Professional League Standards, which set baselines for things like the number of teams in a league, minimum stadium capacity, and the wealth of team owners to ensure long-term sustainability.

The proposal could come into force as soon as March, when a vote is expected by U.S. Soccer’s board of directors at the federation’s annual general meeting.

Teams and leagues will have to have dedicated player safety officers, and league offices will have to have dedicated human resources staff, conduct training sessions for teams, and send annual reports to U.S. Soccer. Those training sessions will cover “topics such as verbal and emotional abuse, sexual misconduct, harassment and retaliation,” the announcement said.

The annual reports will have to include player feedback surveys along with correspondence from teams.

Teams will be barred from “the use of non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements used to shield information about abuse allegations.” This was a big deal in the NWSL abuse scandals of recent years, as multiple teams used such agreements to protect their images and the images of coaches when they departed.

And teams will be required to report “any allegations of misconduct or issues” to U.S. Soccer within two days of hearing about them.

» READ MORE: U.S. Soccer investigation into NWSL finds systemic evidence of emotional abuse and sexual misconduct

There’s an enforcement mechanism, too, ranging from fines to probation for teams and entire leagues. Fines would go to “a participant safety fund and support related initiatives.”

The proposal does not include adding morality clauses to the Pro League Standards, which would be the ultimate weapon to use against team owners in particular. For now, the threat of fines and probation is the biggest tool.

“We are taking steps towards making sure that we’re doing all the things in terms of checking the boxes financially, but doing the best that we possibly can to make sure that we have all the right people in all the right positions — from coaches to ownership,” said former U.S. women’s team player Danielle Slaton, a member of U.S. Soccer’s Participant Safety Task Force and an investor in a forthcoming NWSL expansion team in San Jose, Calif.

“Are there still things that we can we can do to continue to evaluate and determine the morality, to the best of our ability, [of] our ownership?” Slaton continued. “We are open to those conversations with the leagues, and really supporting how they’re going to guide each of their respective leagues on this front. But this is the step we’ve taken thus far, and if we need to continue to find ways to take further steps, we will.”

The task force is chaired by former NWSL player Mana Shim, whose whistleblowing on longtime coach Paul Riley, in September 2021, was a key moment in exposing bad coaches and owners across the league, following revelations by another former NWSL player, Kaiya McCullough, a month before about Washington Spirit coach Richie Burke.

» READ MORE: The NWSL and NWSL Players’ Association’s abuse investigation has new allegations across the league

U.S. Soccer is also launching a major new standards program across the sport called “Safe Soccer,” the centerpiece of which is a vetting system that anyone who wishes to be involved in the game must complete before being allowed to participate.

“The program will include safety training, annual verification of background, and contact information and background checks,” the announcement said.

U.S. Club Soccer CEO Mike Cullina, a longtime U.S. Soccer board member who’s also on the task force, said background checks will be required not just for coaches and staff, but everyone — including bus drivers.

“Anybody who has regular contact or direct oversight of youth players in particular, but also professional players,” he said. “It will raise the standard for screening, it will raise the standard of education before you can be certified to go, and it will continue to have a regular audit on an ongoing basis.”

The program will likely have its biggest impact at the youth level. rather than the pro level. Given the vast scale of American youth soccer, it will take a while to roll the program out everywhere. But there’s a clear determination to make it happen.

“The membership by and large has leaned in and is quite interested in helping move this along,” Cullina said. “There’s been a tremendous amount of work already, and a lot of it is centered on the youth space. And I think that without that, it really doesn’t have the impact that’s necessary.”

» READ MORE: NWSL bans Paul Riley and other managers accused of abusing players

Cullina was presented with a hypothetical situation: What if someone who committed an incident of domestic partner violence as a teenager wanted to get into soccer coaching some years later, and could prove they had matured since the incident?

In fact, the question wasn’t just a hypothetical, and Cullina knew it. It’s the story of U.S. men’s national team manager Gregg Berhalter. His 30-year-old incident was used by Gio Reyna’s parents, the Berhalters’ friends for decades, as retaliation for Gregg’s criticism of Gio’s subpar practice habits at the recent World Cup.

“We spend a lot of time on removing bad actors, but we also have an equal amount of time dealing with due process issues for those who are accused of things that we don’t know — we don’t have the ability to investigate,” Cullina said. “So it’s ongoing, and hopefully with ‘Safe Soccer,’ it can bring us all under one set [of rules], and we can put some resources behind answering that very question.”

He added that the task force is working closely with the U.S. Center for SafeSport, and that “these are the types of things we’re talking about every day.”

U.S. Soccer has already published a list of individuals it knows of from SafeSports’s database “who are currently subject to SafeSport discipline, suspended or banned.”

Eastern Pennsylvania Youth Soccer CEO Chris Branscome backed the new program, and noted that his entity — which oversees the youth game across a wide swath of the Philadelphia region — already has many of the program’s rules in place. They’ve been there since 2016, when new state laws took effect after the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State.

“We think it’s important that anybody that’s going to be in regular contact [with] or supervision of children should have the clearances,” Branscome said. “The Pennsylvania law covers not just sport, but schools, churches, Cub Scouts — any person 18 and over must have clearances to work with or around children. … Clearances don’t always catch the predators, the bad people, but it is one very necessary step along the way.”

» READ MORE: Joanna Lohman ‘was fooled by Paul Riley’ in Philadelphia, where he allegedly coerced her teammates