The Nutmeg News spoke to league officials who indicated that the recent uptick in soccer interest in Chicago shows a great sign of the future prospects of the league in the city.

“We want to be Chicago, I think everyone knows that,” stated Mark Abbot, President of Major League Soccer. “It’s important for us to have a place in the major cities that define this country and I think everyone with the league would welcome a Chicago team with open arms.”

According to soccer fans in Chicago, the issue is finding an ownership group that wishes to invest in a team as well as the political capital to build a stadium in the dense urban center of Chicago.

“We need someone with real willpower,” stated soccer fan Desmond Archer. “Someone who can bring quality soccer to Chicago and give us our first professional team. I feel like this is all slowly building to MLS in Chicago and I welcome the chance to have a team that I could call my own.”

According to league sources, an MLS team in Chicago would likely play their first season or two at the venerable Soldier Field before completion of a new stadium somewhere within the urban core.

“It’s important to us to be centralized,” stated Abbot to The Nutmeg News. “We need to be mixed into the character of the city and we need a passionate and invested ownership group to make this happen.”

The Nutmeg News will have more on this as MLS looks at stadium sites in Altgeld Gardens.