Kingston Stockade FC has officially left the National Premier Soccer League (NPSL) and joined four other semi-pro soccer clubs to found the League for Clubs, a startup league designed to showcase teams that love the beautiful game both on and off the field.
The issues which led to Kingston’s departure from the NPSL were a long time coming, said club chairman Dennis Crowley, but it wasn’t until the league suspended its 2023 champions, Oklahoma-based Tulsa Athletic, earlier this year that the move became inevitable.
“We’ve been getting bullied by the league for years now,” Crowley said. “And it’s not just us, it’s other clubs too. And then when Tulsa got kicked out, it was like, all right, well, let’s do this.”
The NPSL cited no specific reason in its May 2024 letter notifying Tulsa Athletic it was being suspended for the 2024 season, and the club has only stated in response, “We worked tirelessly and in good faith to reach agreement with the league in recent weeks, but this was the final result.”
Crowley said most of the founding members of the League for Clubs had issues with the NPSL during their time in the league.
“I was on the (NPSL) board and then they forced me to resign from the board,” Crowley said. “A bunch of these guys, we were all active in helping to build the NPSL 2017, 2018, 2019. And then our vision didn’t really align with leadership’s vision, and they started kind of systematically removing people that disagree with them.”
Instead, Crowley said, their vision is fueling the League for Clubs (colloquially “the League”), which was founded by Kingston Stockade FC, Tulsa Athletic, Atlantic City FC, Napa Valley 1839 FC and FC Davis; the latter two are based in California. The League is being built in partnership with the Women’s Premier Soccer League, and will in many ways feel familiar to longtime Stockade supporters.
“It’s a short season amateur league, and it’s going to be very much similar to the NPSL,” Crowley said. “I think one of the big differentiators is that we can be very selective with who we bring in.”
What Crowley is getting at is something anyone who’s ever seen Stockade FC at home — at Dietz Stadium, or during their two years of renovation exile at Marist College in Poughkeepsie — and then followed the team to an away game can understand.
“There’s a bunch of clubs that put a lot of effort into their home game experiences, Stockade included,” Crowley said. “And we get frustrated when we go to other places to play and there’s no effort put into it. No fans, there’s no live-stream, there’s nothing for our fans to do. Is there going to be food there for fans? Do we have to pay for tickets? You don’t even hear back from the teams when you write them. And so one of the requirements (for the League), we talk about minimum standards, is that the ownership groups are as invested in the off the field product as they are the on the field product too.”
Crowley said that spirit has been ignored by the NPSL as its sought simply to stay afloat.
“The NPSL is in a tough spot because the organization is big and they need to keep pulling clubs in to maintain it,” he said. “And when you continue to pull clubs in, you don’t always get the clubs of the highest quality. Every now and then you get these high quality clubs, but not all of them are like that.”
For Stockade FC supporters, the offseason can feel interminably long. Crowley hopes the announcement of the League helps.
“This timing is very deliberate,” he said. “The NPSL playoffs are coming up, and when the playoffs are over, that’s when they ask teams to re-up. And we’re really trying to get in and say, ‘Hey, listen, before you just blindly pay, consider the alternatives.’ Just this morning, I was on the phone with some other teams that we’ve played against in the past … We’ve had a lot of interest. There’s a lot of folks that have just kind of had it with the NPSL.”
The outreach is paying off, with the League planning on announcing “six-packs” of teams spread out across three conferences — West, Midwest, and Northeast — in the near future.
“We’ve decided if we have three conferences with six teams each, 18 teams total, that’s a successful season,” Crowley said. It we double that, and it’s 36 teams and six conferences, that’s even better.”
Crowley believes the energy of the League combined with the excitement of a return to Dietz Stadium for the 2025 season will make for an exciting year ahead for Stockade FC.
“I think it’s going to be considerably bigger,” Crowley said. “If you get anywhere close to 1,000 fans at Dietz, it feels packed. Even at 800 fans it feels crowded in a way that it didn’t (at Marist).”
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