Lexington Sporting Club moving to higher-level men’s professional soccer league

Lexington Sporting Club’s men’s professional soccer team is moving up a level.

On Tuesday afternoon during a news conference held near the club’s new soccer-specific stadium, it was announced that LSC would be joining the USL Championship, the second-highest level of men’s professional soccer in the United States.

LSC will join the USL Championship in 2025.

In a Tuesday news release, LSC was announced as having “exercised its option” to join the USL Championship.

Lexington Sporting Club is currently in its second season of existence and has spent both of its seasons playing in USL League One, which is the third-highest level of men’s pro soccer in the U.S. The USL doesn’t use promotion and relegation to determine the teams in each of its leagues.

By moving up to the USL Championship, LSC will join the top division overseen by the United Soccer League, which is beneath Major League Soccer (MLS) in this country’s soccer pyramid. Lexington Sporting Club will also now play in the same league as Louisville City, which began play in 2015 and has twice been crowned USL Championship winners.

LSC and Louisville City have only played once in a competitive match: LouCity defeated LSC 1-0 last April in Louisville in the second round of the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, a national single-elimination tournament held each year.

Tuesday’s major LSC announcement came with several dignitaries in attendance.

LSC CEO Kim Shelton, head coach Darren Powell, USL Championship president Jeremy Alumbaugh and Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton all attended and spoke at the event.

Also present was LSC majority owner Bill Shively, although he didn’t speak during the press conference or to media members afterward.

“This shows how much folks in Lexington want this here,” Gorton said during the event. “… It’s a testament to the hard work, from the very beginning, and the vision of Bill Shively, (ownership group member) Stephen Dawahare, (LSC president) Vince Gabbert, the entire club staff. … Your commitment to the community and to our youth is really wonderful and it is exemplified right here in the work that you’re doing.”

“Elevating to the USL Championship is the culmination of our efforts to build a premier soccer club in Lexington,” Shively said in a news release. “This move is a natural next step in our journey, reflecting our commitment to developing talent and growing the sport at the highest level.”

In jumping up from USL League One to the USL Championship, Lexington Sporting Club completes a sought-after goal in a short period of time, while continuing its rapid ascent in the American soccer landscape.

A USL League One expansion franchise — initially known as Lexington Pro Soccer before the LSC moniker was adopted — was awarded to Lexington in October 2021. That club began play as Lexington Sporting Club in spring 2023.

“It’s starting to go in the direction that we all want it to go,” Powell said during Tuesday’s event. “(With) this move into the Championship, we’re playing at the highest level of the USL.”

Since its creation, LSC has played at Toyota Stadium on the campus of Georgetown College in Georgetown, but that will soon change.

LSC is in the final stages of construction on a new, 7,500-seat, soccer-specific stadium located along Athens Boonesboro Road in Lexington. That new stadium will begin hosting matches in September.

The stadium is part of a larger soccer complex that also includes seven training and youth fields. According to LSC, this represents an $80 million investment by the team’s ownership.

Several of the key figures involved with LSC’s move to the USL Championship cited the construction of this soccer-specific stadium as a major factor in the club’s move to a higher-level league.

Later this month, LSC will also debut a new professional women’s soccer team in the USL Super League. The Super League is a new, top-tier pro women’s soccer league that’s been sanctioned by the United States Soccer Federation as a Division I league, which places it on the same level as the already-established National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL).

LSC will be one of eight teams to participate in the first season of the Super League.

The Lexington Sporting Club women’s team will host the first match at the new stadium on Sept. 8.

“(The stadium) will be the place to be on a Saturday night for the men’s team, or the women’s team, and a place that the youth can look over and have aspirations, and again, have that ambition, to perhaps be there someday,” Alumbaugh, the USL Championship president, said Tuesday.

What to know about LSC’s new soccer league, the USL Championship

The USL Championship began play in 2011 and is considered the second-highest tier of American men’s pro soccer, behind only MLS.

The league currently features 24 teams that are split evenly into 12 teams in each of the Eastern Conference and Western Conference. Several future teams have already been slotted to join the USL Championship in the coming years, with Brooklyn, Buffalo, Jacksonville and Milwaukee among the planned locations.

Brooklyn and Lexington will join the USL Championship next season, giving the league 26 teams.

Louisville City is considered among the USL Championship’s best organizations. The team has made the USL Championship playoffs in each of its nine seasons, winning the USL Championship postseason in both 2017 and 2018 and finishing as the runners-up in 2019 and 2022.

This season Louisville City leads the league with a 16-4-2 (W-L-D) record through 22 matches. This on-field success has come with LouCity having played in a soccer-specific stadium of its own, Lynn Family Stadium in the city’s Butchertown neighborhood, since 2020.

The quality of competition in the USL Championship has vastly improved since the league’s creation, and recent years have seen players who perform well in the league move on to bigger, global opportunities in soccer.

A prime example of this came last summer when LouCity completed a record transfer deal for defender Josh Wynder, who was transferred to Benfica, one of Portgual’s most successful teams.

The seven-figure transfer fee paid by Benfica for Wynder is still the largest transfer fee ever paid for a USL Championship player.

Is Lexington Sporting Club ready for a step up in competition?

Word spread quickly on social media Monday of the upcoming news that Lexington Sporting Club would be joining the USL Championship.

One of the most common criticisms of the move came with relation to Lexington Sporting Club’s on-field performance, which in USL League One play has been dreadful during the club’s first two seasons.

In its debut 2023 season, LSC went 7-14-11 (W-L-D) overall. The club finished 11 points out of the playoffs, and six of the 12 teams in USL League One made the playoffs last season. Sam Stockley, who serves as LSC’s men’s sporting director, oversaw the majority of LSC’s first season as the team’s head coach before giving up those duties near the end of the campaign.

So far this season the results in league play have been even worse for LSC. Lexington Sporting Club is currently last in the 12-team USL League One standings with a 2-6-4 record. The club is six points out of a playoff spot, although the USL League One playoffs expanded this season to include eight teams instead of six.

LSC has found its on-field footing in the USL Jagermeister Cup though, a new competition for USL League One teams this season. LSC currently sits second in its four-team division in that event.

The team has a new coach this season, with the aforementioned Powell — an Englishman who was most recently the director of player development and a first-team assistant coach for Inter Miami, an MLS team — now in charge.

In addition to the construction of the soccer-specific stadium on Athens Boonesboro Road, this offseason also represented a period of significant investment for LSC when it came to bolstering its squad talent.

This was headlined by the signing of forward Cameron Lancaster, who is the all-time leading scorer in Louisville City’s history with 88 goals in eight seasons. So far in Lexington, Lancaster has six goals in all competitions.

Other standout players throughout the first season-plus for LSC have included Ates Diouf, the club’s all-time leading scorer with 21 goals, and goalkeeper Amal Knight, a regular starter who has previously played internationally for Jamaica.

Earlier this season, midfielder Yannick Yankam became the first active UEFA senior national team member to play in a USL League One match. Yankam represents Malta internationally.

“I think it’s massive,” Yankam said Tuesday of LSC’s move to the USL Championship. “You always want to be part of an ambitious club, an ambitious project. I think the announcement today, with building new facilities and everything like that, it shows that they are … ambitious and it’s good as players to know that we are going to play at a higher level.”

Also on the LSC roster this season is Issac Cano, the former Paul Laurence Dunbar soccer standout who in January signed a professional contract with Louisville City. Cano is playing for LSC on a season-long loan from LouCity.

LSC is expected to play the final three home games of its USL League One regular season at the club’s new stadium, starting in mid-September.

Kentucky continues to make major soccer news

With Tuesday’s news that Lexington Sporting Club will soon be playing in the USL Championship, the state of Kentucky continues to make major soccer headlines.

Kentucky already had two professional men’s soccer teams — Lexington Sporting Club and Louisville City — and the state will soon also be home to two professional women’s soccer teams with LSC’s entry in the USL Super League joining Racing Louisville, which plays in the NWSL.

The LSC team in the Super League will begin play later this month.

Additionally, the commonwealth will soon play host to a major international soccer match for the first time in 20 years.

On Oct. 30, the United States women’s national soccer team, fresh off a gold medal performance in the Paris Olympics, will face Argentina at Louisville’s Lynn Family Stadium. This marks the first time that the senior women’s national team will be playing a match in Kentucky since 2004.

Previously, the USWNT played four games in Louisville at what is now known as L&N Federal Credit Union Stadium, the home of the University of Louisville’s football team, between 1999 and 2004.

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