Mark Warburton (Photo by Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
“There’s going to be a tipping point.”
Mark Warburton is bullish on U.S. soccer. He says there will be a point when, rather than basketball or American football, the best athletes in the States will take up soccer instead.
Warburton is the sporting director of Sporting Club Jacksonville, or Sporting JAX, a club that was founded only in 2023 and will join the United Soccer League Championship in 2026.
Getting Sporting JAX ready for its debut season is a big task, but Warburton says, “I enjoy being busy.” He was up before 5 a.m. taking phone calls on the day of his interview with RG. Having once worked as a currency trader in the City of London, Warburton is used to early starts.
When building a new soccer club, who better than someone who has laid the foundations for success at English Premier League sides Brentford and Nottingham Forest, and at Scottish Premier League side Rangers?
Warburton was also sporting director at Brentford before becoming a head coach, amassing 400 games of experience throughout his career. He says, “All of that came together, and this offer—I looked at it and thought I can use everything I’ve learned, I can use it in this one project.”
After spending the 2022–23 season working with David Moyes at West Ham United, Warburton initially wanted to return to being a first-team coach rather than join Sporting JAX. However, he says, “The more I realized the size and scale of this project and the opportunity that it presented, it became really attractive.”
Women First
Sporting JAX has put its women’s team first, with a 2025 start, while the men’s team will begin league soccer in 2026. Warburton began by getting quality staff in place, including head coach Stacey Balaam, saying, “I absolutely wanted a woman coach. I think they just see the game from a woman’s eyes, which is so important.”
He says there are plenty of challenges in women’s soccer in the States, including the lack of opportunities for women to go professional. “There’s only 23 pro clubs for women—380 million people, 23 pro clubs. In the U.K., I’m sure you’d agree, we think of U.S. women’s soccer as market-leading, always the best. They produce all of these players, but they’ve only got 23 pro clubs.”
The women’s team’s first fixture is in August, and now Warburton is turning his attention to the men’s team, saying he’s already got a possible head coach in mind.
Soccer’s Potential in the U.S.
The potential of U.S. soccer includes “a huge talent pool, beyond comprehension.” Warburton says European clubs find it difficult to scout in the States because of its size. Additionally, U.S. soccer has the competitive will and desire that permeates American society, as well as substantial sponsorship money. Demonstrating this scale, he notes the local youth soccer club that Sporting JAX is taking over has more than 10,000 children in it.
He believes there will soon be a tipping point where athletes choose soccer due to the risk of injuries in American football. Often former gridiron players tell him their bodies are battered and broken at 28, struggling even to get out of bed in the morning. Parents understand that soccer is a less expensive and safer option.
“It’s like an oil tanker turning—you can hear it, you can see it, and there’s really positive signs every day. It’s just a long journey because you’re trying to change the institutions of decades of baseball, basketball, NFL.”
However, he says there is still something of a misunderstanding of the game in the U.S., recalling a match he saw recently when “one of the defenders did a bicycle kick, and the ball went straight out of touch, but they loved the bicycle kick and everyone got up and applauded like a goal had been scored.”
Why Pro-Rel Matters
While most soccer fans have heard of Major League Soccer, the USL Championship has also seen huge growth recently and is adding team after team. Clubs from Brooklyn, Buffalo, Milwaukee, and Santa Barbara will all join the league alongside Sporting JAX in 2026. Unlike MLS, USL clubs own the players’ contracts, “so there’s far more flexibility in what we do here,” Warburton says. Player wages are also more evenly spread across the team rather than disproportionately concentrated on designated players. There is still an upside for owners, whereas an MLS franchise can cost so much that “it won’t be far from the first billion-dollar franchise.”
Another big development is that the USL will soon have promotion and relegation, which Warburton says will be “a catalyst for significant interest.” He once met a sports franchise owner who asked, “Why would I invest a billion dollars to be relegated?” Warburton replied, “Well, don’t get relegated then.”
The Realities of Relegation
He speaks from experience. Besides winning promotion with Rangers and Brentford, Warburton arrived at Nottingham Forest in the middle of a relegation battle amid a takeover by current owner Evangelos Marinakis. Forest’s fate came down to a match against Ipswich Town on the season’s final day.
“You can’t prepare for games like that,” he says. “There was one very experienced player throwing up in the toilet before the game… he was experienced and intelligent enough to appreciate the implications of losing, of being relegated… The dinner lady in the canteen, been there for years, would lose her job because budgets would be slashed.”
In that huge game, he trusted youth, playing youngsters like Matty Cash, Ben Osborn, and Joe Worrall. “They were almost fearless—they didn’t realize; they were too young and naive to realize the implications of relegation.”
Forest won 3-0 and avoided relegation by goal difference.
Warburton says there are two sides to relegation, pointing to Blackburn Rovers, relegated instead of Forest that season. “Tony Mowbray went down with Blackburn. That allowed Tony to strip out all the deadwood from his squad, rebuild with youth, get promoted the following season,” and perform very well afterward. “So it can be a healthy sort of vanquishing of all the bits that are bad. The more the American public and owners understand that, the better it will be.”
Lessons from Brentford
Warburton also knows the highs of promotion, at Rangers and before that at Brentford, where he helped build the foundations for the club’s current success, first as sporting director and later as head coach, taking the club up from League One to the Championship and challenging for promotion to the Premier League.
He says owner Matthew Benham “allowed me to set up all the departments in charge of everything football,” and he put people in place who still work there 14 or 15 years later. He calls Benham “a mathematical genius” who “had the vision, and it’s about the quality of his recruitment, the quality of his data.”
Brentford reached the Championship playoffs under Warburton despite having a fraction of the budget of rivals. However, a falling out between him and Benham over transfer policy led to Warburton leaving. He explains, “Matthew wanted to bring in a number of foreign players in January,” but Warburton was worried about disrupting dressing-room harmony mid-season, suggesting instead, “do it in the summer.”
At Sporting JAX, Warburton now has the chance to build something new from scratch. He describes it as a blank canvas, “good because it is a great opportunity, but bad because it is blank and there’s nothing on it—so the men’s team right now is a piece of paper.” It’s fortunate Sporting JAX hired someone who doesn’t mind hard work.
Steve Price is a freelance football journalist and regular contributor to Forbes.com. He has been on the International Sports Press Association’s shortlist for Best Column and has been on the Korean Football Association’s head coach hiring committee. Steve has reported from major tournaments like Euro 2024 and appeared on major outlets like the BBC and The Guardian. He has interviewed FIFA executives, Premier League players and international coaches among others.
