Ma­jor League Soc­cer Vote Failed, What’s Next?

The bill to bring a Ma­jor League Soc­cer team to St. Louis has been re­jected. Propo­si­tion 2, which would have of­fered pub­lic money to be used on build­ing a new sta­dium, failed af­ter nearly 53 per­cent voted in op­po­si­tion of the bill.

Ma­jor League Soc­cer, or MLS, has been flirt­ing with the city of St. Louis for a while now. There is a good rea­son why. St. Louis has one of the rich­est soc­cer back­grounds in all of the United States. With some of the best col­lege soc­cer pro­grams in the area in SLU and SIUE, St. Louis has al­ways had a fresh sup­ply of lo­cal tal­ent. Pro­fes­sional soc­cer has also thrived in this city. In the 1970-1980s, the St. Louis pro­fes­sional in­door soc­cer team, the Steam­ers, con­sis­tently sold out their arena of nearly 20,000 peo­ple.

The biggest ob­sta­cle in bring­ing an MLS team to St. Louis is the fact that there is no sta­dium for a team to play in. In Jan­u­ary, St. Louis of­fi­cials and Mis­souri’s gov­er­nor re­fused giv­ing nearly $80 mil­lion in city money to an in­vest­ment group in or­der to build a sta­dium. The in­vest­ment group, known as SC STL, were suc­cess­fully able get their pro­posal turned to a vote. On April 4, the cit­i­zens of St. Louis were able to vote in fa­vor or op­po­si­tion of the bill.

Propo­si­tion 1 called for a half-cent in­crease to the city’s sales tax. Propo­si­tion 2 would have called for $60 mil­lion of that in­crease be used to help fund SC STL and other in­vestors build a MLS sta­dium. Propo­si­tion 1 passed suc­cess­fully, but Propo­si­tion 2 failed by about 53 per­cent. The cit­i­zens of St. Louis voted for the half-cent in­crease in sales tax, but re­jected the idea of us­ing this money for a sta­dium.

The cur­rent MLS com­mis­sioner, Don Gar­ber, was in sup­port of Propo­si­tion 2 pass­ing. He could not of­fi­cially guar­an­tee that St. Louis would get an MLS ex­pan­sion team, but he did take time to come to St. Louis to gar­ner sup­port for pass­ing Propo­si­tion 2.

De­spite the fact that Propo­si­tion 2 did not pass, there is still hope that St. Louis might get an MLS team. In pre­vi­ous in­ter­views, Com­mis­sioner Gar­ber has said, “We are en­cour­aged by St. Louis and what we’ve been see­ing there at a num­ber of dif­fer­ent lev­els. Both in terms of what the own­er­ship group has put to­gether. The po­lit­i­cal sup­port of the mayor, the gov­er­nor, the vi­a­bil­ity of the mar­ket from a soc­cer per­spec­tive, the newly re­duced amount of pro sports com­pe­ti­tion.”