The idea had been brewing for years. As US Club Soccer executive vice president Christian Lavers watched the ECNL take off as the primary avenue for girls club soccer in America, he pondered on the merits of porting that approach to a boys league.

US Club Soccer already had the National Premier Leagues, a scattered satellite of regionalized leagues that largely play in their own self-contained universes during the season. But there was no wider national outlet, a legitimate answer to the U.S. Soccer-run Development Academy that could push innovation alongside the DA by using different methods.

The U.S. is large enough. Could there be room for another major national league?

While the ECNL grew in size and scope on the girls side, Lavers and those around him wrestled with the idea by proxy for years. And then the discussions hit overdrive in the past 12 months, leading them to announcing on May 26 the imminent foundation of the so-called Elite National Premier League. Suddenly the American soccer club world waits to see if it is about to turn on its axis.

Since the hire of former MLS GM Kevin Payne as its CEO in 2015, US Club Soccer has drilled deep into a club-first orientation. Payne has been adamant that clubs largely know their own markets and player pool best, and empowering them in lieu of overtly taking control has largely been the tack over the past year. That helps explain significant initiatives tied to Payne like Players First and the new US Club Soccer sponsored and La Liga-led coaching methodology courses currently popping up around the country.

With Lavers helping lead the charge, the ENPL plans to take all those lessons and apply them to a national league, not regional ones. Call it a guided free market.

“We’ve had clubs asking for it for years,” Lavers said. “There’s just been a lot of people out there who felt they have players who need a better or different platform. It’s probably been in the last year that it’s had some significant discussions and legs to it.”

The league’s structure is still being discussed in advance of a fall 2017 roll-out, so minute details at this point are scarce. Lavers expects the league’s size will be bigger than the ECNL, which has 79 members clubs competing in the 2015-16 season. The league could be 50 percent or even 100 percent bigger than the ECNL, and discussions in the coming months will help nail down that figure.

Qualification for the league, which is its own set apart league, will be a stratified process. The league will emphasize clubs with strong teams in all five of its age groups from U14-U18, the same format used by the ECNL. Standalone clubs can apply and go under the microscope of league leadership, or they can apply from ENPL-sanctioned leagues. For instance, there will be some sort of qualification process out of the NPL, even for clubs who would only have a few age groups qualify.

The league has time to solidify its bylaws before rolling out as a living, breathing competition in 18 months. Meanwhile, it is launching in the same window U.S. Soccer rolls out its answer to the ECNL with a girls Development League. That throws the future of the ECNL into some shadow. Lavers said he hasn’t had direct communication with U.S. Soccer since the announcement, and most clubs are still deciding how to proceed. Join U.S. Soccer’s venture or stick with the ECNL? Or is there a way to keep feet in both pools?

Lavers said the ENPL isn’t being launched with the DA in mind, necessarily. To US Club Soccer’s mind, the league is simply breathing life into a segment of the club world they feel is underserved.

“It has nothing at all to do with the DA,” Lavers said. “We actually look at it as a complement, as something that will help make American soccer better by providing a better platform for more players. At the end of the day, I don’t think anybody cares where the next great American soccer player comes from. We just want more great American soccer players. The more platforms we have that operate at a high level that provide opportunity for kids and clubs to get better, then hopefully the closer we are to having better and better teams and players representing us professionally and internationally.”

One of Lavers’ hard-won realizations after years overseeing the ECNL are the differences in wants and needs from market to market. The ECNL has made its name by taking a soft hand with top-down oversight, allowing clubs to set their own agendas and coaches to work largely unencumbered by totalitarian policies from the league. The ECNL has always taken the approach that clubs and coaches tend to know their players best. Among other reasons, it’s why the ECNL never banned high school soccer while U.S. Soccer moved in that direction. Micromanaging that process, they reason, creates headaches and burns bridges.

This is arguably the fundamental difference between US Club Soccer’s approach and that of U.S. Soccer, which has developed a reputation as a more centralized environment from an oversight perspective.

Lavers is quick to point out that neither approach is fundamentally right or wrong. But to his mind, there was a gap in the system where clubs longing for a bit more back room freedom could raise up players in a high level environment free of some of those restrictions.

“We feel there’s a lot of players out there that may want to play high school soccer on the boys side, for example, who are top level players who don’t have that opportunity,” Lavers said. “There’s great clubs that are currently in platforms that they say aren’t meeting their (league) needs for one reason or another. They’re looking for a more consistent platform, a more comprehensive platform instead of a couple weekends of top quality games. They want more than that.”

The culture of club soccer in America is expensive, often requiring a year-over-year investment of thousands of dollars just for the right to step through the game’s gates. Lavers is realistic about the expenses involved in developing players, paying for equipment and providing travel. In the current American soccer climate, starting a league with no cost is not only inadvisable, it’s suicidal from a league standpoint. It simply won’t survive absent of major contributions elsewhere.

That said, the league is seeking to cut cost corners wherever possible. That starts with minimizing long-haul travel, which makes up the bulk of a club’s expense report. And if they can pull it off, they’ll have a unique wind to breathe into an American soccer landscape desperately longing for more options to develop players.

“Let’s be as efficient as we can with operations and with the way we structure the platform to reinvest money, and to keep money that’s being spent by these clubs and teams in the platform,” Lavers said. “That way it can be invested back into development programs or education programs or just making the platform itself better. That’s what we’ve done with the ECNL, is use resources in the past that would disappear into five different places. We want to bring those back so we can make the league really special.”