The Republic

Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber sat down with The Tennessean this week to discuss the state of the league as well as the currently MLS expansion process.

Flanked by sports reporters Joe Rexrode and Joey Garrison, Garber, in Nashville for the U.S.-Mexico friendly on Tuesday, talked extensively about league expansion.

"Cincinnati will join next year. It's a current USL club. We'll work on finalizing the actual launch dates for Miami and for Nashville," Garber said. "That gives us two more teams to get us to 28. There's still many, many cities that are a part of that process and we engage with them regularly."

"We have not established a timetable for that next round, but between the five or six or seven that are still in the mix, we'll pick two of them and we'll figure out how they're going to roll out so that we can be a fully expanded league."

The Phoenix Rising of the USL is eager to move up the ranks and join the MLS, but when Garber was asked to list a pecking order of competing cities, he declined to do that. He did, however, say six other cities before mentioning Phoenix.

"Everytime I get asked that question, I have somebody in some city getting mad at me," Garber said. "I haven't announced anything on any of those cities.

"But, we still are engaged in Detroit, we're still engaged in San Diego, we're still engaged in Cincinnati. St. Louis has been floating around a little bit. There's been some talk in Charlotte, there's been some talk in Las Vegas and Phoenix.

"We'll engage with all of those cities but we don't have any hierarchy or pecking order, if you will, because it kinda moves around, where they are with their discussions with their specific stadiums, how their ownership groups are coming together and how it all kinda plays out with a well-round league for us, in terms of covering as much of the country and Canada as we can."