The city has spent big money on trying to woo MLS – but is football’s international appeal worth the cost to the taxpayer? Tom Dart reports

A 24-point game from Kawhi Leonard led the San Antonio Spurs to an easy victory over the Indiana Pacers on the last Monday before Christmas, but this was not the biggest news of the day for the formidable NBA franchise.

San Antonio’s local authorities bought a minor-league football stadium on 21 December last year and charged the Spurs’ parent company with the task of wooing Major League Soccer – and fast.

The city and county finalised an agreement to spend $18m buying Toyota Field from local philanthropist and businessman Gordon Hartman. He runs a theme park for people with special needs, Morgan’s Wonderland, that is adjacent to the stadium where his San Antonio Scorpions played in the North American Soccer League.

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Spurs Sports and Entertainment (SSE) chipped in an extra $3m that also goes to Hartman’s nonprofit, in return for a 20-year lease on the facility and its training complex. Their annual rent is a modest $100,000 and they agreed to spend $1m on upgrades. If they do not secure an MLS franchise in the next six years they will start incurring penalties of up to $5m owed to the city and county.

The Spurs pay their star forward, LaMarcus Aldridge, that much every three months. But for city officials the outlay of taxpayer money is a significant statement. Either the venture fails and San Antonio is stuck with a minor league outfit similar to the privately-run one it already had, or MLS says yes and investment must be found to more than double the size of the 8,500-capacity stadium. And then there’s the expansion fee.

Why bother? The siren call of football’s worldwide appeal for an underrated city that would like to be more famous. “Soccer has an international appeal and is a perfect fit for our city’s global outlook and economic strategy,” the San Antonio mayor, Ivy Taylor, said last year.

The Spurs are one of the NBA’s most successful and admired franchises, but not among its most glamorous or noisy. Much the same could be said of their hometown. With a fast-growing population of about 1.4 million, San Antonio is the US’s seventh-largest city – though only the 25th-biggest metropolitan area. Even in the MLS expansion debate it has garnered less attention than similarly-sized places such as Sacramento, St Louis and Las Vegas. San Diego also generates buzz, and Cincinnati has growing ambitions.

“Lots of times I think people don’t put the city of San Antonio as one of the seventh or eighth largest in the country. Its proximity to Mexico is kind of exciting,” says Bobby Perez, an SSE senior vice-president. The group also operates WNBA, NBA development league and AHL ice hockey franchises

“We’ve been watching the growth of the sport not only nationally but locally, which has been evident since the Scorpions started [in 2012],” he adds. “The opportunity presented itself and it’s something we’d been studying for some time … Our next step is to try to get this off the ground then work with MLS to find out what their exact plans are.”

MLS’ owners expressed support last December for expanding the league to 28 teams. There should be 24 in the next couple of years, with Atlanta in 2017, Los Angeles in 2018 and Minnesota in 2017 or 2018, along with Miami (stadium permitting).

With the clout of SSE behind them and an arena that should be easy to expand, the former Scorpions, reincarnated in the third-tier United Soccer League as San Antonio FC (and with a piece of the Spurs logo on their crest) surely have a credible chance.

“The notion that Orlando would be in MLS in 2011 was not a realistic thought in anyone’s mind except [president] Phil Rawlins and the people running the club,” says managing director Tim Holt, sitting on a seat above the halfway line with a faded Scorpions logo stitched into the padding as a big wheel revolved languidly behind the opposite stand on the grounds of Morgan’s Wonderland.

Like the head coach, Darren Powell, he was hired from Orlando, who made their MLS debut last year. “For me it’s the best run and supported club in the country right now. I’m sure we’ll apply a lot of that stuff here,” says Holt, a former USL president.

“They did it very quickly in relative terms, but they did it systematically. First they were extraordinarily engaged in the community – beyond just the soccer community, in all aspects of the community. They supported events, they were very visible, the team was constantly out there. They immediately took to building a club environment, not just being a professional team separate from itself, but getting into player development, creating a top to bottom youth club almost from the outset.

“And the presentation of games and matchdays. The way they engage with their fans 24/7, 365 but in particular the way they presented their games in a way that sort of assumed the best out of people, assumed they knew the game and understand it, and presented it in a soccer-authentic way which resonated.

“I think there’s a tendency still, which is changing a bit in American professional soccer, to try to do too much in terms of game presentation. Constant interruptions in the action, musical interludes, the whole nine yards. Absolutely we’re in the entertainment business but let the game be the primary part of that, the focal point.”

The quest for authenticity – whatever that means in such a young competition – has led to new MLS teams adopting boringly generic Anglicised names (hello, Atlanta United FC!). San Antonio FC is no different, though they lack the central location increasingly prized by the league: their neat stadium is in a drab suburb a 20-minute drive northeast of downtown, albeit next to a freeway that can whisk drivers to Austin in 75 minutes, potentially expanding the fanbase.

The club has sold more than 2,000 season tickets and is hoping for a full house at their inaugural home game against Swope Park Rangers on 9 April. They won their first match against Seattle Sounders 2 on Sunday, 3-0.

Bobby Moseley, a 20-year-old defender with Stoke City, has signed on loan; former MLS players Jason Johnson, Carlos Alvarez, Danny Garcia, Manolo Sanchez, Greg Cochrane and Josh Ford are also on board.

“In the short term, we have to put together a product that can be competitive within the USL. If we’re able to do that you kind of gain momentum, with on-field performances, then hopefully that will then drive fans to come to the game,” says Powell, an Englishman who was head coach at Elon University in North Carolina then Orlando’s academy director.

Orlando are an obvious source of inspiration for clubs such as SAFC: created in 2010, beginning play in the USL the following year, their passionate and swelling fanbase and determined owners quickly made a persuasive case to MLS, even in a state that was considered toxic after the Miami Fusion and Tampa Bay Mutiny folded in 2001.

The Seattle Sounders, Portland Timbers, Vancouver Whitecaps and Montreal Impact also leapt from USL to MLS in recent years: organic growth that becomes irresistible, a strategy that stands in contrast to instant products leavened by celebrity and wealth such as Los Angeles FC, New York City FC and David Beckham’s Miami vehicle.

Orlando, though, were once the Austin Aztex before the former Stoke director Rawlins hauled them to Florida in search of a sunnier business climate. Texas may be big, but it already has two MLS sides and neither FC Dallas nor Houston Dynamo have developed into superclubs. They toil to attract 20,000 fans to games despite vast catchment areas.

Lots of times I think people don’t put the city of San Antonio as one of the seventh or eighth largest in the country

San Antonio’s nearly two-thirds Hispanic population and location 150 miles from the border with Mexico present challenges as well as opportunities. “A majority of the population is Hispanic but most of those folks have a primary club that they already love, whether it’s a Mexican league club or a club around the world. We want to make San Antonio FC their favourite club or their co-favourite club,” Holt says.

His strategy to seduce MLS is three-fold: attract enough fans to show there is a major-league level support base; sign up a strong roster of corporate partners; produce a realistic plan to upgrade the stadium.

“I’m not the most patient person. How aggressively we’ll go after that – we would like to be there tomorrow but it’s going to take a little time to build this. It’s going to take a couple of years to build the fanbase and the support, the awareness, the momentum,” he says. Within six years? “Do we think that’s a realistic timeframe? Absolutely we do.”