MLS Teams Want Places to Call Home

If there is anything that brings a scowl to Don Garber’s face it’s short-sightedness, especially the inability or unwillingness of city governments and municipal sports authorities to look beyond the present, to see tomorrow instead of today.

Garber is Major League Soccer’s commissioner and, as such, he is a firm believer in the future of the sport in this country. That future, however, depends on MLS teams each having their own stadiums and being in control of their own playing dates, training facilities, concession, parking revenues and the like.

Right now, only one MLS team, the Columbus Crew, has its own stadium, the site of today’s championship match between the Galaxy and the San Jose Earthquakes. The other 11 are orphan birds in borrowed nests.

The league’s deep-pocket owners--men such as Phil Anschutz, Lamar Hunt and John Kluge--are willing to build the needed stadiums, or at least to fund them, but all too often they run into roadblocks when it comes to dealing with local communities.

“These kinds of things disappoint me,” Garber said Friday. “This sport has massive interest at the grass-roots level. There’s tremendous ethnic support for this sport. We need municipalities to understand and accept the value of partnering with us.”

Currently, the biggest impasse is in Denver, where the Colorado Rapids are stranded. Mile High Stadium is being torn down, the NFL’s Broncos have moved next door to Invesco Field, but the Rapids are being shut out of the new stadium. The deal offered to them is so poor that Garber has told Anschutz he can relocate the team if he likes.

“At this point, we don’t have a place to play in Denver and we’re certainly not going to get held up by an NFL team or by a municipality to play in a facility that, quite frankly, may or may not be the perfect place for us to play in the first place,” Garber said.

A similar situation exists in Chicago, where Soldier Field is about to undergo extensive renovation. The NFL’s Bears have found a temporary home elsewhere, but the Chicago Fire is homeless at the moment.

Anschutz, who operates four MLS teams, including the Galaxy, offered to build a stadium at Arlington Park near Chicago, but was rebuffed.

“We were willing to build a stadium [but] we could not reach agreement with Arlington Park on how long a stadium could stay there,” Garber said. “It’s ludicrous to think that we would put $20 million into a facility and not know that we’d be able to stay in a spot as long as is necessary to make that worthwhile.”

Not all is bleak, however. There is, for instance, a plan being negotiated that would produce a long-term solution in Chicago. Garber said the plan might be announced in a week or so.

And then there is the Galaxy’s new stadium in Carson, where ground-breaking should take place within a matter of a few weeks.

“Los Angeles is the shining star,” Garber said. “I was out there two days ago. That stadium is going to make us as a country proud. It’s going to be among the top soccer facilities in the world. It will be perfect for our league and it will represent our sport in ways that, until two days ago, I wasn’t even dreaming of.”

Then, too, there is Dallas, where the nearby city of McKinney, Texas, is ready, in Garber’s words, “to build a soccer environment that wouldn’t be just a stadium but [also] a home, perhaps, for the USYSA [the United States Youth Soccer Assn.], for the North Texas Soccer Assn. and for the Dallas Burn. I’m very confident we’ll get a deal done there.”

New soccer-specific stadiums also are in the preliminary planning stages in Harrison, N.J., for the New York/New Jersey MetroStars; in Washington, for D.C. United. and, further down the line, on Long Island for a second MLS team in the New York area.

Today marks the end of the league’s sixth season. The stability has been impressive, with no teams having folded and none having moved. Average attendance this year increased by nine percent to 14,961.

“I think we’re at a level that is beyond where the other major leagues were in their fifth or sixth year,” Garber said.

“Quite frankly, we’re far above that. To get to 10,000 took the NBA something like 50 years.”

But it will take new stadiums--and visionary communities--for MLS to make the next leap.