There’s a certain disorder to Miami which you grow accustomed to here, beyond the well-earned Florida man tropes, perhaps a product of the heat and humidity, the traffic, the collision of so many different, vibrant cultures, that in some ways, the whole chaotic founding of this football club feels very Miami already.
Miami won the right to negotiate a no-bid deal for a 25,000 seat soccer-specific stadium and real estate complex at the Melreese Country Club site just north of Coral Gables, which was huge after years of figuring out what little plot of land the club would call home.
The bad news is they put the Melreese voter referendum, which faced stiff opposition, in the rearview, only to realize that finding temporary home for Inter Miami in 2020 is almost as difficult.
What’s American soccer without the lack of any linear line of progress?
As for 2020, various reports confirm that Inter Miami has collapsed its search for a temporary home to “Plan C” and “Plan D.” TYAC can also report that as of this writing, there is a “Plan E”, but that site is significantly less desirable to both the club and MLS and as such, that option would only be explored as a last resort.
How did we get here?
Option one was Marlins Park, which Michelle Kaufman at the Miami Herald reported was rejected primarily because the Marlins didn’t think sharing with Inter would be ideal given the wholesale overlap of baseball season with MLS.
Option two was Hard Rock Stadium, which we reported this week was out because of spring conflicts with the Miami Open, summer conflicts with the International Champions Cup and autumn conflicts with both the Miami Dolphins and the Miami Hurricanes.
Finally, there are options C and D.
Option C, and the subject of Inter Miami’s current negotiations, is Riccardo Silva Stadium at Florida International University. Located in the southwest portion of Miami, FIU is difficult to travel to, even on a weekend, but the site would service a host of needs: there are luxury suites, there is ideal soccer specific size (20,000 capacity) and there’s a beer garden with nice sight lines. The press area is limited but it checks enough boxes for a temporary season.
Then there is Plan D, which is Lockhart Stadium in midtown Fort Lauderdale, former home of the NASL Fort Lauderdale Strikers (original and reboot) as well as the Miami Fusion, who won the Shield there in 2001 a year before being contracted.
Here’s a closer look at the two current 2020 Inter Miami Options.
FIU
FIU has the advantage of being in Miami-Dade County, though it is not in the City of Miami– it’s in unincorporated Miami-Dade and the closest municipality is Sweetwater. Still, playing in Miami-Dade is preferable, as the club, from its magnificent crest to the way they are promoting this team with street art and murals in Brickell and Wynwood, is being consistently marketed as “Miami’s team,” a bit of a departure from the way other professional sports franchises in the three South Florida media markets are marketed.
The problem, of course, is the name on the stadium and Silva International Investments, who own The Miami FC club. Silva donated millions of dollars to FIU athletics, the bulk of which went to stadium renovations, including the stadium JumboTron. He also crafted an agreement to allow The Miami FC to play its NASL games at the stadium, subservient only to the needs of FIU football games.
Florida has very broad sunshine laws, and in evaluating that contract, I reported on Twitter Thursday that The Miami FC has a “right of first refusal” on games played at the venue, so long as The Miami FC is playing in a professional league.
At present, The Miami FC is set to join the upstart NPSL Pro, playing in the Founders Cup this season. As long as NPSL Pro is recognized as a professional league, The Miami FC would be second and Inter Miami would need to wait in line. This creates obvious logistical hurdles for Inter Miami (and MLS) from a scheduling standpoint, and because FIU is a public school, there’s no real way for FIU Athletic Director Pete Garcia and his longtime acquaintance Jorge Mas to cut a backroom deal and get around FIU’s covenant with Silva. The only real option, then, is for either NPSL Pro to not be recognized by US Soccer as a professional league (unlikely) or Beckham/Mas to pay The Miami FC and Silva’s group off to make an accomodation. But in the latter scenario, The Miami FC and Silva would have immense, if not almost all, the leverage.
That leverage is why Sean Flynn can release the type of statement he did yesterday, where he essentially says “we’re happy to welcome Inter Miami to professional soccer in the city” and “would look forward them potentially joining us at FIU.” Silva and The Miami FC are contractually protected, making it easier for The Miami FC to feel welcoming.
To me, that leaves Lockhart and Fort Lauderdale as the end game in these discussions.
All along, the preferred venue has been in the city of Miami.
But multiple sources told me that the Inter Miami as a club would prefer Lockhart over FIU, if they can get a deal done. The issue, of course, is Lockhart needs much more than a coat of paint and there might not be enough time. But if a deal can be done, I was told that would be the temporary home while the Miami issues at Melreese are sorted out.
Lockhart has a couple of soccer groups competing for use of the space.
Beckham and Mas want to knock down Lockhart and build a smaller soccer-specific stadium for a League One team and the Inter Miami development academy. In that vision, the site would just be a soccer site, but one capable of hosting youth tournaments with training fields to generate additional revenue, similar to other sites in MLS.
Beckham and Mas have done the leg work here too– they had what had to be their most friendly political meeting since being awarded a club with the Fort Lauderdale City Commission Tuesday and by all accounts impressed this commission with their attention to detail, which had been lacking in their encounters with City of Miami and Dade officials last year.
That said, they face competition for Lockhart and a City that is anxious to turn what at present is a lonely and historic abandoned eyesore into something useful again.
FXE Football, which is a front group for OnSide entertainment, a soccer group that have run a number of friendlies in South Florida, typically involving South American sides like River, Boca Juniors, Cruzeiro and Corinthians, also presented a proposal to the Fort Lauderdale City Commission. Their proposal is a bit more ambitious: they would like to refurbish Lockhart and they have a signed agreement that if they win the bid, they will have a USL Championship club that is Fort Lauderdale’s own. Their property plan includes extensive commercial retail, including a TopGolf. There are, I think, significant questions as to how they will finance this plan but their pitch to the commission was that they would do so by selling real estate. They’ve also requested a long-term lease, which the Beckham group was reticent to commit too.
Two commissioners offices reached out to me, however, and indicated they preferred the concrete goals of Beckham and Mas. Inter Miami would potentially use Lockhart short term for year one in MLS or as needed to get MFP ready.
What if Lockhart and FIU fail?
Stadium issues in Miami are thorny, as the political thicket surrounding the Melreese referendum proved. There remain multiple operative lawsuits to suppress that site, and even without the litigation, there would be substantial legwork for the Beckham/Mas group to do to ensure they can begin work on their 25,000 soccer-specific stadium at Melreese and accompanying retail.
That background is an important framing for the Inter Miami 2020 stadium discussion because while Inter Miami certainly hope and believe they will have their own Miami home in 2021, that’s not a certainty. Any 2020 venue would need to be potentially ready to host the club again in 2021.
An “outside the box” proposal, but one sources at Inter Miami FC and Beckham and Mas acknowledge has been discussed, is FAU, another public university with its own football stadium.
FAU plays in Boca Raton, in southern Palm Beach county, one of the nation’s largest soccer developmental hotbeds and an excellent demographic for MLS. World Cup and MLS television ratings in Palm Beach County were among the highest in the country in 2018 and the area is one of the few places in the state where youth soccer registrations continue to improve instead of plateau.
FAU’s stadium is much nicer aesthetically and from a luxury suite standpoint than FIU; the field is better and the venue has played host to the USWNT, the German National Team and other high-profile games over the years. It would be a terrific short-term venue, in my view, because of its proximity to hot beds that already enjoy MLS’s product. But there is understandable concern among rank and file folks in Miami that playing Inter Miami’s first season in MLS a full hour north in Palm Beach County would be a tough way to start building a culture at a club marketed as “Miami’s team.”
My view is that there have always been reasonable questions as to whether MLS will succeed in Miami. It’s not a tremendous professional sports town as is and there’s really not much of an empirical example of a city tapping into huge South American populations to sustain their MLS club. Atlanta has done well with large Mexican-American populations, as has LAFC, to a lesser extent, as will Nashville (they hope). But Miami doesn’t have a large Mexican-American populations.
Houston has tapped into Central America a bit, but they battle attendance issues even with Honduran stars like Alberth Elis in the fold.
The challenge for Inter Miami, then, is to find not just a location that helps cultivate a soccer culture, but to assemble a roster that generates excitement in soccer-crazed communities within the city itself. That’s a job that requires unflinching focus in and of itself, which further compounds the dilemma of not knowing with any certainty where the club will actually play.