America is brimming with lower-tier clubs willing to do things the sensible way. The tiered way. In our soccer terms anyway, the American way. Build from the bottom with promotional events, low-cost stadium rentals, minimized overheads, low risk signings. Do things within your means in hopes of someday earning the coveted gaze of MLS, the salve for the eternal American soccer wound: continual cash flow at the gates.

This is the way it’s always been on these shores, anyway. The U.S. is not a haven for billionaires looking to spend a chunk of their ill-begotten gains on a money-sump of a venture for the sheer thrill of soccer ownership. It wouldn’t make any sense. Soccer ownership is largely a losing venture anyway, even on the best of terms.

No, the things that rile up men like Roman Abramovich are the educated scrutiny of London, the lure of Champions League money, the knowledge that his players, his coaches can dribble circles around some of the world’s best. It’s at least partly an ego game. And MLS ownership, for all its sensibility and purity of heart, lacks ego in spades.

Men like Merritt Paulson and Robb Heinemann have no small amount of panache, which has made their clubs an extension of their hardly contained desire. Paulson especially. On Twitter alone, the Timbers owner comes across as much like an educated member of the TA as he does a besuited front office brassman. It’s perhaps a smaller scale than what some of the rest of the world is used to (and Vincent Tan, we speak naught of ye), but as Dallas Cowboys are continually learning, your team is a direct and at times painful extension of your ownership. Live and learn.

And here we come to Peter Wilt and Indy Eleven. The Indianapolis club was only founded in 2013, and the incredibly sexy jerseys (including a uni sponsor that would make the Earthquakes jealous) were confirmed in October. The team is being planted in historically infertile soil in Indianapolis, home to the defunct Indiana Blast and a city that has historically had trouble supporting the rest of its (more popular) pro sports teams with any verve. And yet they’ve already sold nearly 7,000 season ticket deposits for an NASL team that won’t play until next year.

But Wilt (who is not the owner but has operated in a forward fashion as though he was) has ambitions beyond the norm, beyond our baby step culture. Earlier this month, Wilt told the Indianapolis Star that he had ambitions to build a 20,000-seat stadium, undoubtedly a primer for MLS entrance. He reiterated that desire to Soccer Morning’s Jason Davis this week. To do this before your team has played a game, before you’ve even seen the actual turnout, is ballsy. It’s also the sort of maverick play that elbows your way into the door.

Anything I can say about Peter Wilt has already been said better and at more length by Graham Parker in an excellent Grantland column from last year. A populist general, Wilt is a tribalist and has deep roots in creating an atmosphere of belonging amongst a fan space that might not have felt otherwise. He is bold, so much so that we all wondered why he’d been allowed to disappear into the woods of Wisconsin when MLS was bleating out in pain for a man of his ilk to grab a franchise by its husks and shake out the juice again. Indy has itself a charismatic field general with the street sense and the savvy to make the Eleven something beyond the NASL norm.

No question here that the challenges are legion. Indianapolis will have some switchbacks to navigate, namely the sustainment of fans in a traditionally non-soccer market and the ability to keep attending spirits high while the team plays at IUPUI’s Carroll Stadium, which is nice but is hardly a long-term fix. Wilt knows that. Whether or not the team is able to successfully bridge the gap from start-up to full-fledged industry standard is yet to be seen.

Indy Eleven is perhaps the newest, most elemental form of the next generation of Americans taking up arms for a game that’s becoming the new paradigm for young U.S. sports fans. Indianapolis had previously been left for dead as a home for professional soccer, a Napoleonic invasion of Russia that was famously rebuffed by basketball’s past and slunk back to its bunkers elsewhere. Now, fans packing out the Union Jack and the Chatham Tap on Saturday mornings have begun to alter the paradigm. Rowdies from Zionsville to Bloomington have begun to even make crotchety old columnists sit up and take notice.

Indy Eleven has a winding road ahead on its way to full-time professional status, to that time when it can say it’s “made it” in America. But perhaps it’s time we all sat up and took proper notice. Because Peter Wilt’s boys seem to be going somewhere.