Detroit announcement shows fallacy of unfettered MLS expansion
About a year ago, I attended a convention in downtown Detroit. This meeting of about 5,000 professionals took place at various sites throughout the city and was designed to show that Detroit was back. A city of great history, musical tradition, and sporting prowess was being revitalized by aggressive private sector investment and smart government spending, shedding its old stereotypes and taking its place as a cosmopolitan gem near the Canadian border. Yet over the four days I spent in the city, I noticed a few things. First, on weekdays, there were no people on the streets. For a major
About a year ago, I attended a convention in downtown Detroit. This meeting of about 5,000 professionals took place at various sites throughout the city and was designed to show that Detroit was back. A city of great history, musical tradition, and sporting prowess was being revitalized by aggressive private sector investment and smart government spending, shedding its old stereotypes and taking its place as a cosmopolitan gem near the Canadian border.
Yet over the four days I spent in the city, I noticed a few things. First, on weekdays, there were no people on the streets. For a major US city, the daytime atmosphere was more The Walking Dead than Wall Street. Second, almost everyone in Detroit I talked to who worked in the city lived in the suburbs. This is not unusual for a city but, regardless of where they worked or their background, they all commuted in to work and left right after. Third, while there were popular blocks of hangout spots that resembled the hipster corridors of Anytown USA, they were sprinkled throughout streets that visitors were told to avoid where clumps of city police kept an eye on the random people still left after work hours.
I share this not to disparage Detroit. I actually liked many aspects of the city, but I want to give a different side to the recent press conference by Dan Gilbert and MLS on the possibility of a Detroit MLS franchise launching in the coming years.
Detroit may be on its way back, but it is not close to being a Toledo, much less a new Chicago. Massive portions of the city are dilapidated. Transportation is a mess, and city residents are unfortunately mostly limited to those who cannot or do not want to live elsewhere.
Yet the idea of MLS investing in a city is not a bad one. Twenty years into the newest American professional soccer experiment, a successful league like MLS can gamble on a lesser of a safe bet city such as Detroit, one that could yield great results if the Detroit revitalization is as successful as many people are hoping. But for the Detroit scenario, there are two major red flags that should make anyone pause before assuming the automatic success of MLS Detroit.
The first is that the great revitalization plan could fail. While the press coverage is positive about the new restaurants and investment coming in, there are a number of ways The D could falter in its rebuilding. Residents could stay away, the car industry could again falter if a younger generation shuns cars or new models fail, or the new industries that are trying to establish Detroit as a base fail to take off. Instead of an economic power like a new Chicago, Detroit could end up as a smaller Cleveland, and no one is clamoring for that city to have an MLS team.
But more importantly to the city and to MLS as a whole, the process to this point stinks. Consider that the announcement did not involve the professional soccer team already in the city, Detroit City FC. This is a team that has an admired fan base and literally contributes back to revitalizing the city, however one that is too far down the US Soccer professional league ladder to make a splash at a press conference.
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Instead, Don Garber lined up next to Dan Gilbert and Tom Gores to make the announcement, and then out comes a glamorous stadium rendering to distract from the many unanswered questions. For example, why does the stadium need to be built on land currently occupied by a penitentiary project that was the site of alleged government graft in the building process and is now a priority for city officials to get done as a way to not waste precious taxpayer money? Interestingly, according to the Detroit News, Gilbert has been pressuring the city to sell him this “prime real estate” for three years, and possibly an MLS team offers him a new chance to pressure the city to sell him the penitentiary land to get the development possibilities he seeks. MLS seems not to question this.
Herein lies the problem with the MLS expansion. Rather than layout a well-thought out plan for expanding MLS, Garber loves hopping from city to city and playing the bids off of each other, trying to drive up the entry bid cost. Every time there is a rumor of potential interest in an MLS franchise (Sacramento! Minneapolis!), a league official is lending support to the potential of the market and the city’s ideas make league news. The proposed Detroit stadium, which at upwards of a billion dollars to build could be an absolute fantasy, was being tweeted by the official MLS account and featured prominently on the league site. Is Detroit a realistic possibility? It doesn’t matter because that stadium rendering now turns up the heat on Sacramento, San Antonio and all the other owners and cities wanting a piece of the MLS pie.
At twenty-one years old, MLS now should begin thinking long-term about the shape of the league and how it fits into the American soccer pyramid. Instead, it continues to chase dollars and promote possible fantasies of a perfect MLS franchise in every possible city. Let’s hope the league can prove me wrong and has a strategic plan for smart growth of the league, lest we see bids like Detroit’s end up in seemingly permanent limbo like David Beckham’s Miami franchise. Unlike Miami, however, the inability to deliver a promised MLS team could have more disastrous effects on a city like Detroit.
