In just a few short years, St. Louis will once again be home to three major professional sports teams. No, the Los Angeles Rams did not decide to abandon California anew to return to the still-uninspiring Edward Jones Dome, and no, the National Basketball Association did not decide that Salt Lake City might not need a team after all. Instead, St. Louis is getting a soccer team.

Major League Soccer (MLS) announced last Tuesday that it had chosen St. Louis as the site for its 28th team. A private ownership group will be “overwhelmingly” responsible for financing the team, the primary investor, Carolyn Kindle Betz, told the media. The league, which is the highest professional level of American soccer, said that a new stadium will be built near Union Station in downtown St. Louis in time for the new team to begin play in 2022.

Thanks to factors ranging from strong immigrant communities and the Catholic church’s focus on soccer in parochial schools to St. Louis University’s soccer dominance throughout the mid-20th century, St. Louis has long been known as an American soccer capital. Yet, in the 26 years since MLS was founded in 1993, neither the city nor private investors have dedicated financial support to start a team. Now, members of the Taylor family, which includes Kindle Betz, owns rental-car giant Enterprise Holdings and is increasingly involved in the city’s revitalization, have stepped in to fund the team. The team will be the first female-majority-owned in MLS history.

“It’s fantastic news. For a city with the heritage that we’ve got in soccer and the many thousands of people who have played and coached and refereed in this city, it’s like a dream come true,” said Dave Lange, a senior lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Missouri-St. Louis whose 2011 book, “Soccer Made in St. Louis: A History of the Game in America’s First Soccer Capital,” tracked the city’s relationship with the sport. “For the city to have been a center of soccer in the nation for so long and to not have a team in top league was really almost like an embarrassment.”

According to ESPN, MLS has long sought to bring a team to St. Louis but has never been confident in a stable source of funding. When in 2017 St. Louis voters struck down a proposal to have the city spend $60 million in tax proceeds for a new stadium, many feared that the movement for an MLS team would struggle. That was not the case. “The grassroots effort has existed for years,” wrote Wayne Pratt, a morning newscaster at St. Louis Public Radio, in an email to Student Life. “That support did not go away after the 2017 failure.”

The head coach of the Washington University men’s soccer team, Joe Clarke, described a sense of optimism surrounding the new team. “I’m excited about seeing [the downtown] stadium full and an incredible ambience around the game,” he said last week. “The United States has figured out that professional soccer is like college basketball: you start off in the streets two hours before the game with a big party and you tailgate into the stadium and then you are on your feet cheering, pounding on your drums and chanting the whole game,” Clarke observed.

Data supports Clarke’s point that Americans have caught on to the appeal of soccer. In 2018, MLS averaged nearly 22,000 fans in attendance per game, an immense increase since the league’s early years, when attendance dropped as low as 15,000 fans per game. In terms of game attendance in the U.S., MLS lags behind only the National Football League and Major League Baseball, two organizations much more entrenched in American culture.

Despite the enthusiasm and anticipation surrounding the arrival of a team to St. Louis, questions still abound. Though the ownership group appears highly dedicated to the expansion effort, so far the MLS plan has been short on details. For starters, the team does not have a name, though ideas include city-specific names like the Archers or the Confluence. There has been no announcement of the exact location for the stadium, and no update on a backup plan if that stadium cannot be completed in time, said Pratt, KWMU’s lead reporter on MLS expansion to the city. Pratt also said that there were questions surrounding aspects of the proposal that must be approved by the city’s Board of Aldermen. “A lot could change between now and 2022,” he wrote.

Nonetheless, spirits are high after the MLS announcement.

“I think it has been like a 180 degree turn for the city,” Lange said, pairing the new MLS team with the St. Louis Blues’ Stanley Cup Championship in June. Lange stressed seeing the new MLS team as part of broader redevelopment in the city: “It’s really part of that bigger picture of St. Louis on the rebound, so it’s an exciting part of that.”