Major League Soccer has named its finalists for the 2020 round of expansion. Two franchises will join the league that year, the new entrants coming from among Cincinnati, Detroit, Nashville and Sacramento. Those additions come on the heels of Los Angeles FC, which joins MLS next season, and David Beckham's Miami expansion team, which, at its current rate, might start play only shortly before the Earth crashes into the sun.
Of those four potential cities, it's hard to say which two the league will select. But I know who I'm rooting for.
A convincing case can be made for or against any of the four cities. The groups in Nashville and Detroit have ridiculously deep pockets. Sacramento and Nashville have new stadium plans ready to go, Cincinnati is on the verge of getting approval for a stadium site, and Detroit has Ford Field lined up.
Detroit and Sacramento are huge markets. Nashville's Stanley Cup run last year showed North America what an excellent sports town it can be. If Columbus picks up and moves to Austin, then Cincinnati would be the league's only market in Ohio. Depending on which side you look from, each one of the four sites looks like a shoo-in or an also-ran.
I'm partial to Sacramento and Cincinnati, where soccer is already thriving. In Sacramento, the Republic was the second-division United Soccer League's greatest success story, drawing a nearly unheard-of 10,000-plus fans to every game. Then in 2016, Cincinnati came along and blew Sacramento's numbers out of the water, averaging more than 20,000 fans per game. As someone who watched Minnesota struggle for years in the lower divisions, then graduate into the MLS ranks, I'll always be partial to clubs with a history, rather than teams that exist solely to produce glitzy stadium renderings.
One of MLS' biggest struggles is that it tends to feel more like it was cooked up on the desk of an apparel marketing executive, rather than like an authentic sports league. Promoting teams that already exist, like Sacramento and Cincinnati, works against that perception of inauthenticity. Potential teams like Nashville and Detroit, meanwhile, are "brands," not teams. A soccer team talking about its brand is maddening. Let teams be teams. Let Detroit and Nashville's rich owners start teams first, then consider whether they belong in MLS.
Take the Wilfs, part of the potential Nashville ownership group. The Vikings owners could easily have purchased Minnesota's lower-division franchise back before Bill McGuire bought the team. There would have been an MLS team playing at U.S. Bank Stadium this season, if the Wilfs had bothered to care about soccer at any point. It's hard to get excited about their Nashville bid now that they've discovered there might be a buck in this soccer racket after all.
I hope the league values teams over deep pockets in this expansion round. Given the league's previous moves, this seems unlikely. But this old lower-division soccer fan can hope.
