In some ways, the new era of one of the original clubs of Major League Soccer has already begun, but the crown jewel of Crew SC won’t be unveiled for some time.

The proposed new soccer stadium that will sit as a part of Confluence Village just west of Huntington Park won’t be ready for the start of the 2021 season. At the earliest, Crew president Tim Bezbatchenko said, the state-of-the-art stadium will be open July 2021.

"There's zero chance we're going to be opening at the beginning of 2021,” Bezbatchenko told The Dispatch. “That's just not — it'll happen middle of the season. We're going to be in the summer, probably July 2021 at the earliest.”

Previous reports listed the 2021 season as the approximate date for when the new Downtown stadium would open. This is the most concrete opening date the club has offered since new owners Dr. Pete Edwards and Jimmy and Dee Haslam unveiled plans for the new stadium when they announced the purchase of the Crew last year.

For the status of the new stadium right now, Bezbatchenko said there’s still some paperwork that needs to be finished with the city of Columbus and Franklin County. But he expects the groundbreaking for the new stadium either late this summer or early in the fall.

He said that the tailgate experience that exists right now for fans in the parking lots of the state fairgrounds at Mapfre Stadium will change, but it will be much more community-oriented. He said he envisions a march to the stadium through a plaza near the stadium, which is common at other MLS stadiums.

“(The stadium is) going to change the trajectory of this club forever,” Bezbatchenko said. “There's going to be so many ancillary positive consequences to this that you can't even approximate and can't guess about in terms of the culture change that the fans are going to go through.”

The trajectory of the club can also be affected by the moves the Crew might make in the upcoming transfer window, which runs from July 7 to Aug. 7. The Crew front office is approaching this transfer window with caution, but won’t be afraid to make a move.

“We're doing everything we can to build this roster now and to start improving,” Bezbatchenko said of a team that is tied for ninth place in the Eastern Conference. “What I don't want to promise is we're just going to mortgage the future to satisfy everybody's wants and desires right now.”

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In terms of building the roster for the future, Bezbatchenko said he’s hiring a director of player personnel that will be in charge of the club’s budget, among other responsibilities. He also is striving to build a “robust” scouting department and a separate analytics department.

“In order for us to compete with some of the biggest spenders in the league, we have to have one of the best scouting departments in the league,” Bezbatchenko said. “There's just no other way around it.”

jmyers@dispatch.com

@Jacob_Myers_25