David Beckham’s plan to bring a 25,000-seat stadium to the Port of Miami as the home for his new Major League Soccer franchise looks to be heading in a different direction with a key ally in the project effectively telling the former England captain to look elsewhere.



The proposal to build the stadium on vacant land in the southwest corner of the giant port has run into choppy waters in recent weeks with a vocal alliance including cruise ship operators Royal Caribbean, maritime workers and a number of prominent Miami politicians expressing their opposition publicly.

Now Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, who stood alongside Beckham and MLS commissioner Don Gerber in February as the retired star made his long expected formal announcement that he was exercising his right to buy a start-up MLS franchise, has joined those keen to steer him away from the previously preferred seaport site.

In a letter to Beckham’s New York-based real estate adviser John Alschuler, Gimenez urges the investment partnership known as Miami Beckham United to consider building instead on another downtown waterfront parcel a little further north.

“I am asking you to undertake a thorough analysis of the area located immediately north of the American Airlines Arena and immediately south of Museum Park, including the area known as the FEC slip,” he wrote.

The mayor said he envisions: “the creation of a grand waterfront park” close to the Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Center with an “unparalleled experience of sports, recreation, arts and culture.” The site, Gimenez said, would give Beckham’s group the nine-acre stadium “footprint” it was seeking while converting underutilised land into vibrant and scenic public space.

What the letter acknowledges only briefly is that the “FEC slip”, a disused deepwater slipway once owned by the Florida East Coast Railway, and which has long featured in discussions over the revitalisation of Miami’s waterfront areas, would have to be drained and filled at great expense, up to $16 million by some estimates.

The Miami Marlins considered and rejected the site during its own search for a new baseball stadium several years ago, according to the Miami Herald, in part because of the cost of transporting large rocks from elsewhere as landfill.

Another complication is that the site, known as Parcel B, is owned by the City of Miami and would have to be sold or gifted to the county prior to any development. In 2011, the city, having just spent more than $15 million on a seawall remediation project, drafted an unequivocal resolution stating that it “strongly opposes any actions or discussions by Miami-Dade County related to the filling of FEC deep water slip.”

Additionally, any proposal involving city-owned waterfront land is required to face a public vote.

Alschuler told The Guardian on Tuesday that he welcomed the mayor’s letter as an “expansion of alternatives” for the location of the stadium, which also included the less favoured inland sites at Florida International University and next to Marlins Park in Little Havana.

“It’s a meaningful step forward,” he said. “Instead of having one good option we now have two. Both sites are of substantial interest. We’re confident we will find a site that works for the team and for the fans and which will be an economic asset to one of the world’s great cities.”

Alschuler said it would be premature to discuss the merits or otherwise of the proposed new site until it was studied in detail. “The mayor has asked us to undertake an analysis and we will proceed to do that,” he said. “There are three possible conclusions, yes it works, no it doesn’t work, or we need more time.”

Beckham, whose co-investors are Bolivian telecoms billionaire Marcelo Claure and entertainment impresario Simon Fuller, has said he hoped his as yet unnamed franchise would be ready to take the field in two to three seasons’ time, though acknowledged at his February press conference that there would be “bumps in the road”.

He scored a significant victory in the Florida legislature last week when lawmakers approved a measure to allow professional sports franchises in the state to compete for sales tax subsidies to help with construction projects. Beckham, who has always insisted that he was not seeking public money from the city or county, could see his stadium plan benefit by up to $3 million.

Meanwhile, the Miami Seaport Alliance, which has claimed that a stadium development at the port would threaten jobs and adversely affect the contribution to Miami’s economy from cruise and cargo operations, also welcomed Gimenez’s vision.

“Whatever site the community wants to do is lovely and wonderful, and we leave it to our elected officials to decide,” John Fox, a Royal Caribbean lobbyist and the group’s president, told the Miami Herald.

“Our position has always been that we’re not in favour of getting this done at the seaport.”