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The one big lesson to MLS's expansion hopefuls from St. Louis' stadium failure
All of the talk about St. Louis' MLS expansion bid was positive. The league loved the market, the ownership was settled, they had history in the city and the stadium proposal looked great. When MLS announced that they would award two expansion teams in 2017, St. Louis looked like a shoo-in for one of them.
Then it all fell apart when the city voted not to spend $60 million of public money on their proposed stadium. Now the entire bid may be dead, and we have all learned (or more accurately re-learned) one very important lesson: Nothing matters more than stadium funding, and it's also the hardest thing to lock down.
It doesn't matter how great St. Louis' bid looked, how wonderful the city is or how successful the team could be because without a stadium, there is no team. And there is no stadium without funding, which is fickle and isn't secure until everyone has signed on the dotted line.
As we look at St. Louis now, and the other 11 candidates for expansion, it really starts and ends with a stadium plan and funding. Do they have it? If not, they're not in any pole position and their entire bid is in question.
That's why MLS's entire expansion picture is so cloudy.
Right now, only one of the 12 prospective bids have a stadium deal locked up -- Sacramento. If MLS awarded them a team right now, they could get building on the stadium. Everything is approved, the funding is secure, they are ready to go. There are questions about the bid, most notably an ownership squabble that has raised questions about the potential team's stability, but that's easier to fix than a stadium deal.
Getting stadiums built is incredibly complicated, and it has nothing to do with the construction. The actual erection of a 20,000+ seat venue is actually the easy part.
First, there needs to a suitable site for the stadium that is easily accessible and will allow the team to thrive. Then the team needs to acquire the land for the stadium, which sometimes requires a deal with the government to donate the land, sell it to the team for cheap or even use eminent domain to acquire it. Infrastructure, from nearby roads, electrical and even traffic mitigation needs to be sorted out, as well as the nearby development that usually accompanies these stadiums. And once all that is done, someone has to come up with upwards of $100 million, sometimes as much as $200 million or even $300 million.
Rarely does the team agree to fund all that and even when they do, there are tax breaks and other concessions from government. That means studies, lobbying, negotiating and, sometimes, a public vote.
Basically, getting a stadium deal done is a giant mess with hundreds of potholes. And no city is getting a team without one.
St. Louis made it through the entire gauntlet, cleared every hurdle, then got tripped by the last one. Now their bid may be done for. It's that difficult.
So MLS intends to hand out four more expansion teams, with two being announced this year and two more at a later date. There's no reason to think they won't, and they will almost assuredly come from the 12 cities they've shortlisted.
Will it be St. Louis? How about Sacramento? San Diego's bid looks nice, as does Cincinnati's, Detroit's and pretty much everyone else left on the list. But who is the favorite?
It's impossible to say who will awarded an MLS expansion team because only one has a stadium deal. And as St. Louis proved, once again, it all comes down to stadiums. Follow those, and you will find your next MLS expansion teams.
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