David Beckham is spearheading a group that’s trying to bring MLS soccer to MIami. (ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images)
It appears that New Year’s Eve will come and go without an MLS
expansion announcement from David Beckham, but missing the league’s Dec.
31 “deadline” almost surely won’t have any tangible impact on his push
for a Miami stadium deal.
Securing land and funding for a new facility in time to meet the
original terms of Beckham’s $25 million expansion option was always
going to be a tall order for the former midfielder, who retired only
seven months ago. Beckham has been working with Bolivian
telecommunications mogul Marcelo Claure and continues to make progress
with local authorities, sources tell SI.com.
Two weeks ago, Miami-Dade County commissioners unanimously authorized mayor
Carlos Gimenez to negotiate with Beckham and potential contractors, and
by all accounts those talks are going well. There’s confidence at the
league level that the details will be worked out.
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Perhaps Beckham was overly optimistic in late November, when he told
Sky Sports, “Hopefully there will be an announcement before the new
year.” But he certainly wasn’t desperate. MLS has no plans to cut
Beckham loose on Wednesday and start from scratch in South Florida. In
fact, commissioner Don Garber and deputy commissioner and president Mark
Abbott are on vacation, not waiting by the phone to hear if the
ex-player and the mayor have broken ground.
Beckham’s cut-rate entry fee might rise next month, but MLS remains committed to bringing Miami aboard once a stadium plan takes shape.
“We are very excited about the opportunity of David putting together
an ownership group and finalizing a stadium site in downtown Miami so
that we could end up having what we hope would be our 22nd team in a
city that’s one of the largest in the country and has a strong and
passionate soccer fan base. But there’s a lot of work that needs to
happen,” Garber said this month.
“We can’t go to Miami without the right stadium solution,” he added.
“David understands that. The city understands that. That is an
indisputable fact. We can’t have different rules for Miami than we’d
have for any other city.”
Miami and Atlanta are expected to be the league’s 22nd and 23rd clubs. Falcons owner Arthur Blank, who hopes to field an MLS team in a new retractable-roof stadium
scheduled to open in 2017, has been in talks with the league for years.
Falcons executive VP and chief marketing officer Jim Smith, formerly
the president and GM of the Columbus Crew, attended the MLS Cup final.
Also in Kansas City for the league title game was a group that might
be interested in bringing MLS to Minneapolis — and it wasn’t the
Vikings. While Beckham’s Miami entry appears to be a matter of “when”
and not “if”, there’s an intriguing contest taking shape in the Twin
Cities, where the construction of a new soccer-ready NFL stadium may
have lit a fire under the owners of local NASL club Minnesota United.
The Vikings expect to open their $1 billion palace in 2016, and the organization claimed last week
that “Conversations regarding securing a soccer team for this market
have heated up between the Vikings and MLS representatives.” A team
spokesperson stood by that characterization when contacted by SI.com on
Monday afternoon.
According to multiple sources, however, MLS officials have spent more
time with United than the Vikings over the past several weeks. The
second-tier club, which won the NASL championship in 2011, is owned by
Bill McGuire, a physician and the former CEO of UnitedHealth Group.
United plays at the National Sports Center in Blaine, some 14 miles
north of downtown Minneapolis, but has acknowledged “preliminary” interest in pursuing an urban, soccer-specific stadium. Representatives were in K.C. to take a look at Sporting Park.
United’s long-term viability might depend on beating the Vikings to
the MLS punch, one source said, and it seems McGuire has found an ally
in the Minnesota Twins. The baseball team’s president, Dave St. Peter,
joined the United contingent and the head of the Minnesota Ballpark
Authority three weeks ago in Kansas City.
Owned by investor Jim Pohlad, the Twins are part of a consortium
called 2020 Partners aiming to spur development in the area around
Target Field, Target Center (the NBA arena) and the Minneapolis Farmers
Market. It certainly wouldn’t be cheap to build there, but Pohlad’s
resources and relationships might make the difference for McGuire and
United. Twins ownership has been interested in MLS for a while, a source
told SI.com.
In September, 2020 Partners issued a statement “encourag[ing]” United
to “explore the Farmers Market site for a soccer stadium as the
potential anchor for development of a multi-use complex.”
The Twin Cities has had a team playing at the lower levels of the
U.S. pyramid since 1994 — two years before MLS kicked off. After two
decades, it seems a race to the top has begun.
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