Lindsay Patterson grew up in a small town outside Cincinnati dreaming of a career covering the city’s high-profile sports. At the time, that meant Reds and Bengals, as well as the major college basketball teams at UC and Xavier. Soccer seemed more like something kids did on Saturday and Sunday morning, during the Little League offseason.

When she heard in 2015 about Jeff Berding’s plan to bring professional soccer to Cincinnati, though, she knew this was an opportunity. If the new FC Cincinnati were interested in hiring a sideline reporter, she wanted that job. Her hustle and talent got her hired — she was on the phone to Berding almost as soon as the team’s formation was announced — but she had no idea what she was walking into.

“In 2016, getting ready for the first match at Nippert, I was thinking maybe 500 to 1,000 people would be there,” Patterson told Sporting News. “Then you walk into the stadium — it was a cold day in April — and they had 13,000 people. To me, 13,000 people was like a sellout.

“Nobody had a clue.”

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This is a colloquial expression, because she understands: Berding knew. He was an executive with the Cincinnati Bengals, working as director of sales and public affairs. He’d spent three terms as a member of city council. He grew up on the city’s West Side, a place where it’s not uncommon for children to return and buy homes in the same neighborhoods as their parents. He’d graduated from St. Xavier High, one of several all-boys Catholic high schools in Cincy whose graduates retain a sort of enduring fraternity. Berding was part of the fabric of the city in a way few outsiders can fully understand.

It was his vision to bring high-level professional soccer to Cincinnati, starting in 2016 in the second-division United Soccer League. The club was an immediate sensation, the region’s passion so overwhelming that it forced MLS to embrace a city it might never have considered as a possibility for its expansion efforts.

Saturday, when FC Cincinnati takes the field in Seattle for its first game as the 24th club in Major League Soccer, one of the most remarkable ascents in modern American professional sports will reach a peak. Not the last for which Berding and FCC are aiming, but an amazing achievement in such a short period of time.

“We tried to build a Major League Soccer franchise from Day 1. That was always part of the plan,” Berding, the team president, told Sporting News. “Four years was always the plan, because Orlando had done it in five years, and we felt Cincinnati is a better sports market. If they could do it in five, Cincinnati could do it in four. And we did.”

Somehow, he saw this. Cincinnati’s overwhelming soccer interest was not overt. Columbus was a founding member of Major League Soccer, but those who drove the 90 minutes up I-71 to attend Crew games hadn’t much company from back home. The Cincinnati soccer bars rarely, if ever, were overrun on Premier League mornings. Three indoor and two outdoor teams in various leagues came and went between 1996 and 2012.

Perhaps the only real hint there was a latent interest in soccer came in 2002, when the World Cup final between Brazil and Germany was scheduled to be televised by ABC early on Sunday morning, June 30. The local affiliate, WCPO, planned to show the world’s biggest sporting event on tape delay because it did not wish to preempt paid religious programming. A flood of calls from angry viewers convinced the station to air the game live.

Berding had two children who played competitive club soccer and was board president of one of the big youth clubs, King’s Hammer. As a soccer dad, he traveled around the country to games and could see the sport growing rapidly.

“You could see all these big facilities, brand-new facilities, that municipalities were investing in on the youth side,” Berding said. “There were literally thousands and thousands of parents and kids. One time we had a tournament in Elizabethtown, Ky,, and we had to stay in a hotel at the Louisville airport — 58 miles away. Because all the hotels were booked.

“It spurred my interest. So I started looking at all the NFL data to see the growth in soccer between 2004 and 2014. Soccer went from not being on the sports pyramid in 2004 to really being up there by 2014, just behind the NFL and college football.”

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He examined the local Nielsen ratings for the U.S. men’s and women’s national teams and Premier League games. He compared the numbers of youth players in the market to those in Kansas City and St. Louis and concluded the growth pattern could best be described by one word: “Explosive.”

With a growing local economy that was recruiting more young corporate talent from outside the city, “It seemed like the ingredients were there, the growth was there,” Berding said. “And If we did it the right way, we can be immediately successful.”

He took his plan to his bosses with the Cincinnati Bengals. They passed. He went up the street to the Cincinnati Reds. They declined, also. But billionaire Carl Lindner III, CEO of the American Financial Group, whose father had owned the Reds, heard of Berding’s pursuit and asked for a meeting. Lindner agreed to become majority owner.

One of Lindner’s friends is Phil Anschutz, now the investor/operator of the Los Angeles Galaxy, who helped save MLS in the 2000s along with Lamar Hunt, the two of them operating multiple teams to help stabilize the league. He had tried to talk Lindner into investing in a team, Berding said, “But Carl’s only interest was Cincinnati. That’s the Lindners. They are hometown people. They bring businesses to Cincinnati or start businesses in Cincinnati.”

Even before the team played its first game in MLS, Lindner and Berding flew to New York for a meeting with MLS commissioner Don Garber. They wanted to be sure that if they did this right there would be an opportunity for Cincinnati in MLS. The Columbus franchise hadn’t yet reached the crisis that would launch the Save The Crew movement, but it generally was problematic in terms of community support. There would be outside questions about whether another club in such proximity would be warranted.

FCC answered those questions emphatically. On the field, the club reached the 2017 U.S. Open Cup semifinals and even held a second-half lead on the New York Red Bulls before falling. In 2018, looking to build toward MLS, management constructed a roster designed to win a championship and to make the most comfortable possible transition to American soccer’s first division.

Last summer, they executed a deal to bring in striker Fanendo Adi, who had scored 50 goals in 120 appearances with the Portland Timbers and started for the MLS Cup winners in 2015. He was on a Designated Player contract with the Timbers. Midfielder Fatai Alashe was signed, as well, having most recently played for the San Jose Earthquakes.

“We want to be a winning team,” Berding said. “It'll be a process. We played Columbus last week. We weren't very good. It will be better this week against Seattle. Will be better the next week in Atlanta. Two months from now we'll be better at the summer window, and we'll be better at the end of the season. You know, we're playing teams that have played together. Our guys are still learning where someone's going to be on the field. So much of this is just familiarity and consistency. And when guys have that, it's pretty attractive and it’s winning.”

That first game Patterson remembers was only the start. Nippert Stadium, the football stadium the University of Cincinnati had recently refurbished, proved an inviting venue for soccer fans and a crucible for visiting teams. FC Cincinnati sold 10,000 season tickets that first year and broke the USL attendance record with an average of 17,296 per game. That didn’t include a crowd of more than 35,000 when Crystal Palace of the Premier League visited for a friendly.

Alan Pardew, who has managed seven of England’s top clubs, told the Cincinnati Enquirer, “It’s not often you have an atmosphere like that in the preseason, and not actually in a league game.” It was becoming common for FCC, though.

The following year the season ticket base was up to 13,000 and the average attendance was 21,000 per game. In year three, last summer, when the club won the USL regular season, season tickets were up to 15,000 and the average attendance was over 25,000, which would have ranked fifth in MLS.

Indeed, FC Cincinnati charged USL prices, so it wasn’t entirely a fair comparison. As a Major League Soccer club, prices are up about 70 percent. The season ticket base is up to 20,000. Nippert can hold much more. It seems it will need to. The opening home match is March 17 against Portland. All but a few of the lower-bowl tickets remaining are singles.

Nippert wasn’t meant to be the club’s long-term home, however. That will be built in the city’s West End, on the site of a high school football stadium. It is expected to open in 2021.

“I grew up in a football family: college football and the NFL. We didn’t even have soccer at my school,” Patterson said. “My dad is the No. 1 FC Cincinnati fan now. My whole family, they love it; it’s been really cool to watch them come to matches and enjoy it.

“I try to give my season tickets to people who’ve never been to a game. When they come, they want to come back.”