Hurdles ahead for Beckham and MLS in Miami

(by Nick Madigan nytimes.com 2-5-14)

The soccer star David Beckham delivered a long-awaited but in many ways provisional commitment to Miami on Wednesday when he confirmed it as the future home of a Major League Soccer expansion team that he will own — alongside partners not yet named — and run.

Beckham made the announcement during a somewhat giddy news conference overlooking a sunny Biscayne Bay, an event punctuated by vigorous chants from fans who have been without a top-flight team since 2001, when M.L.S. folded the Miami Fusion.
 

“This is an exciting time for myself, for my family and friends,” Beckham told the crowd while perched on a stool between the M.L.S. commissioner, Don Garber, and the mayor of Miami-Dade County, Carlos A. Gimenez, who is on record as opposing the use of public money for privately owned sports facilities.
 

As if to assure Gimenez of his access to deep pockets elsewhere, Beckham made a point of saying that “a lot of great people want to invest in this team and this club,” a remark greeted with cheers.
 

“We don’t want public funding,” he said. “We will fund the stadium ourselves.”
 

But the news conference raised more questions than it answered. There is no deal in place for the financing to build a stadium, or to buy or lease the land on which to put it. The team has no name, and there seems to be only a vague notion of when the team might start playing in M.L.S. — perhaps in 2016, more likely 2017. Nor was it clear where the team might play, temporarily, until its own stadium is completed.
 

The Miami team would be the 22nd in M.L.S. The league currently has 19 clubs, but it will add two more — in New York City and Orlando — next year.
 

Beckham had inserted the right to buy a team for $25 million into his original playing contract when he joined the Los Angeles Galaxy in 2007, but he had to exercise that option before Dec. 31, 2013.

Wednesday’s announcement was merely confirmation that he had done so by the deadline.

In an interview after the news briefing, Garber said that in the last month or so he had personally looked at three properties in downtown Miami that might be suitable stadium sites for Beckham’s team.
“We want that stadium to be downtown,” Garber said, mentioning in particular a site in Miami’s seaport near the arena where the N.B.A.’s Miami Heat play.

Asked why he had chosen Miami for his new venture, Beckham replied, “I mean, why not?”

 

More concretely, he said Miami had become a truly international city that was especially appealing to visitors and immigrants from Latin America and Europe. Those audiences, he said, flock to soccer games, as evidenced by huge turnouts to matches in recent years featuring teams like Real Madrid, A.C. Milan, Chelsea and national teams from Brazil and Honduras. Those games were played in the Sun Life football stadium in Miami Gardens, a suburb northwest of downtown.
 

“In this market, if you put a soccer team together, you have a lot of sophisticated soccer fans who will go,” said Norb Ecksl, who was general manager of the Miami Freedom soccer team in the early 1990s and is now the editor of Sunshine Soccer News.

“If you put a good product on the field and promote it properly, it’s going to work. And you have to have a state-of-the-art stadium that people will be willing to come to. It’s all about entertainment.”
 

Beckham, he said, “has got to have the money, and cooperation from the government” to make the venture succeed. “We’ll see,” Ecksl added, the failure of previous teams in South Florida fresh in his mind.

During the news briefing, Beckham and Garber insisted that things had changed since the Fusion folded, and that it was time for Miami to take its place in the booming business of soccer.

“Miami is a vibrant city, a city with a lot of passion,” Beckham said. “It’s ready for football, for soccer. And I’m looking forward to spending a lot more time here."

 

Asked whether he had any players in mind as potential hires, Beckham demurred, although he acknowledged that some prominent players had already contacted him.
 

Beckham, 38, is a former captain of England’s national team. He began playing for Manchester United when he was 17 and went on to become one of soccer’s most prominent players.
 

He said he was “living the dream” by starting his own team.
 

“For me, I wanted to create a team that we can start from scratch,” he said. “I wanted to create a team that’s very personal.”

Beckham mentioned two potential partners in the venture: the Bolivian billionaire Marcelo Claure, founder of the Miami-based wireless distributor Brightstar Corporation, and the “American Idol” producer Simon Fuller, both of whom, he said, were “very excited” about the project.
 

For the soccer fans who attended Wednesday’s announcement, the possibility of a return to regular local play by a first division professional team was more than welcome. Jonathan Urbaez, a 20-year-old student at Miami-Dade College and one of about 150 members of the Southern Legion, a soccer supporters’ group formed expressly to push for a new M.L.S. team in Miami, said that when he heard that Beckham might start a team here, it “sounded too good to be true.”
 

“Once I heard that the wheels were rolling,” Urbaez said, “I knew it was something I had to be a part of.”