The league, which for years had been carefully noncommittal about its future with Beckham and Miami, did little to disguise its excitement about Monday’s reveal.
It passed out hundreds of tickets for the lunchtime event at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center, and it said last week that MLS Commissioner Don Garber, Beckham and most of his ownership group would be on hand for “a major announcement regarding the future of soccer in Miami.”
There were no details on the team itself — its name, its colors or even when it would begin play — but Beckham and his group could hardly hide their relief.
“This is something that has been a dream for many, many years,” Beckham said.
Beckham, a former captain of England’s national team, who also played for Manchester United, Real Madrid and in the MLS with the Los Angeles Galaxy, had exercised his option to buy a franchise for $25 million in 2014. That bargain price was part of his original contract with the league, signed when he joined as a midfielder for the Galaxy in 2007. The owners of the two franchises entering the league in its current round of expansion will pay multiples more for their teams: about $150 million.
Monday’s announcement, made four years to the week after the league held an event to herald his intention to field a team, had long been contingent on the ability of Beckham’s ownership group to finalize a stadium plan — a point MLS officials have made publicly and privately for years.
That process appeared to have come to an end with the ownership group’s agreement to purchase almost 9 acres in Miami’s downtrodden Overtown neighborhood that they say will be home to a 25,000-seat stadium that could cost $500 million. Local officials, embarrassed by a deal for the Miami Marlins stadium that left taxpayers on the hook for $2.4 billion, had balked at helping to underwrite the costs of the soccer venue, and Beckham had to opt for private rather than public financing.
Still, officials here were happy to bask in the glory of an apparently successful deal with a newly configured ownership group for the Beckham team and stadium that includes Sprint’s chief executive, Marcelo Claure; the company’s chairman, Masayoshi Son; the entertainment mogul Simon Fuller; and Jorge Mas and his brother, José R. Mas, members of one of Miami’s most well-known Cuban exile families and the owners of Mastec, an engineering and construction company based in nearby Coral Gables.
“The stars have aligned,” Carlos A. Giménez, the Miami-Dade County mayor, said in a telephone interview Monday morning. “There were a lot of false starts, a lot of obstacles to overcome. David persisted and persisted, and when a door closed, there was always another one.”
Beckham’s path to a stadium here, initially announced in February 2014, was anything but smooth. His first plan was to build it in the county-owned PortMiami, but the cruise industry, heavily invested in the harbor, put up roadblocks to the deal. Later plans to put up stadiums at the waterfront in downtown Miami and in the Little Havana neighborhood, next to Marlins Park, ran into their own hurdles.
And, although the deal is all but sealed for the Overtown location, at least one legal challenge remains.
It concerns part of the proposed site, a 2.8-acre lot owned by the county and used as a storage depot and garage for its water and sewer department. In a lawsuit filed last summer, Bruce C. Matheson, a wealthy Miami landowner, challenged the county’s approval of the $9 million sale without its having allowed for competitive bids. County officials argued that Florida law permits such no-bid transactions involving public land if they result in wider economic benefits.
In October, a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge dismissed the lawsuit, but Matheson is appealing.
In addition, some residents of Overtown, traditionally one of the city’s poorest and most underdeveloped neighborhoods, have objected to the proposed stadium on the grounds that there is no official provision for job creation in the immediate area.
The proposed stadium has also rattled homeowners in the nearby Spring Garden neighborhood, settled in the 1840s and designated a historic district in 1997. Residents there fear the prospect of hordes of soccer fans within earshot will destroy their tranquility.
But other residents nearby are unfazed.
“It’s going to bring life and productivity to the area, as well as police and security,” said Alicia Pérez, 54, a retired secretary who lives in the Tuscan View apartment complex, just south of the proposed stadium site. “It’s going to be good. I don’t hear anyone complaining here.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
NICK MADIGAN © 2018 The New York Times