Cincinnati's MLS expansion bid: FC Cincinnati announcement imminent

Major League Soccer is coming to Cincinnati next week, and league officials are likely bringing with them an invitation for Futbol Club Cincinnati to join their ranks.

Sources confirmed to The Enquirer that a major club announcement is coming Tuesday and MLS commissioner Don Garber will be in attendance.

FC Cincinnati confirmed further details of the event in a Thursday afternoon press release.

Perhaps there's nothing for officials to add, though, as Garber's presence for an announcement in Cincinnati points an invitation for FC Cincinnati to join MLS.

"Major soccer announcement" was the phrasing used as a not-so-subtle heads up prior to the December expansion announcement in Nashville.

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The invitation for locals in Miami to attend the January expansion announcement there used different wording – "An important announcement on the future of soccer in Miami" – but essentially took the same form.

Based on the spirit of the statement regarding next week's FC Cincinnati announcement, it appears the Queen City club has received the call to the top soccer league in the United States and Canada.

It will likely remain unclear until Tuesday when FC Cincinnati would officially begin to play in MLS, but the club had strived to hit the field in 2019. That would allow it exclusive advantages in terms of building the club from a personnel standpoint.

Though FC Cincinnati's work toward MLS started in earnest in early 2015, the finalization of the expansion bid for FC Cincinnati would cap a 16-month-long formal expansion process.

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That expansion process tested the patience and made skeptics of FC Cincinnati's typically excitable fanbase. Contentious debates amongst politicians also resulted from the expansion process, with the commitment of public dollars to FC Cincinnati's infrastructure needs at issue in the 2017 mayoral race and subsequent meetings at City Hall this year.

Ultimately, FC Cincinnati found the support it needed from city and Hamilton County elected officials.

Representatives of the residents of West End, where the club's proposed soccer-specific stadium will be built just blocks from Downtown, also achieved for their constituents a community benefits package.

FC Cincinnati had its detractors locally throughout the expansion process, but it's hard to say the club's ascendency was anything but a true Cincinnati success story.

FC Cincinnati was conceived in East Side coffee shops and had no brick or mortar to call its own for months.

"No office space. Speculative earnings models. A brand new lease to play soccer in the University of Cincinnati's football stadium, but no players to take the field. No coach to coach the imaginary squad. Forget Major League Soccer – this newly-founded United Soccer League project needed colors and a logo. That was Futbol Club Cincinnati as recently as spring 2015. - The Enquirer/Cincinnati.com, Aug. 12, 2016.

FC Cincinnati signed in spring 2015 a 15-year lease to play its home matches at the University of Cincinnati's more than 100-year-old Nippert Stadium. The club spent more than $2 million to renovate the venue prior to the 2017 season, expanding the field size to meet FIFA requirements.

The club is expected to use Nippert in MLS play while the process to begin work on its soccer-specific continues.

No timeline for stadium construction has been released or publicly discussed.

It is fitting that Nippert could play host to FC Cincinnati's early years as an MLS franchise because the venue became the epicenter of a scarcely-paralleled American soccer movement.

In 2016, a United Soccer League-record 333,353 fans passed through the Nippert turnstiles for FC Cincinnati matches.

More than 477,000 fans attended matches in 2017 and 97,838 have turned out for the club's first five matches of 2018.

Along the way, Cincinnati's fans have toppled numerous single-game attendance records – its attendance figures consistently compared well to most MLS.

Within months, FC Cincinnati should be measuring itself against MLS competition in every aspect, including on the field on a weekly basis come next March.