Columbus and Franklin County leaders were left scratching their heads Tuesday after the owners of Columbus Crew SC announced that they plan to move the team if it doesn’t land a new, Downtown stadium.

Public- and private-sector officials both said the Crew’s ownership hasn’t clearly communicated what it needs to keep the team in Columbus.

Investor-operator Anthony Precourt said Tuesday that the team wants a new stadium closer to the city center, but he said he isn’t looking for public support. Crew SC has played in Mapfre Stadium at the Ohio Expo Center since 1999.

Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther said the city has not considered using public money to pay for a new soccer stadium. It’s unlikely, Franklin County Commissioner John O’Grady said, that the three-member Board of Commissioners would use the county sales tax to help the Crew fund or build a new stadium.

Voters shot down a plan to publicly finance a Downtown soccer stadium in 1997. The Crew's former owner, Lamar Hunt, then privately financed construction of the stadium at the expo center.

"The city is not in the business of private soccer-stadium construction,” Ginther said Tuesday. “That's never been in consideration or discussed."

Ginther said he spoke to Precourt after his group bought the team in 2013 because Ginther, at the time a city council member, and others feared a move away from Columbus. But the stadium discussion started only a few months ago, Ginther said.

Both Ginther and O’Grady said they had spoken to Crew representatives in the past several weeks and received no indication that the team might move.

“They told us their finances were tenuous, and they were looking at other options,” O’Grady said. The Crew, O’Grady added, didn’t ask for money or anything else, only repeated its desire for “a better location.”

“If he needs a Downtown stadium, he should have said something,” O’Grady said of Precourt. “That’s a weird negotiating ploy.”

Ginther and the three commissioners each heard first about the Crew’s threat to leave Columbus for Austin, Texas, through news reports.

Austin Mayor Steve Adler said in an email that soccer “would be a huge success in Austin and the Crew would find tons of fan support ... though I don’t think there’s support for public funding of a stadium.”

Ginther said: "We believe this community has responded to the Crew and stepped up our efforts collectively. The bottom line is soccer is going to be successful here in the city of Columbus. We have a bright future, and it includes professional soccer in this community. It's up to Mr. Precourt to decide whether or not it's with him and this franchise or not."

The city helped marshal support from the private sector to buy the team outright or in partnership with Precourt, Ginther said, and to provide “multimillion-dollar offers for corporate sponsorships.”

Precourt apparently didn’t give those offers serious consideration. He said Tuesday that he intends to move the team to Austin, the largest city in the country without a professional sports franchise, if he doesn’t get a new stadium.

Watch: Crew Coach and others react to news that team may be moved to Austin

“I regret that he didn’t take it seriously," Alex Fischer, CEO of the Columbus Partnership, said of the offer to take an ownership stake in the team. “I hope we can keep working even as we’ve hit a low point.” The partnership includes leaders of major central Ohio businesses.

After Franklin County voters rejected a sales-tax increase to finance both a Downtown soccer stadium and a planned hockey arena in May 1997, Hunt, at the time the Crew's owner, privately financed $28.5 million to build the stadium at the old state fairgrounds.

Since 1998, the Crew has had a 25-year lease with the Ohio Exposition Commission for the property on which the stadium sits. The lease requires the Crew to find "another professional sports team whose use of the stadium would be consistent with the design of the stadium" if it "terminates operations as a professional soccer team." The lease also gives the state the option to require the team to remove the stadium from the property at the end of the lease.

When the stadium opened on May 15, 1999, under the name Crew Stadium, it was the first in the nation to be built specifically for a Major League Soccer team. Precourt bought the team and the stadium in 2013 for what was then a record $68 million, according to Forbes. Crew Stadium became Mapfre Stadium in March 2015.

“There was a time when everyone in the country was super jealous of Columbus. Columbus literally had the first soccer-specific stadium in the country,” said Victor Matheson, an economics professor at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. “That totally revolutionized Major League Soccer and basically saved the league."

But in the past 18 years, Columbus has fallen behind other cities where newer stadiums offer more fan amenities. In contrast to the $28.5 million it cost to build Crew Stadium, modern stadiums can cost more than $200 million.

“The Columbus owners look around at all the other soccer-specific stadiums around the country and get stadium envy,” said Matheson, a former MLS referee who has studied sports stadiums. “At this point, the Columbus Crew stadium is a pretty bare-bones stadium compared to these other stadiums.”

Matheson said most MLS stadiums are outside downtowns because real estate closer to the city center is more expensive, and the stadiums offer little alternative use. Financing of stadiums has come from a mix of private and public money, he said.

If the Crew leaves, Columbus could bid for another franchise. The MLS plans to add four new teams; however, Matheson said Columbus’ loss of a team would hurt its prospect of landing another one.

Mapfre Stadium sits on 15 acres, not including the sea of parking surrounding it. At least four vacant sites in the heart of the city are large enough to accommodate a stadium:

• 21 acres the city controls immediately west of COSI Columbus that the city plans to develop into a mix of uses.

• 16.2 acres on the southern end of the Jeffrey Park site east of North 4th Street in Italian Village, scheduled for residential and commercial development.

• 14.7 acres owned by Nationwide Realty Investors on the north side of West Nationwide Boulevard, west of Huntington Park and railroad tracks.

• 23 acres north and northwest of Huntington Park that is now in contract with the Schottenstein Real Estate Group, which hopes to develop the site into a residential, retail, office and hotel destination.

“We would be interested in hearing proposals from the Crew or the city of Columbus, as it would be great for central Ohio to keep the team here, but neither has reached out to us yet on this,” Schottenstein Real Estate Group President Brian Schottenstein said.

Representatives of the other sites did not return calls to The Dispatch.

Precourt alluded to three potential stadium sites during a news conference Tuesday.

"Yes, there are three sites that have been recommended to us, and we will continue to look at them," Precourt said, declining to comment further.

If soccer is going to continue in Columbus, Fischer said that talking about a new stadium is “one big alternative that we really have to understand.” Redevelopment around the current stadium is another, he said.

“There are multiple options,” Fischer said. “What we need to do is collaborate, have those conversations with the very people who know our city and community the best and can help generate the creative ideas and solutions.”

Dispatch Reporters Shannon Gilchrist, Jim Weiker, Alissa Widman-Neese and Andrew Erickson and Librarian Linda Deitch contributed to this story.

rrouan@dispatch.com

@RickRouan