The Miami Fusion flickered and died at the start of the century. But the league – and soccer in the US – is in a very different place these days

During the darkest hours of his four-year quest to bring a Major League Soccer team to Miami, which was finally approved on Monday, David Beckham may have taken heart from studying parallels with the region’s history.

In 1905 modern Florida’s founding father Henry Flagler decided to extend his East Coast Railway from Miami to Key West island, 150 miles south over land and sea.



Three hurricanes, a yellow fever outbreak and $50m later, the project mocked as “Flagler’s Folly” was thought cursed, and its architect crazy. However, by the time he rocked up on the first train to reach Key West in 1912, the Overseas Railroad was dubbed the “Eighth Wonder of the World”. His work precipitated south Florida’s century-long transformation into a tourist mecca.



For Beckham too, his faith in the Miami venture often seemed misplaced. In the 1,454 days following the initial announcement, his stadium plans were pushed from the glitzy waterfront into Miami’s “urban core”. He laboured to find local investors and haggled with the city over disused, contaminated land. He weathered political storms, further objections to the stadium site and all-but exhausted the league commissioner’s patience.



“There were times we sat back and said ‘this is not going to happen. It’s too difficult. There are too many bumps in the road.’ But I don’t give up,” an emotional Beckham said on Monday, during an event to confirm entry into MLS in 2020.



Now the real work starts. The market for MLS in Miami is potentially huge. There’s passion for soccer that rivals the big three sports, while Real Madrid and Barcelona jerseys are now as common as Dolphins attire. The first ever El Clásico game on US soil sold out Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium this summer. Recreational soccer games are as prominent in parks and playgrounds as basketball.



David Beckham wants to bring Class of '92 spirit to his Miami MLS team Read more

But Miami is an event town. The national perception of fans as “bandwagon jumpers” is not entirely without merit. When the novelty of having a team (and Beckham’s not-inconsiderable charm) has faded, it’ll be winning on the field that creates and sustains the wider fanbase.

It’s something Beckham acknowledged when pledging to build “the best team in MLS”, touting the top European players who’ve called to tell him “I’m in.”

“I think Miami needs a star,” Beckham said on Monday. “You have to realise the audience we have and Miami would expect us to bring in a star. That’s what we plan on doing.”

Max Ramos-Paez of the Southern Legion Supporters Club agrees. He added: “The ownership group is here to win. In this town, that really matters. It’s not about the stadium, it’s not about the colours or the badge. It’s ‘are you winning? Or are you entertaining us?’”

The Southern Legion, for so long the “fans without a club”, was joyous yesterday; banging drums, hanging banners and bellowing out ready-made chants for a team that still doesn’t have a name. After a day of interviews and glad-handing Beckham turned up unannounced at the group’s celebration on Monday night.

Vanessa Morales (@NewsDeskChica) CHEERS, #DavidBeckham! The #305 can finally celebrate @futbolmiamimls!

Exclusive 📺 @telemundo51 @nbc6 images of @davidbeckham in Brickell @fadomiami, last night. #FutbolMiamiMLS https://t.co/ck04j79e8w pic.twitter.com/8EAwRhNFws

During the launch event he told those fans: “I had people that came up to me who said ‘let it go, don’t do it’, but the one thing that kept me going for four years was you guys. You guys are the reason this is happening today.”

The Legion will need to grow its numbers, if Miami MLS is to fill the proposed 25,000-seater stadium in Overtown, scheduled to open in time for the 2021 season. Ramos-Paez thinks the community will embrace the team, once it understands the owners are in it to win it.

“The Miami Heat formed a culture that made people understand they were going to be competent and compete. There’d be no fire sales,” he said. “Our MLS team is going to be run by professionals and we’re very excited about that.”

While, the Heat organisation has been a paradigm of responsible and fruitful ownership, the Miami Marlins baseball team sits at the other end of the spectrum. The building of the sparsely populated (the team ranks 28th out of 30 in MLB attendance – Florida’s other team, the Rays, are bottom) Marlins Park stadium at an astronomical cost to the public made this process far more difficult than it needed to be for Beckham’s group.

Ironically, it was the Marlins’ dysfunction that saved the MLS bid. In an effort to buy the baseball team, local construction tycoon Jorge Mas lost out to Derek Jeter.

Mas offered less than the asking price for the Marlins, because he wanted to spend cash on boosting the payroll and retaining top players, local reports say. Less than six months after Jeter took over, he’s presided over another fire sale, traded away the team’s only true star in Giancarlo Stanton, and probably consigned Marlins fans to further years in the doldrums.

But baseball fans’ loss has been soccer fans’ gain. Mas and his brother José joined the MLS bid in December, at a time the league was ready to “unbundle ourselves from this thing” as Commissioner Garber said yesterday. The Mas brothers finally fulfilled the criteria for supportive local ownership partners and things moved very quickly thereafter.

The support arrived in the nick of time. MLS is currently considering bids from Charlotte, Detroit, Indianapolis, Phoenix, Raleigh, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, St Louis and Tampa. Plenty more are interested. Miami’s time was up.

The league’s admirable patience was motivated by its commitment to Beckham – who secured the rights to buy an MLS franchise for just $25m (the going rate is currently $150m) when signing with LA Galaxy in 2007 – as well as the perceived importance of the south Florida market.

Commissioner Garber cited the significance of Miami’s diverse Latin and Hispanic culture in today’s political landscape, but also its position as a gateway to South America.

“Our league is becoming more closely connected to the South American leagues,” Garber said. “We have an office in Buenos Aires where we’re scouting and recruiting players. We want to be connected to that part of the world.”

Of course, top-level professional soccer has failed in the city before. Miami Fusion folded in 2001 after three seasons. What’s to stop history repeating itself? Garber says that collapse was down to the appetite for the game nationally, rather than locally.

He explains: “In 1998 the league expanded to Chicago and Miami and in 2001 and 2002 we started folding teams. We were going through massive trauma and probably closer to closing the league down than most people realise.

“Then MLS said ‘we’re not going anywhere’ and the league bought the English language rights to the World Cup in 2002 and 2006 because Fifa couldn’t sell them to anyone. We paid $70m, now Fox and Telemundo are paying over a billion.

“The US team did well in 2002 and 2006 and the women started winning championships and gold medals. It just became this momentum of progress driven by the fact that our country started engaging with the game. So if Miami Fusion came in 2010, we’d have a team now. It was just too early.”

Flagler’s Oversees Railroad, as grand as it, was washed away by a Category 5 hurricane in 1935 and never rebuilt. Today its remnants are used as fishing piers. Now Beckham has weathered his own storm as he attempts to rebuild pro soccer in Miami. Now comes the effort to keep the train rolling all the way to MLS Cup.