MLS is coming to Atlanta. The news was confirmed at a launch event on Wednesday hosted by Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank, who will operate the new team, and MLS commissioner Don Garber.

In a statement, Garber described Atlanta as "one of the largest and most diverse markets in North America (with) a rich tradition in sports and culture."

The as yet unnamed team (though “Atlanta Phoenix” has been trending on Twitter, as a reference to the city’s flag), will play at the new Atlanta Falcons Stadium, which will employ state-of-the-art technology to adjust capacity for different events — easing the fears that a team playing in an NFL arena is a retrograde move in the era of soccer-specific stadiums.

It is expected that Atlanta will begin play in the 2017 season (when the stadium is scheduled for completion), following Orlando City and New York City FC (2015), David Beckham’s Miami team (2016), and presumably, a reconfigured Chivas USA, as new faces in the league.

The Atlanta move had been expected — perhaps less for any obvious sporting logic, than from recent public statements from Blank and Garber talking up the prospect of an MLS foothold in the city, following a flirtation that has lasted since Blank first expressed an interest in a franchise in 2008. Just last week, Blank claimed a deal was close and Garber had been politic in his talking up the innovative quality of the proposed stadium technology as being well-suited for soccer.

Looking at the deal, there’s an argument that the involvement of Blank and his Home Depot fortune, is at least as attractive as the potential for growing the league in the south. With MLS expanding rapidly, there has been a knock-on effect of a transformation of its governance structure, as a new breed of owners enter the league — the addition of a heavy-hitter like Blank is a coup in that context, and in the shared ownership structure, a hedge against any future stalling in the league’s growth.

“With Arthur Blank joining our ownership group, we are adding one of the most respected owners in professional sports," said Garber. "Arthur is deeply passionate about soccer and our quest to become one of the top professional soccer leagues in the world. We look forward to working with him and the entire Falcons organization on achieving this important goal.”

MLS executives will also be bolstered by the fact that Kansas City has already demonstrated what a driven ownership group can accomplish in a short period of time in an unlikely market — with the league’s one-time afterthought now a model club. The challenges in Atlanta are different from those in Kansas City, but there are some similarities in terms of what must be done to build a team there, let alone a soccer town.

Certainly, Atlanta itself is not necessarily the first name that comes to mind for an obvious expansion — even the NFL Falcons might concede that this is a part of the world where college football dominates. An existing soccer team, the Atlanta Silverbacks, played in the NASL Soccer Bowl against the New York Cosmos last year, and while they drew a sellout crowd — it was for a stadium holding 7,211 people on the day. The new team need to establish a much more substantial fan base – and quickly.

Nor is the stadium a completely done deal, or an uncontroversial one. When Blank first announced his attention to rebuild the Georgia Dome, as the cornerstone of his ambitions to bring a Super Bowl back to Atlanta, there was immediate resistance. For one thing, this would be the youngest stadium to be replaced in NFL history — as one commentator put it, the Georgia Dome is only two months older than Miley Cyrus. The new stadium will be built beside the existing Georgia Dome.

Then there’s the perennial large stadium dispute over the degree of public funding required to complete it. Atlanta is no exception. The city council has already balked at the prospect of supporting the new Atlanta Braves MLB stadium, which is now being developed in nearby Cobb County, and there is a legal challenge to the bonds that will need to be issued to complete the new Falcons stadium.

Added in to the mix is the sensitivity of a stadium being built in the cradle of the civil rights movement — part of the new stadium plans require a street named after Martin Luther King to be blocked at one end to allow for VIP parking, and present day political leaders believe the financial burden for the immediate local communities is disproportionate to the rest of the tax base.

Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber. Photograph: David Goldman/AP Photograph: David Goldman/AP

The Conferences

2020 may be the date the MLS expect the current wave of expansion to be complete by, but soon after comes 2022 — a date the league has long cited as the point they expect to be one of the top 10 leagues in the world. If that’s to happen, expansion, in and of itself, is only one part of the puzzle. One other effect of Atlanta’s arrival will be to develop the conversation about how the MLS conferences and schedule should be structured.

After a brief period with a league-wide home and away schedule of the kind typical worldwide, the introduction of Montreal Impact in 2012 saw MLS move to a lopsided schedule where teams play out-of-conference opponents only once a year. Currently there are 10 Eastern and 9 Western conference teams, and it’s widely expected that the arrival of New York City FC and Orlando City will see Houston Dynamo move into the Western conference in 2015.

The speculation began in earnest when Commisioner Garber announced the expansion of MLS to 24 teams by 2020 last summer. Only one of those slots is now unaccounted for, though it is believed Minneapolis is considered the frontrunner for the last announced slot. That may clear the way for a three conference system, as briefly used in MLS’s formative years (though with many fewer teams), though looking at the prospective geographical spread it’s hard to imagine natural delineations to do this. It’s also possible that the league could go with two twelve team conferences.

These conversations are about much more than arbitrary matchups, or keeping existing or burgeoning rivalries together on the schedule, but about the league’s ongoing challenge to match up timezones, TV interest, weather conditions, and the demands on players of a summer schedule at odds with the Fifa calendar — one of the costs of operating in the huge land mass the league covers.