So professional soccer is coming to Lexington. Start date: 2023. League: United Soccer League. Franchise name: To be determined. Site: Also to be determined, but also essential to the endeavor.
“The stadium will be transformational,” USL President Jake Edwards said Tuesday.
Will pro soccer in our fair city work? The potential is there, which is why the growing league picked Lexington in the first place.
The official announcement came Tuesday at the Fifth Third Pavilion downtown, complete with Mayor Linda Gorton and other dignitaries, including Bill Shively, owner of Dixiana Farm and whose Tower Hill Sports will serve as majority owner for the USL League One franchise, a step below the league’s USL Championship division, which is a step below Major League Soccer.
In actuality, Lexington has been on the USL radar since 2017. It took time to do the ground work, cultivate investors, gauge the potential of securing a stadium site and nailing down other details.
“Lexington has been one of our top markets we’ve been looking at for five years now,” USL Chief Operating Officer Justin Papadakis told me back in July. “We just need three things: the right ownership, a stadium and a city partner.”
Shively fit the ownership component. The insurance executive said Tuesday he has his eye on 150 acres near the corner of Richmond Road and I-75 for a potential training site for the franchise’s youth academies, which are a USL requirement.
The stadium is trickier. The goal is to build a 6,000 to 10,000 capacity stadium downtown — something the USL strongly prefers — preferably behind Rupp Arena, according to Shively. In the breach, the franchise is in talks with UK about using the Wendell & Vickie Bell Soccer Complex for home matches.
As for the city partner, Shively insisted Tuesday the franchise will not be supported by city dollars. Still, there has to be city support to make this thing go, support in terms of interest, involvement and ticket sales.
The speakers at Fifth Third pointed to a diverse city population, that includes international students at UK and other Lexington schools. According to Gorton, 196 different languages are spoken here. Soccer, or football as it is called in most places, is truly a global sport.
That includes the United States, even if we aren’t much good at it compared to places where the sport is a way of life. It is increasingly becoming our way of life. My two boys both played youth soccer, as I’m guessing your children did, too. Those same boys and girls now play FIFA on their video game consoles, watch the Premier League on their streaming devices and binge “Ted Lasso.” The future is here.
And if you want to gauge Lexington’s potential for success as a soccer town, you can simply look up the road, starting with Cincinnati. Its professional team, FC Cincinnati, was such a hit as a USL team playing in the University of Cincinnati’s Nippert Stadium, the city was awarded an MLS expansion franchise. Its TQL Stadium, located in Cincinnati’s West End, is considered an MLS showplace.
Consider this: Two weeks ago, with the Cincinnati Reds in the middle of a race for a National League playoff spot, just 9,475 attended a Tuesday night game at Great American Ball Park. Across town, an exhibition match between the U.S. National Women’s Team and Paraguay drew 22,515.
Then there’s Louisville City FC, a USL Championship franchise that started out playing at Slugger Field, home of minor league baseball’s Louisville Bats. The matches became such popular family-friendly events that the 15,034-seat Lynn Family Stadium was built for the team and the Racing Louisville FC franchise in the National Women’s Soccer League.
Can the same thing happen here, if on a slightly smaller scale? Yes, it can. Soccer has the interest. It has the ownership. A stadium is the next step, and a crucial one. You might even say, an essential one.
Said Papadakis, “We look forward to wrapping that up.”