Soccer Coming to StL?

Well, this time it looks serious...and, I think, probable. St. Louis voters turned down the effort to publicly fund...or at least partially fund...a new soccer stadium for the effort to bring an MLS team to the city last spring. That seemed to effectively kill the idea.

But hold on. Jim Kavanaugh, World Wide Technology CEO and former pro player himself, circled the wagons, got the huge-money Taylor family of Enterprise holdings involved, and the likelihood of seeing pro soccer in the Gateway City seems to have dramatically improved...almost overnight.

If I'm the commissioner of MLS, and of course I'm not. Don Garber is. I look at this effort and say.."How can we not add this city's group to our league?" If they want the financial impact of Enterprise, not only locally...but in their league's advertising portfolio...and surely they do, they can't ignore what's going on here. Plus, you have the only ownership group led and dominated by women in the entire MLS. Carolyn Kindle Betz, (pictured) and several other female members of the Taylor family, are leading the charge.


And more importantly, this ownership is asking for very little in the way of public sector cooperation, or dollars. They need the state to deed the land for the new stadium, just west of Union Station, over to the city, which will then lease it to the team. And the city of St. Louis, without much of a commitment otherwise, will receive significant dollars from a small tax added to purchases made at games. Ownership is making the big commitment...and everyone else just needs to go along for the ride.

The announcement of the new group's efforts, not insignificantly, was also geared toward bringing the minority community on board with the new team as well. Having the press conference at the Matthews-Dickey Boys and Girls Club headquarters was a public-relations bombshell...and another piece of the pie that Garber and company can't possibly look past. The city is diverse. The city has been divided. The city needs something like this to help gel it back into a city full of people all pulling on the rope in the same direction.

Nashville and Cincinnati have recently been announced as teams 25 and 26 in a four-team expansion with two more to be announced fairly soon. Without knowing much about the other cities vying for an expansion team, (Detroit and Sacramento are candidates) I have to feel like they were just broadsided big-time by the this announcement.

Can having a pro soccer team fix all the problems our city and region has? Of course not. But this is about the best news we've had in a long time that might start us down a path toward significant healing.