Dive Brief:
- FC Cincinnati announced Friday major development partners for the club's $200 million soccer-specific stadium in Cincinnati.
- Turner Construction, a veteran of hundreds of sports venue projects, will act as the general contractor for the stadium in partnership with local African-American-owned contractor Jostin Construction, which is certified as a minority business and a small business enterprise. MEIS Architects will design the stadium, and has teamed up with a local firm, Elevar Design Group, which will help with some architectural elements. Machete Group will oversee the project budget and schedule, design team and site and master planning, as well as sponsorship and product assets.
- The stadium will have at least 21,000 seats, and the team expects to break ground by the end of this year, according to the Cincinnati Business Courier. If all goes according to plan, the foundation will be visible by the second quarter of 2019, crews will top out by the end of next year, and the team will host its first match there in 2021.
Dive Insight:
Major League Soccer announced that it had awarded Cincinnati a franchise in May, but work began on a stadium plan well before then. The club's owners agreed to pay for stadium construction and licensing fees, which total $350 million, but the city and county will pay for between $70 million and $75 million of necessary infrastructure projects around the stadium, including a $15 million parking garage, according to The Enquirer.
Detroit also applied for an MLS expansion team but was denied by the soccer authority in its latest round of franchise awards. MLS has made it no secret that it would give franchise preference to those cities that built soccer-specific stadiums, and billionaire Quicken founder Dan Gilbert, his development company and Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores were on track to do just that.
After lengthy negotiations with Detroit's Wayne County to swap a stalled jail site for another piece of land where Gilbert would build the county a new criminal justice complex, county and city officials finally came on board. However, Gilbert teamed up with the William Clay Ford family, owners of the Detroit Lions, in advance of the MLS decision, and Detroit's final bid indicated that, if its application was approved, the new team would play at the Lions NFL venue Ford Field in downtown Detroit, which would be retrofitted to accommodate soccer matches. Some onlookers said this decision played a part in the MLS' decision to deny Detroit a slot.
