Pat Brennan | Cincinnati Enquirer

Pat Brennan, Cincinnati Enquirer

The Enquirer/Kareem Elgazzar

Cincinnati's meteoric rise as one of the new soccer hotbeds in America will be affirmed Tuesday in a way that only Major League Soccer can provide.

MLS Commissioner Don Garber and leaders from Futbol Club Cincinnati are expected to announce Tuesday the three-year-old soccer club will be accepted to the league for the 2019 season, ending more than a year of pursuing membership in the league via a formal expansion process and behind-the-scenes work by the club dating back as far as early 2015.

Team leaders and league officials remain mum on the purpose of the meeting. However, the events leading up to Tuesday have followed the pattern of announcements for other successful expansion pushes.

Historically, MLS has made posh events of its expansion announcements in the chosen cities, and Tuesday is shaping up to be another one of those.

Last week, Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley's office proclaimed Tuesday "Orange and Blue Day," and is encouraging locals to wear FC Cincinnati's colors.

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Cranley, along with Garber, FC Cincinnati majority owner Carl Lindner III and team President and General Manager Jeff Berding will speak Tuesday during an event at Rhinegeist Brewery at 1910 Elm St. in Over-the-Rhine.

There, the expansion bid announcement is expected to take place with the evening program scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m.

With Rhinegeist's capacity already maxed out for the announcement, fans have been invited to congregate at Fountain Square in Downtown at Fifth and Vine streets. A simulcast of the announcement program happening at Rhinegeist will be broadcast on the video board above the square.

The party at Fountain Square is scheduled to last from 4:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.

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The Enquirer/Kareem Elgazzar

The banner day for local soccer fans will also bring about a welcome finish to the first of two expected rounds of MLS expansion as the league continues its push to grow to 28 teams.

Details regarding the next round of expansion haven't been released, and first-round finalists that failed to earn a bid in Sacramento and Detroit will likely make strong pushes for the last two spots.

Locally, the expansion process won't be missed. It tested the patience and made skeptics of FC Cincinnati's typically excitable fanbase. Contentious debates amongst politicians also resulted from the expansion process, with the commitment of public dollars to FC Cincinnati's infrastructure needs at issue in the 2017 mayoral race and subsequent meetings at City Hall this year.

Ultimately, FC Cincinnati found the support it needed from city and Hamilton County elected officials.

Representatives of the residents of West End, where the club's proposed soccer-specific stadium will be built just blocks from Downtown, also achieved for their constituents a community benefits package.

With all that work behind it and a future in a prominent and growing soccer league on the horizon, FC Cincinnati will celebrate Tuesday the fulfillment of the lofty dreams of a few friends that birthed the concept for the club in East Side Cincinnati coffee shops less than four years ago.

Sam Greene

A day for the fans

But for FC Cincinnati's loyal supporters, the club probably wouldn't be on the precipice of receiving an invitation to join the top soccer league in the U.S. and Canada.

Regardless of what was happening on the field with FC Cincinnati, the fans have always been an undeniable part of the equation as they made a habit of packing the Nippert Stadium grandstands.

Strong attendance numbers for the club's first games snowballed and, by the end of the United Soccer League franchise's first season, a league-record 333,353 fans attended matches.

More than 477,000 fans attended games in 2017 and more than 100,000 have turned out so far in 2018.

With attendance numbers rivaling or besting cities that already have an MLS team, Cincinnati quickly gained notoriety for its loyal soccer following.

The formal MLS expansion process started with 12 cities. As FC Cincinnati was up against organizations without existing teams and that could only offer speculative projections of fan interest, fans in the Queen City gave their club an undeniable advantage in the expansion race.

When would play begin, and where?

FC Cincinnati will eventually play in a state-of-the-art facility in the city's West End neighborhood, but that day won't arrive for a while.

To start out, FC Cincinnati is expected to continue playing at the University of Cincinnati's Nippert Stadium, which it has already poured millions of dollars worth of upgrades into. It's unclear what additional upgrades could be needed prior to the start of the 2019 season when Cincinnati is reportedly scheduled to begin to play in MLS, according to Sports Illustrated.

FC Cincinnati strived to arrange a 2019 entrance, partly to allow the soccer operations staffers some advantages in building the team. The club will be on the receiving end of several personnel mechanisms to help first-year teams and it won't have to share like it would have had the team entered the league in 2020. That year, Miami and Nashville are also expected to begin to play and the personnel mechanisms – things like priority order for drafting and selecting talent – would be split between all the new teams.

What else to expect for 2019

Some past announcements you might have missed or forgotten about are suddenly relevant again, such as the team's MLS jersey, or "kit" sponsor.

The words "Mercy Health," along with a logo of the Cincinnati-based health care provider, will adorn FC Cincinnati's jerseys starting in 2019. The deal, the club said last summer, is a lucrative one and "one of the largest jersey sponsorship commitments in MLS and is on par with Atlanta United’s deal with American Family Insurance."