Shawn Windsor

Detroit Free Press

It was the night Detroit City FC opened its new home stadium in Hamtramck, and some 7,400 soccer fans packed the place. They sung. They chanted. They swore. Then swore some more.

They wore scarves emblazoned with Detroit City’s insignia and clothing dyed in the team’s maroon and gold color scheme.

Some even wore gas masks, as symbols of their own rabid enthusiasm, and to defend against the smoke plumes set off at the beginning of the match.

For the better part of two hours, the mix of newish Detroiters, longtime Detroiters, immigrants and suburbanites turned freshly painted Keyworth Stadium into the state’s most audacious sporting scene, a thunderous riff on togetherness and fandom, where spectators are as much the show as the players.

Support for Detroit City FC – a fourth-tier amateur club whose roster is primarily college players – has grown so rapidly and unexpectedly that it outgrew its original home field at Cass Tech.

That growth helped convinced NBA owners Tom Gores and Dan Gilbert that Detroit is ready for a Major League Soccer team. Gores, who owns the Detroit Pistons, and Gilbert, who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, know a movement when they see one.

In April, the two businessmen jointly announced plans to bring MLS to Detroit.

“Young people are looking for something that is their own,” said Arn Tellem, a former NBA agent who is vice chairman of Palace Sports & Entertainment and Gores’ point man behind the MLS effort.

“The world is changing. Soccer is the sport of millennials.”

About 100,000 kids play soccer in Michigan, which is more than any other state in the Midwest. Yet the game is no longer just for 6-year-olds.

It’s for 26-year-olds and 34-year-olds. It’s for a generation of enthusiasts who learned the game playing on a field (youth soccer), on a screen (FIFA, the videogame) or on an increasing number of networks that televise games from the best leagues around the world.

(Think of the buzz and coverage of the UEFA Euro Cup, in which ESPN stationed a set in Paris to report on a tournament that doesn’t involve an American team.)

Many of these new American fans care only about soccer. Consider: 60% of season-ticket holders for New York City FC – an expansion MLS franchise – had never bought season tickets to another pro team.

In other words, soccer isn’t stealing fans from other sports leagues as much as it is creating them. Which is good news if you want to start an MLS franchise.

Still, its success in Detroit isn’t a foregone conclusion. The league loses money, according to its commissioner, Don Garber. And has since its inception in 1996. Garber argues the MLS remains in the investment phase of its history.

The league opened with a wave of momentum from the 1994 World Cup, hosted by the U.S. In fact, FIFA only awarded the U.S. the World Cup because it promised to develop a professional soccer league.

That blast of initial enthusiasm stalled and teams – there were 10 – struggled to create identities. They played in NFL stadiums that were too big and relied on rosters of mostly middling players.

Two things finally settled the foundation: more general interest in soccer as the U.S. national team showed promise in the 2002 World Cup and then again in 2010 and the opening of soccer-specific stadiums, designed to hold about 20,000 fans.

The league has doubled in size since 2004. Attendance grows every year. So does TV viewership, though it’s still paltry by even NHL standards.

Rosters are now split almost 50-50 between international players and American players, which has improved the talent level. Last season, according to the MLS website, 248 of the league’s 564 players were foreign born.

This trend is crucial to help fill more rosters as the MLS expands. Garber wants to get to 28 teams. The trick is to identify why soccer is gaining popularity in a particular market. The surge is not monolithic.

As Garber noted during a stop in Detroit in April, the market here is tied to the notion of rejuvenation.

“(Detroit) is a city on the rise,” he said.

That intrigued him. So does Detroit City FC’s astounding growth.

“They’ve done a great job,” he said. Now it’s a matter of “figuring out the right way to integrate with them.”

This won’t be easy. Many Detroit City FC fans – or supporters, as they’re known in soccer culture – don’t want to give up the organic and homegrown vibe at Keyworth for what they feel would be a corporate vibe at a $150-million stadium downtown.

Gilbert, Gores and MLS want to build on the failed Wayne County jail site on Gratiot.

So, how can Gores and Gilbert persuade the millennials to help fill a sparkling new stadium?

Well, by studying Detroit City FC, for starters, said Tellem.

“We can learn a lot from them,” he said. “We’ve already had several meetings with them. And we will continue those discussions.”

Tellem is convinced that embracing the DCFC ethos – whether through some kind of merger or through a wholly new enterprise – is crucial for MLS survival in Detroit.

“(Soccer’s) fan base has changed,” Tellem explained. “If it were just suburbanites, our perspective on having a franchise would be different.”

Unlike fans of the NFL or the NBA, who will drive hours to sit in a concrete monstrosity regardless if it’s next to an interstate or patch of industrial wasteland, MLS needs foot traffic.

The league’s most successful franchises show this. They coax millennials from downtown apartments to walk to games. The route to the stadium – in places like Seattle and Portland – often includes a stop at a local bar. From there, supporters march to the stadium together. Singing.

“It’s a whole-day experience,” Tellem said. “Millennials want that sense of community. It’s intimate. And it has to be downtown.”

Detroit City’s most ardent fans – known as the Northern Guard – began walking to the games at Cass Tech, pounding drums, giving the trek a kind of primal soundtrack. Word of those booming marches spread quickly.

Before long, the club had outgrown its first home.

An evolution of popularity

There’s an old saying about soccer in the U.S. that it has been the sport of the future since 1973. For years – and now generations – we’ve heard the game was close to catching on here. On the playing field, the boom happened long ago.

More kids – ages 6-10 – participate in soccer than any other sport. The trouble begins at middle school, when kids either move to more established team sports like basketball, baseball or football or quit playing sports altogether. This trend is even truer in inner cities, where soccer is viewed as a game for suburbanites.

“Urban America hasn’t been exposed to it,” said Val Brunson, a volunteer coordinator at the Mack Alive Community Center on Detroit’s east side, who is convinced the game can help transport kids – physically and psychologically – outside of their own insular worlds.

To do that, she said, “soccer needs to be explained, (so that) these kids (can) see there is more to life than what is going on in their block.”

Brunson grew up playing soccer. Her parents pushed her into the game to stay fit. Back then, in the 1980s and 1990s, she was an anomaly in Detroit. She wouldn’t be now.

A few weeks ago, hundreds of kids were darting around makeshift soccer fields on the grounds of Historic Ft. Wayne, a one-time Army artillery post along the Detroit River in southwest Detroit. It was Saturday morning, and parents in lawn chairs or sprawled on blankets hugged the edges of the fields, hollering and encouraging their kids. They’d come from several nearby neighborhoods, a mix of ages, a melting pot of black, white and Latino.

Exactly the sort of tableau the MLS has in mind when it seeks new markets. In order for cities to be awarded a franchise, the investment group must show plans to open soccer academies not far from the proposed stadiums.

The strategy isn’t just about planting seeds to cultivate future players, but to connect to urban neighborhoods to develop soccer fans. As Brunson noted, soccer here is the sport of elitism, of minivans and whiteness.

Brunson ignored the negative associations because she played. She fell for the game’s speed and tactical demands, with its demand of spatial thinking. She figured some of the teenagers at her east-side community center would fall in love with those things, too.

So when Detroit City FC offered to send a bus to the center and haul a few dozen of her kids to the inaugural night at Keyworth Stadium, Brunson agreed. For two hours, she and her kids walked the grounds, reveling in the noise and energy.

“Most of them hadn’t been to a game before,” she said, “and had no idea Hamtramck had a soccer stadium.”

Predicting the scene at Keyworth would be like predicting we’d be walking around with voice-commanded computers in our pockets connected by signals relayed from space.

But here we are, at the foot of a regional boom, watching amateur clubs like Detroit City pop up all over the state, attracting thousands of passionate fans. Six teams play in Michigan alone, from Pontiac to Lansing to Grand Rapids.

As local clubs grow so do national ones. Garber has said MLS will add four new teams by 2018 and four more shortly thereafter, bringing the total to 28 teams.

Gores and Gilbert hope to be one of those franchises ready to go by 2020, new stadium and all.

Some 79 million Americans consider themselves soccer fans, up 34% from 2010, according to MLS.

Among millennials – ages 18-34 – it’s now the second-most popular sport in the U.S. The next step is to translate this burgeoning interest to into the development of world-class players.

“When we see the kind of cultural excitement that we see around street basketball come to soccer as it is around the globe, when our best athletes are getting out of school at the end of the day and only playing soccer in the street and the parks, then we will start producing more players,” said Eric Schwartz, an avid soccer follower and an economist at the University of Michigan who studies marketing and sports.

For now, the interest in watching is outpacing the interest in playing, at least among our most gifted athletes. Fans don’t go to Detroit City FC games expecting to see the next Lionel Messi.

They expect to see a community in which their participation helped build.

“It’s about an aesthetic,” said Alex Wright, one of the club’s co-owners.

And how that aesthetic became a happening.

An expansion of exposure

In some ways, American kids know more about the best soccer players in the world than they do the best baseball players or football players or hockey players.

The biggest soccer stars in the world now offer intimate views of their lives through digital media. Fans can follow a player on Instagram or Snapchat and get an inside look at the pregame locker room, say, or the cool-down after practice. Even if it’s only for a few seconds.

Online exposure to athletes is only one part of the explanation of why soccer mania has come on so strong, so fast. The video game known as "FIFA" is the other.

“What EA Sports has done for soccer is immeasurable,” Schwartz said. “It’s the only good thing associated with the FIFA name.”

The maligned international soccer organization couldn’t have foreseen its namesake video game going viral with American kids. FIFA is an overall top-10 seller and trails only NBA2K and Madden football among sport-oriented video game sales.

As it rose in popularity, the game gave pre-teens and teenagers an entry into a previously inaccessible sport. That access gave these kids a kind of currency, knowledge of international soccer their parents didn’t possess.

It was theirs.

The first generation of those kids got older and started adopting teams in Europe, following them on the Internet, and then, eventually, on American network TV.

“We think of globalization as Americans exporting its culture to the rest of the world – McDonald’s, Hollywood, rap music,” said Stefan Szymanski, author of “Soccernomics” and a professor of economics at U-M. “Now it’s about bringing something here. A lot of young Americans like what they’ve seen (of soccer) on TV. The singing, the chanting.”

Szymanski, who is British and moved to Ann Arbor five years ago, said many Europeans couldn’t understand why Americans didn’t like soccer. But he argued that animus didn’t originate from regular consumers. It came from certain American intellectuals.

Two years ago, in a blog that suggested the rise of soccer showed a rise in America’s moral decay, Ann Coulter blasted the game because it didn’t reward individual achievement.

“There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability, and no child's fragile self-esteem is bruised,” she wrote.

“Ann Coulter has great fun railing against soccer,” Szymanski said. She calls it “everything un-American. There is a core of truth in that if you really want to believe in American exceptionalism. It’s hard to accept there is another sport out there.”

But, as he pointed out, if “most ordinary people … think (a product is) good, they will buy it.”

Does he see a change in habits?

“I can’t imagine a world in which soccer will take over (here),” he said, “but I see it reaching parity. Why not?”

It’s easy to imagine when you’re watching red and yellow smoke plumes rise into the sky over the middle of Hamtramck as thousands sing and chant.

A grassroots origin

The week before the season opener at Keyworth, Bilal Saeed was scrambling around Pioneer High’s stadium in Ann Arbor. Sprinting up the stands to the press box. Racing from one edge of the field to the other. Ordering his staff of AFC Ann Arbor to meet VIPs, to find bottles of water, to time the playing of the national anthem.

Saeed, one of nine owners of the amateur soccer club, serves as its match day manager and team spokesman. He’d worked for Detroit City FC for a few years before helping start the team in Ann Arbor last summer.

On this chilly Friday night, several hundred fans watched AFC play Kalamazoo FC – another upstart – while snacking on hot dogs, homemade doughnuts and vegetarian burritos.

“It’s Ann Arbor,” Saeed joked.

The unseasonably cool temperature hurt attendance, but last season saw 1,200 fans a game show up. On one side of the stadium a few dozen hardcore supporters (the Main Street Hooligans) tried their best to sing and chant. On the other side, families spread out in the bleachers.

The energy was nothing like Detroit City, but there was passion for the experience, and for the game. The club joined the National Premier Soccer League this season, a higher-caliber league, giving Michigan six teams in the NPSL with Detroit City, AFC Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo FC, Grand Rapids FC, the Michigan Stars (Pontiac) and Lansing United – many squads have at least one potential MLS-level player, and all have different identities.

“It’s very grassroots,” Saeed said. “It’s not cookie-cutter.”

In that sense, soccer fandom is like following college football, where teams – and the schools they represent -- vary in personality, temperament and ideology. MLS is trying to re-create this traditionally European model in its league, too.

In Orlando, for example, a lower-tiered club became so popular after it moved to Florida that MLS stepped in to bestow a franchise. Orlando City is now set to move into a soccer-specific stadium in that city’s downtown.

Orlando City currently plays in the old Citrus Bowl, drawing as many as 30,000 supporters per game. Beat writers for the local newspapers argue the team is the most popular in the region, surpassing the Magic, the NBA’s franchise there.

Seattle, meanwhile, attracts some 40,000 fans to its games at CenturyLink Field, the Seahawks’ stadium. And in cities like Kansas City and Columbus, MLS squads attract from 14,000 to 18,000 a game.

The club that could be Detroit’s doppelganger resides in Oregon, where a beard-wearing, tattoo-engraved gang of soccer fans called the Portland Timbers Army is the West's answer to Detroit City's Northern Guard.

The Timbers once were an amateur club, like Detroit City FC, and rose up to franchise-hood in the MLS. They also boast one of the more creative fan bases in the league. When the team scores a goal, supporters grab a chain saw and hack off a piece of log.

“I think we can be Portland,” said Detroit City’s Wright. “We can have the Detroit version of that, whatever that is going to be. The supporters will figure that out.”

The issue is the funding. Wright and his group don’t have access to the $100-million fee just to join MLS. Nor the $150 million it will take to build a soccer-specific stadium. Gores and Gilbert, presumably, do or can through an investment group.

On the surface, the marriage seems like a no-brainer.

But underneath?

From DCFC to MLS?

Part of the attraction to a team like Detroit City FC is that supporting the club feels like joining a movement. You go to a game because a friend takes you, or describes the atmosphere and urges you to give it a try, or shares a photo on a social media platform.

Mohamed Algehaim, 24, of Hamtramck discovered the FIFA video game last year. That led him to online soccer chats, which eventually put him in touch with Detroit City supporters.

He heard about opening night on Facebook, which is revealing, because he lives in a two-story house 50 feet from the entrance to Keyworth Stadium.

On opening night this spring, Algehaim stood outside the main gate waiting for friends to arrive. Throngs of fans poured past him.

Algehaim couldn’t stand still, darting, rising on his tiptoes, craning his neck to peer over the onrushing crowd in order to catch a better view of the scene inside.

“Man, this is cool,” he said.

It was easy for him to envision a similar scene playing out downtown, in an MLS stadium, with 20,000 crazies roaring. He’d happily join that experience, though not every Detroit City supporter would.

Joseph Higgins, 26, stood in the beer line during the first half, a gas mask hanging from his neck. The native Detroiter had recently moved to Dearborn for work. He wasn’t happy about it.

He felt a little disconnected from the city’s resurgence, and coming to the games helped reorient him. Higgins thinks the emotional bond he feels at games would be destroyed if an MLS franchise took over Detroit City FC.

“I will follow the Rouge (the club’s nickname) wherever they play,” he said. As long as the club remains the “Rouge.”

Defining what the Rouge means going forward won’t be easy. If co-opted by the MLS, Detroit City FC fans would get better soccer, international stars, slicker amenities and nationally televised games. But they’d lose something, too, a sense of messiness, perhaps, or that hint of gleeful chaos.

That sense engulfed him as he stood in line for a beer. From his vantage point he could see the field, the speed of the players, a stack of treated 2-by-12s waiting to be installed as more bleachers, a truck selling Korean tacos, a couple of grill men hawking Polish sausages, all of it blending into a symphony of smoke and bass drum and unhinged vocal chords.

It felt new and unfinished, even unpredictable, a crescendo no one saw coming.

Not even on opening night.

It was here, said Wright, because the club created a sense of place, and offers “an identity.”

What happens to that identity will greatly determine the success of an MLS franchise in Detroit.

“The fans are here. The game is here. The culture is right,” said Schwartz, the U-M marketing professor, and an AFC Ann Arbor supporter who was at Keyworth opening night. “It’s (the MLS’s) match to lose.”

Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.

Stadium talk

The Columbus Crew was the first MLS team to play in a new, soccer-specific stadium. Lamar Hunt built Mapfre Stadium in 1999. This helped start the trend toward soccer-specific stadiums. The newest stadium, Orlando City Stadium, home to Orlando City, will open next year and cost $155 million. Like Mapfre, it also was privately funded.

Most MLS stadiums use a mix of public and private funds. But the most recent trend is for the stadiums to be built with private capital.

Here is a look at the last five:

2015 -- Avaya Stadium, home to the San Jose Earthquakes, $100 million, privately funded.

2012 – BBVA Compass Stadium, home to the Houston Dynamo, $95 million, city of Houston paid $35 million.

2011 – Children’s Mercy Park, home to Sporting Kansas City, $200 million to build the stadium, though it was part of a larger, $400 million development deal that included an office park and a youth soccer complex. Taxpayers contributed $146 million.

2010 – Talen Energy Stadium, home to the Philadelphia Union, $120 million, the state kicked in $47 million and Delaware County chipped in $30 million – the stadium in located on the Delaware River in Chester, Pa.

2010 – Red Bull Arena, home to the New York Red Bulls, $200 million for the stadium, privately funded. The city of Harrison, N.J., where the stadium is located, paid $39 million for the land and to clean up the site, the county paid $45 million for a parking garage.