Goooaaaallll! An MLS team in Charlotte will work, as long as Tepper makes right moves

Major League Soccer officially comes to Charlotte on Tuesday, and for that I am grateful.

Whether you like soccer or not, whether you call it “futbol” or not, whether you played it or your kids played it or not, having an MLS team in Charlotte helps our city.

Soccer is the world’s sport, and Charlotte has always wanted to be world-class.

America’s acceptance of soccer has been grudging. But a critical mass has formed over the past few years, and now every decent-sized U.S. city seems to want in on the MLS action and all of the accompanying cultural benefits. This is partly because the initials “MLS” may as well stand for “Millennial-Luring Shindig,” so youthful is the demographic to which the sport feverishly caters.

So, with the official MLS/CLT announcement Tuesday morning at the Mint Museum Uptown and all of its accompanying hullabaloo, the city and team owner David Tepper are both accomplishing a long-term “Gooooooalllllll!”

Actually, long-term is an overstatement. Once Tepper officially bought the Panthers in the summer of 2018, he quickly made no secret of his desire to add an MLS team as a second tenant at Bank of America Stadium.

Was there some doubt he could get it done? At first, yes.

But for the last few months, an MLS team here has become almost a foregone conclusion. MLS Commissioner Don Garber kept adding one “very” after another when asked about how advanced the talks were.

The city of Charlotte itself likely pushed the deal over the finish line by promising a massive package of $110 million of soccer-related support.

That amount of money sounds like overkill — especially when you see what other recent MLS expansion cities have contributed. The city of Charlotte has certainly gotten over-excited and overbid before (the NASCAR Hall of Fame, the 2020 Republican National Convention). But my guess is the $110-million promise also is intended to make sure that Tepper stays happy and keeps the Panthers in Charlotte forever, in which case it makes more sense.

And make no mistake — this MLS team is a David Tepper production. He is front and center, mostly because he has a net worth of close to $12 billion.

That is an almost unimaginable amount of money, but think of it this way. If you made a million dollars a year for the next 11,000 years and you saved every last penny, you’d still be a billion dollars short of where Tepper is now.

Finding the casual fan

So it’s understandable that MLS wanted Tepper to join up, and that the league suddenly found a soft spot in its heart for Charlotte that it never quite had when the city’s MLS bid was in the hands of racetrack gurus Bruton and Marcus Smith.

That’s the money part of it. But that’s not what people will be thinking about when they go to a Charlotte FC game, or a Carolina Gliders FC game, or a “Whatever this soccer team is going to be called” game whenever it starts playing (in 2021 or 2022, most likely).

And about that name — if Tepper and his people are smart, they hold a fan vote and don’t just pick one unilaterally.

Whatever the name, when people go to the games, some will care a lot about the soccer. They will be the ones doing the chants in the seats reserved for the official fan club and the ones who can name every team in the English Premier League.

But a lot of people will come just out of curiosity. They won’t care much about the soccer at all. There will be plenty of fans who won’t know a bicycle kick from a corner kick.

If we really had tens of thousands of avid soccer fans in Charlotte desperate to watch the sport in person, then the Charlotte 49ers — who year after year field one of the best and most entertaining men’s college soccer teams in the country — would have drawn more than 1,500 fans at least once this past season (their high was 1,476).

And that’s OK. Charlotte’s MLS team will badly need the casual fan to survive — the fan who will buy the scarf because the scarf is cool, not necessarily because they know what the initials “FC” stand for (it’s “football club,” if you’re wondering).

MLS has to be a happening

I’ll be in the middle of that fan range. I coach recreational youth soccer now, and three of my kids have played grassroots soccer. I like to watch the men’s and women’s World Cup.

But I also don’t watch pro soccer on TV. I thought I remembered that the Seattle Sounders had won the most recent MLS Cup, but had to look it up to make sure.

I don’t think that’s atypical. I believe a large part of the seats at Bank of America Stadium will be filled with a Charlotte Knights type of crowd, intent on having a good time with their friends and figuring out the stadium’s trendy brewery options. If they see a goal or two by the home team, all the better. But they are walking out happy either way as long as the concession lines aren’t too long and the prices aren’t too exorbitant.

The Charlotte team will sell out its first game, surely. Maybe its first several.

And not long after that, it will face its first real challenge. The MLS isn’t the NFL, and even the NFL has a hard time selling out in this Netflix era. The games will need to be marketed as a happening, not just a sports event, much like the Charlotte Hornets were seen in their initial years and the way the Knights are now.

Will it work? I think it will.

This is Charlotte’s third pro team playing at the highest level of its sport, joining the Panthers and the Hornets. It comes at a good time. Both those teams are rebuilding, and the city itself just keeps growing and diversifying.

Charlotte has room for soccer. If it’s managed correctly (looking at you, Tepper), and if it gets the sprinkle of good luck every business needs, this is all going to be a whole lot of fun.

This story was originally published December 16, 2019 at 6:28 AM.

Scott Fowler

The Charlotte Observer

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Columnist Scott Fowler has written for The Charlotte Observer since 1994 and has earned 26 APSE awards for his sportswriting. He hosted The Observer’s podcast “Carruth,” which Sports Illustrated once named “Podcast of the Year.” Fowler also conceived and hosted the online series and podcast “Sports Legends of the Carolinas,” which featured 1-on-1 interviews with NC and SC sports icons and was turned into a book. He occasionally writes about non-sports subjects, such as the 5-part series “9/11/74,” which chronicled the forgotten plane crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 in Charlotte on Sept. 11, 1974. Support my work with a digital subscription