Sharing a stadium and facilities can help both men’s and women’s clubs grow, although the tactic isn’t always a guarantee of success

Is a downtown stadium a cure-all for any soccer club that needs a boost? And do US women’s soccer teams need to be affiliated with men’s professional clubs? Like so many things in an allegedly simple game, it’s complicated.

The Washington Spirit, finishing up an awful campaign in the National Women’s Soccer League, gave Audi Field a test drive on Saturday night. The Spirit’s usual home field – the Maryland SoccerPlex – is more than 30 miles from the Washington Monument. In contrast, the Monument is clearly visible over the stands at the new downtown Audi Field, built for Major League Soccer’s DC United.

DC United certainly needed this stadium. The once-mighty club has fallen behind its peers after flushing away money for years to rent the flora- and fauna-infested RFK Stadium. Audi Field provides a unique home advantage, with stands so steeply pitched that the vendors should sell crampons to those in the top rows. And controlling revenue is essential, making possible signings such as Wayne Rooney, who looks anything but over the hill.

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But will it help the Spirit?

The Spirit’s owner, local tech entrepreneur Bill Lynch, partnered with DC United to launch an amateur club called DC United Women. When the NWSL launched in 2013, that club rebranded as the Spirit. Lynch’s partnership with United was a loose one, but it was ahead of its time. In today’s NWSL, most of the successful clubs – including the Portland Thorns, who expect crowds of at least 15,000 nearly every time they play at home – are outright partners with the local MLS clubs. The Utah Royals, like the North Carolina Courage, moved from elsewhere to affiliate with a men’s club (the teams are paired with MLS’s Real Salt Lake and the United Soccer League’s North Carolina FC respectively).

Not that affiliation is a panacea. The Houston Dash put in motion an ambitious three-year plan to double their 2017 attendance of roughly 4,500 fans per game when they teamed up with MLS’s Houston Dynamo, but they’re lagging far behind last year’s numbers. They also lag behind the Chicago Red Stars, who share Toyota Park with the Fire but otherwise aren’t affiliated.



“You can be in an MLS stadium, and if they haven’t marketed it, you can still not have a lot of attendance,” said Utah Royals defender Becky Sauerbrunn after the Royals beat the Spirit 1-0 on Wednesday. “In Salt Lake, we’ve had an organization that has really marketed us to the community, and it’s translated into great attendance numbers.”

But unaffiliated teams certainly don’t have it easy. The Spirit are currently being kept out of the basement by moribund New Jersey club Sky Blue FC, which drew a wave of negative publicity in July over substandard living and playing conditions.

“The biggest challenge you have as an independent team is that you don’t own anything,” sais Royals coach Laura Harvey. “Playing in the [MLS] stadium, having the resources we have just makes our life even easier.”

“In Salt Lake, the owner and the club have just done a really good job setting everything up,” said Utah’s Diana Matheson, who played through bad and good with the Spirit. “They built the locker room facilities from scratch for us. It’s just so professional, on par with the MLS team there ... Next year, the owner wants to have at least 12,000 [fans per game].”

And the Royals prove a downtown location isn’t essential. MLS seems to have backed off its decade-long quest for urban hipster cred, not raising a finger to block a proposed move of the Columbus Crew to an Austin location that would be farther from downtown that the Crew’s current stadium, the first built for an MLS club.

Back in Washington, the Spirit’s downtown debut was successful in many respects. The crowd of 7,976 easily broke the club’s attendance record, a foregone conclusion given the difficulty of squeezing more than 5,000 fans into the SoccerPlex. The Spirit Squadron, a supporters group bringing many of the young adults soccer clubs covet, had a bigger and louder presence than it usually has in the SoccerPlex.

But could the Spirit pull off that crowd 12 times a year? Would it eventually lose the suburban families for whom Audi Field is as difficult to reach as the SoccerPlex is for downtown DC residents? (The trek from just outside the Beltway to Audi Field via mass transit on Saturday took a solid two hours.) And would the Spirit lose something that makes them unique in the process?

Spirit’s Andi Sullivan, who played for DC United Women while she was still in high school, was torn. “I love playing at the SoccerPlex,” Sullivan said. “The quality of the field is amazing. But there was something really special about the stadium tonight. There were moments in the game where I felt like I could feel the electricity. It’d be great to come back here and play again in the future.”

Maybe the Spirit could split the difference and split the season between the exurban wonderland of the SoccerPlex and the dazzling downtown stadium, appealing to fans who can easily make one or the other ground but not both. And perhaps DC United, finally extricated from the RFK sinkhole, can be a partner.

Whatever the Spirit decides, the ramifications will go far beyond the DC exurbs. Sky Blue needs a savior, and there’s a club that conveniently wears that color in New York. The quest for working business models in a country where so many have failed is ongoing.

How ironic if Washington, with its geopolitical faultlines, led the way with unity and compromise.