So, the undersiders are actually set up way differently from most supervillian teams we see. And that's part of why they're so effective, they're built by Coil to be effective, and are thus kind of designed top down to be the perfect team. They're recruited from a selection of unrelated teenage parahumans who don't know eachother or have much in common, but who all have something for the team to give them, either needing a way to make money off of their powers, being new capes trying to get into the business, or being capes that could benefit from being on a team. Coil even realizes he can bring on Lisa (whose basically in trouble with him) and Bitch (whose a wandering threat nobody would approach in most circumstances, much less realize they could recruit). He then takes this group of teenagers and gives them a unified headquarters where they all have rooms, along with common areas, to make sure they end up seeing eachother as freinds, as a way of making sure they have loyalties beyond money. He's their boss, but he's not the person leading them into combat, instead appointing one of their own to be the leader. And he gives them missions, which are a diverse set of jobs they can do, that they can choose to not go on. He even makes sure that they can work well with allied teams like the travlers. And while they are all teenagers, the way the team is set up grooms them to be effective adult villains.
This is a really effective way of creating creating a villain team. And it's way different then the merchants, E88, or the ABB who are basically just normal criminal enterprises who have capes as high ranking members. But you know who that is exactly like: the Wards/Protectorate. Coil is a PRT agent, he understands how they run teams, and why their way is so ruthlessly effective. So when he created a supervillian team he basically created a crime version of the Wards, mirroring the structure, just doing villain work instead of hero work. And with himself as the PRT stand in. After leviathan they basically graduate from being the crime Wards to the crime Protectorate. Every single one of them is a Wards style recruitment, even Lisa is basically a probationary member. And I'm pretty sure Coil knew this, because the name undersiders makes much more sense if he actively understands that they're a villain version of the Wards.
Mostly unrelated but it makes me think of what things would have been like if Chariot was recruited onto the undersiders and Imp was sent to spy on the Wards for Coil.
