Ownership groups from 12 cities across the United States submitted Major League Soccer expansion bids this week as the league prepares to expand from 22 teams in 2017 to 24 in ’18, 26 in ’20 and 28 sometime afterward.
Minnesota United and Atlanta United join MLS for the 2017 season, with LAFC and a Miami team (pending stadium approval) set to join next year.
The MLS expansion committee will review the applications from the 12 cities — Sacramento, San Diego, Phoenix, San Antonio, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Nashville, Detroit, Cincinnati, Raleigh/Durham, Charlotte, Tampa/St. Petersburg — starting this month. The committee, led by New England’s Jonathan Kraft, will select teams 25 and 26 by the end of 2017.
In Tucson, Ariz., on Thursday, current Sounders head coach Brian Schmetzer, who was the team's assistant coach when it joined the league via expansion in 2009, weighed in on the bids and the league’s future.
“There’s a lot of competition for those spots because…the value of franchises is going up and up,” Schmetzer said. “The [level of] soccer in this country is increasing. TV money, revenue, the whole bigger picture is increasing. There’s a lot of competition between a lot of quality cities to get MLS franchises.”
Schmetzer played for the NASL Sounders before coaching the USL Sounders to two titles in 2005 and ’07. MLS awarded Seattle an expansion spot in November 2007, and the club played its inaugural MLS match in March 2009.
Schmetzer is partial to several cities on the expansion list in particular for personal and sentimental reasons.
“My daughter was born in San Diego, and I had four good years with [former indoor soccer team] the San Diego Sockers there,” Schmetzer said. “I also played in St. Louis.”
As far as how he expects the decisions to be made or the process behind them, Schmetzer deflected to those tasked with doing it.
“It’s up to the people who are way above my pay scale to make those decisions,” he said.
