Triangle’s MLS moment came and went while no one was paying attention
If MLS expansion were a bad romantic comedy, this would be the end of the second act. The desirable newcomer has chosen the phony, rich rival over the genuine, deserving protagonist, and the third act would bring them together, forever, as it should be.
There’s very little doubt (at least in this area code) that because of the long and endearing tradition of and passion for soccer in Raleigh and the Triangle, not to mention the relative lack of other pro-sports competition, this market would be a better fit for an MLS franchise than Charlotte. But the impending announcement that Charlotte will land the coveted expansion franchise — and Raleigh, at this point, isn’t even in the frame — is a missed opportunity that the Triangle will regret for a long time.
In an informal and unscientific Twitter poll of soccer fans in the 919 area code, 48 percent chose “indifferent” to describe their feelings toward the as-yet-unnamed Charlotte franchise. That was more than the 35 percent who said they would root for the team, willingly or unwillingly, and the 17 percent who were actively rooting against it.
Triangle soccer fans are many things, but “indifferent” isn’t naturally one of them.
Bad timing, wasted years
Blame isn’t easily apportioned; there’s no one person or group of people to blame. It came down to timing and money, two powerful forces that tend to operate on their own schedule.
Raleigh would have been a great expansion market for MLS for most of the past two decades, better with each passing year of growth, but when the circumstances were ripe there was no one with the vision to see it. And when that visionary did come forward in the person of NC Courage and NCFC owner Stephen Malik, he had the interest and initiative to pursue it but not enough money.
Once David Tepper bought the Carolina Panthers and MLS got a whiff of his wallet, the game was up. Raleigh’s longshot bid became a no-shot bid. It has been Charlotte’s team to lose since the moment Tepper decided he was a massive fan of soccerball.
It should never have come to that. So many years were wasted by the lack of anyone in this market to see what MLS could become, and what a great fit a team would be here: a sport played primarily in the summer, without direct competition from the colleges or the Carolina Hurricanes for most of the schedule.
In retrospect, this isn’t surprising. None of the local billionaires have expressed any interest in professional sports. Witness the abject failure of anyone local to even express interest at purchasing the Hurricanes at any point while the franchise atrophied under Peter Karmanos. In other markets, the local gentry look at professional sports as a civic good. Here, it seems to be something to be patronized at best, ignored at worst.
If someone other than Karmanos had owned the Hurricanes, someone with deeper pockets and more vigor, local or otherwise, an MLS franchise would have been an ideal complement to the hockey team, with tremendous synergies between the teams from the schedule to sales, marketing, finance, HR and so on. It would have been simple to tack an MLS team onto a functioning NHL team, but for many years the Hurricanes were barely the latter.
Money talks
When Tom Dundon did purchase a controlling interest in the Hurricanes from Karmanos, there were immediate discussions between Dundon and Malik about MLS possibilities. Those came to a halt once Tepper bought the Panthers and it became moot.
Malik’s MLS bid was always a bit Quixotic, even more so once it became apparent he couldn’t build a stadium and cover the expansion fee out of his own pocket. But it was always born of the best of intentions, and with a silent partner like Dundon, it might have worked. If Malik had come along 10 years earlier, things might be very different now. He is the right man at the wrong time.
Instead, expansion fees soared and Malik’s efforts got bogged down in unwieldy stadium schemes — attempting to partner with the fractured state government on one, getting rejected (so far) for public dollars on the latest project, the Garner North white elephant — which highlights another lack of vision on the area’s part.
WakeMed Soccer Park might have looked more suitable as an interim home for an MLS team if it had ever actually been connected to the transport infrastructure. But commuter rail remains largely a fantasy, and for various complicated reasons, the Town of Cary has never been able to make a direct connection to I-40. (If there’s one thing that particular aspect of Raleigh’s MLS aspirations has in common with Charlotte, it’s sclerotic traffic.)
MLS moment lost
And now none of it matters. Charlotte somehow managed to fork over $110 million as part of this MLS bid, a neat sleight of hand on Tepper’s part, since he could leave that as a tip at Starbucks. If that’s what it would have taken to land an MLS team, perhaps its better if the billionaire has his hand in someone else’s pocket.
When the Triangle had a head start, it lacked vision and money. When someone finally showed up with plenty of the former and not quite enough of the latter, he was quickly eclipsed by someone who had so much of the latter the former was irrelevant.
The Triangle’s MLS moment came and went while no one was paying attention.
This story was originally published December 12, 2019 at 3:12 PM with the headline "Triangle’s MLS moment came and went while no one was paying attention."
