An emotional David Beckham said Miami had made his “dream come true” after finally becoming a Major League Soccer team owner. The Miami MLS team plans to enter the US top-flight as its 25th team in two years.

The new club, which is yet to be named, was rubber-stamped by MLS 1,454 days after the former England captain arrived in Miami pledging to bring a professional team to the city. Now, with most of the hurdles cleared, MLS commissioner Don Garber has awarded Miami a franchise that will bring professional football back to the city for the first time since 2001.

Speaking to the UK media following the event, Beckham emphasized his Miami team will seek to bring in top stars, but also rely on an academy model to develop homegrown talent.

The former England captain expressed a desire to replicate the success of the ‘Class of ‘92’ – the group of young players who emerged to forge over a decade of success at Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson’s guidance.

“We want to reach for the stars, we want the best players in, but more importantly for us we want to create a state of the art academy where we have a hotbed of talent in this part of America,” he said. “If we get that right, that will make us and the people of Miami even more proud to support their team, because they’re seeing young kids, their sons, coming into this team and have the chance to play professional football.”

Monday’s announcement brings to a close a long saga during which failed stadium initiatives, local political maneuvering and a search for additional investment threatened to derail the project. A major breakthrough came last June, when the investment group secured the final three-acre plot of land necessary to build the new arena in the city’s Overtown district, describing it last year as “the last chance to get a stadium or soccer team.”

The project remained on the verge of collapse until local construction magnates the Mas brothers, Jorge and José, joined the ownership group in December shortly after losing out on the bidding to buy the Miami Marlins baseball team.

“[The struggle to found the club] speaks to our desire to have an MLS team in Miami,” said Commissioner Garber. “This is a very important city in our country. It’s very culturally diverse, it’s got enormous energy and a Hispanic and Latino culture that really is one of the key demographic drivers in our country, which as you all know, is more important now than at any other time, in terms of what that means politically.”

Beckham’s group has long envisioned a European-style “walk to the match” in the historically African American neighbourhood, where there is still ardent opposition and an ongoing legal appeal. It’s a couple of miles away from the initially-proposed waterfront location next door to the NBA’s Miami Heat, but a world away in terms of the glamour originally sought by Beckham in 2014.

Beckham added: “I’m English, so I’m coming into this wanting to learn, but I want to be a good neighbour. I don’t want to have any problems and obviously we want to make people happy.”

The investment group is also bringing “every penny” to build the new arena after the city, stung by the construction of the Marlins Park baseball stadium at an estimated public cost of $2.4bn over 40 years, closed the public purse strings to new stadium projects.

That financial burden was lessened by Beckham’s right to purchase an MLS expansion franchise for just $25m. Part of the contract that brought him to the LA Galaxy in 2007, it’s a very agreeable deal. Nashville will have to pay a reported $150m expansion fee to become the league’s 24th team.

The appetite for the football in the city is currently at its highest since the Miami Fusion folded back in 2001. Recently, while Beckham’s group wrangled with politicians, second-tier Miami FC, co-owned by Italian legend Paulo Maldini, has come to the fore. The team made it to the quarter-finals of the US Open Cup last season drawing crowds upwards of 10,000 during the run. The MLS team, with Beckham behind it and rapid support already in place, will hope to build on that.

Eric Braz, founding member of the Miami MLS Southern Legion Supporters Group, until Monday the game’s loyalest fans without a team, said: “My life is complete again. This is going to bring the community together around soccer. We set this group up in a bar 10 years ago. There were times we thought this wasn’t going to happen, but today we finally get to celebrate.”