By 2016 or 2017, Florida should be home to at least five professional soccer teams.
The revelation that MLS would be officially returning to Miami has been greeted with a bit of a shoulder shrug among many fans of the league. David Beckham has been rumored to be focused on putting a team there for at least a year and the formal announcement just seemed to be a matter of time. That there's still no firm plan for a stadium is obviously a concern, but considering the money and star power involved in Beckham's ownership -- Bolivian billionaire Marcelo Claure and Simon Fuller, the guy who created American Idol are the guys with the real cash -- that too seems likely to come to a reasonable conclusion.
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This all represents quite a turnaround in the fortunes of soccer in Miami, but really in Florida as a whole.
Let's remember that as recently as 2005 there was not a single fully professional team playing in a state that has long produced some of America's top talent. This also a state with nearly 20 million people, which ranks it as No. 4 in the country, and those people are pretty well concentrated in urban areas. This is state that has three NFL teams, two NBA teams, two Major League Baseball teams and even two NHL teams. Heck, there are 14 minor league baseball teams in the state and 13 Division I college athletic programs.
In other words, no one has ever questioned that the state of Florida has the population base that should be able to support plenty of professional soccer teams. But as recently as 2005, the state did not have a single fully professional team. Even after Miami FC joined the USL in 2006 and were eventually joined by the likes of the FC Tampa Bay (in 2010), Orlando City SC (in 2011) and VSI Tampa Bay (in 2013), the state has not had a top level team since the Miami Fusion and Tampa Bay Mutiny were contracted from MLS following the 2001 season.
Orlando City will be the first Florida team to join the league, as they are on pace for a 2015 debut and the so-far-unnamed Miami team could join them as early as the following season. That's obviously the headline here, but it also highlights what has been a soccer renaissance in Florida.
By the time Miami takes the field in 2016 or 2017, there should be at least five professional teams in the state. The two MLS teams will be joined by the NASL's Fort Lauderdale Strikers (formerly Miami FC), Tampa Bay Rowdies (formerly FC Tampa Bay) and the also-unnamed Jacksonville team (due to start in 2015). The only state that is on pace to have more than that by then is California, which should have six teams (the San Jose Earthquakes, LA Galaxy and Chivas USA in MLS and the LA Galaxy II, Los Angeles Blues and Sacramento Republic in USL Pro). Texas, for instance, has just three professional teams and New York should have four by then.
While this certainly seems to be running the risk of over-saturating the market too quickly, this may actually work. Orlando City has already famously been drawing impressive crowds -- they averaged more than 8,000 last year -- in their three USL Pro seasons since moving from Austin, Texas; the Strikers have seen their attendance steadily rise since their rebrand (they averaged more than 4,000 last year); and the Rowdies have steadily drawn about 4,000 as well. Jacksonville is a city of more than 800,000 people that only has one other pro sports franchise, has a decent history of supporting the United States national team and is more than two hours away from its closest in-state soccer competition.
The only serious question mark is around how the Miami market will welcome Beckham's team. The Strikers have so far suggested they welcome their prospective rivals, which makes sense. The Strikers are the team with the history and seem to have become comfortable with the niche they now fill. There's no reason that a rivalry with a MLS club couldn't serve to raise all the ships in Southern Florida. They are also located a solid hour outside of urban Miami in traffic, so it's not like they will be inherently fighting over the same audience.
To succeed, most seem to agree that Beckham must succeed in putting out a top-class product and ensure that viewing games is seen as a must-attend event. Trotting out a group of relatively unknown players, relying on a boring brand of defense-first soccer and using a repurposed American football stadium on the outskirts of town simply is not going to cut it. Of course, MLS officials seem to know this and are saying all the right things.
Now if they can just get it all right, there are reasons to think they could pull it off.
