Eventually, the people of Detroit became tired of the unfulfilled promises to bring a professional soccer team back to their city.



First, there was the campaign of MLS Detroit, who, in 2004, believed that finding funding for such a team was “only a matter of time.” That never materialized. Then, in 2011, came the Silverdome proposals: bold plans to have a Detroit-based MLS side play in the historic but now dilapidated NFL arena. Other cities were preferred.

“We were frustrated with 20 years of grand, often half-baked, plans that all ended up in the dustbin,” Sean Mann, one such frustrated resident, said. “So, we decided to start a club. We knew that if we did it right, with a focus on supporters and grassroots community engagement, we’d have some level of success.”

Mann is one of five individuals who helped bring a soccer team back to the city – Detroit’s first since the Express, who competed in the original North American Soccer League, between 1978 and 1981. Along with locals Alex Wright, Ben Steffans, David Dwaihy and Todd Kropp, Mann owns Detroit City FC: a team founded in 2012, and who have taken a ground-up approach to building a soccer club in one of America’s most historic sporting cities.

Though still new, Le Rouge – a nickname that derives from the city’s French roots and the River Rouge, which runs through Detroit – have seen attendances triple, a supporters’ culture flourish, and left many questioning just how big the team can become.

The origins of the team, who compete America’s fourth-tier league, the National Premier Soccer League (NPSL), can be traced back to a local recreational league, which Mann helped start, in 2010. Organizers decided to invite teams to compete from different areas. Eleven neighbourhoods and around 300 players would take part in the inaugural season of the Detroit City Futbol League, which, Mann said, was a far cry from the 30-plus neighbourhood competition it has become five years later.

“Our first season, the goals were made out of PVC pipe,” he said of the DCFL, which today has more than 1,300 participants, 80% of whom are residents of Detroit. “When the ball struck the goal it would shatter, and we would have to pause the game and reassemble the goals.”

It was in seeing the league grow that Mann and others began to get a feel for Detroit’s enthusiasm for soccer. About a year after the league begun, he would have this fervor in mind on a business trip to Tennessee. It was there that he met the owner of a local soccer team, Chattanooga FC of the NPSL, who explained to Mann how he had grown his team since it was founded, in 2009.

“I came back to Detroit and approached a group of guys that I had really gotten to know through the [recreational] league,” Mann said. “I told them that we are the largest city in the country without a pro soccer team, and I think there is an opportunity for us to do it, and do it right.”

Mann and the four others, who had met on the pitches of Belle Isle and Fort Wayne, decided that starting an NPSL team would be the most achievable, considering the past failed bids to join the higher levels of the US soccer pyramid, as well as the funding needed to start an MLS, NASL or USL franchise.

They would spend the following months traveling around the midwest in Mann’s Ford Focus, looking at how at the operations of other NPSL teams – who were attracting between 200 and 300 fans to each game – and coming up with ideas of how they could build a supporters’ culture of their own in Detroit.There was also the need to find a stadium, sponsors, and council support. And the small the matter of funding.

“It took us about 18 months,” Wright said, laughing. “I had to pay in installments; I remember that.”

The National Premier Soccer League is a “national league with a regional focus,” as their motto reads, and consists of 65 teams and 12 divisions. Some teams pay their entire squad; others remain completely amateur. In order to enter, new teams must pay a $17,500 entry fee, as well as annual dues, which are decided upon by the members of the league. After gaining the necessary funding to enter the 2012 NPSL season, the Detroit owners would turn to the one place where they knew they could find supporters: the neighborhood league. Joe Barone, the chairman of the NPSL, said that the league were impressed by this business model.

“The went for the reverse of targeting youth,” Barone said. “They are targeting adults instead.”

Detroit City decided to focus their efforts on those who were playing soccer in the city: young professionals and multi-cultural residents; “folks grew up watching the Champions League and playing soccer in the 90s,” Mann said.

Many of these would have been individuals unaffected by the economic difficulties facing Detroit during this period.

In 2014, the Guardian reported that Detroit’s soccer scene, though flourishing, was mainly towards white, middle-class players. Alex Wright said that this was to be expected, but claiming that the sport is not an “alien phenomenon” to black Detroiters, as the report suggested. In a generation, Wright believes, the demographic will change as more individuals are introduced to the game; the neighborhood league costs $25 and is open to all, he added.

Detroit City FC’s squad mainly consists of NCAA soccer players. Photograph: Jon DeBoer

Because they did not have the budget to bring in players from afar, Detroit City FC would also look for local players – a market the owners believed had remained untapped. Today, their squad consists mainly of NCAA soccer players, playing for Detroit as a means of getting competitive game time, and “veterans,” who, Wright said, may have once played at a high level, but now purely for the love of the game. (Due to NCCA regulations, no players can be paid by Detroit City FC, the club confirmed.) By going local, the owners hoped that such the players would also bring friends and family to games, helping to create a buzz around the club newly-formed club.

La Rouge would play its first match at the Cass Technical High School Stadium, on May 12, 2012. In front of 1,072 fans, the team drew, 1-1, with AFC Cleveland.

That day, the pitch was mowed by a used ride-on lawnmower that the owners had picked up on Craigslist. Each player’s shirt would had an individual sponsor, as the team could not find a company willing to sponsor the entire kit (a problem when sponsors’ players became injured).

“Parents became ticket collectors; wives became ball girls: it was an all-hands-on-deck approach,” Mann said. “As we have grown, we have kept hold of some of those humble touches.”

Since that game, City – who, in their first four seasons would reach the playoffs three times – have found a full kit sponsor. They have found more people to help out at games. And they have discovered that, through slow building, attendances have continued to rise – as well as the number of people attendings the “March to the Match”: a mixture of drumming, chanting and an ever-developing identity of a team that is still in its infancy.

“I don’t think you can buy success in soccer in America,” Wright said. “You can buy a nice venue and people will be excited for a few years. But without that tribal identity, a team in American soccer does not stand a chance.”

For the 2015 season, the club’s average attendance was 3,627 – 2,232 more than three seasons ago. This figure was higher than the average attendance for America’s third-highest division, the USL, in 2015, and was around half the average attendance of America’s second-highest league, the NASL. It is this growth that has lead some to suggest that – with a top 15 market, more than 600,000 residents, and a strong sporting history – Detroit could already be looking at the higher tiers of American soccer.

“I can see Detroit City playing in the NASL; the market is worthy,” Joe Barone said. “We would not be opposed. It says a lot about who we are as league, able to identify markets, and we would welcome it.”

Though Mann and Wright agree that they would like to make the leap, they said that finding funding to make such a move still needs to be explored.

“That’s where the fact that we are five guys, who came up with the team over a beer, sort of hinders us a bit,” Wright said. “Unless one of the five of us wins the lottery, no matter how good we might be at running a soccer team, we can’t get into the pro level.”

The club continue to stress the need to look at stadium alternatives for their high school field, which, despite being filled to capacity numerous times during the 2015 season, only has a seating room for 3,080. Attendances, Mann said, look set to rise, with the focus never straying away from where all started: the neighbourhoods of the city.

On Tuesday evenings, all five owners head out to support their neighbourhood teams. Wright is the only one who still pulls on his cleats, week in, week out.

“We don’t see ourselves as owners, but as custodians of this club. I like to say we are the host of the party, not the life of the party,” Mann said “Our goal, whenever we make decisions, is the thinking that we want our kids to go to Detroit City FC games. We want this to last for generations.”