It’s pretty easy to come up with the kind of barfy, ahistorical team names MLS franchises love to pick, so kudos to the ownership group trying to invent a soccer team in San Diego and buy its way into the league for crowdsourcing a little more imagination. Though maybe “Footy McFooty Face” wasn’t quite what they thought the masses would dream up.


The San Diego group, currently in the process of bidding for an MLS expansion spot, asked potential fans to brainstorm and submit a bunch of team names they might like to see. After collecting the submissions, they in turn put a certain number of those names on their Facebook page for people to vote on. Here’s is how the page describes the name selection process:

Update: We’re now in the final round! We’ve narrowed down the 1,000+ submissions to just 20. Like every other round, the top 10 names make the cut. After this round, we’ll have our final 10 names! We’ll submit those 10 to Major League Soccer for review, and pretty soon we will have a team name! Note - Soccer Club or Football Club can be added to names, and similarly, a nickname or mascot can be added to traditional names. You, the fans, will help us decide on that later!


If we’ve learned anything from the latest presidential election, it’s that if you give voters a bad choice, they just might select it in droves. Not to say that Footy McFooty Face is bad, of course—it’s actually a great name. It’s just not as faux-serious and soccery like Sporting KC and Real Lago Salado.

As the rules explain, the fan vote isn’t the only determinant for what the team will ultimately be named. Slim chance MLS and the ownership group okays the McFooties name. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go out there and vote for it. To paraphrase Kanye, shoot for McFooty, so even if you fall you might land on the Bad Hombres.

[NBC Sports Soccer]