Like the capital city itself, the Austin Aztex have undergone substantial changes in the past seven years. This season, the soccer club, led by Coach Paul Dalglish, starts playing at the professional level in the United Soccer League. It’s a climb up the ranks toward the team’s objective—Major League Soccer—that follows a recent stretch of seemingly watershed deals, feats and major-league intrigue.

The fortune of the club took its first auspicious turn in 2013 with an amateur-level championship in the Premiere Development League. Five to 10 years from now, that title might be considered the prologue to a historic local success story if the organization’s CEO, Rene van de Zande, has his way. Nearly a year ago, van de Zande publicly aired his desire to groom the team into an MLS franchise. With the new USL status, he has amped up the chatter about the prospect. “It’s part of our vision, and we know the criteria the MLS is looking for,” he says. “You need to have a soccer-specific stadium—the MLS is not going to allocate a soccer franchise without a stadium—and then there’s a strong preference from the league that the stadium be in a downtown area.”

Chipping away toward those lofty ends, the Aztex spent the off-season networking with the MLS at a furious pace—first striking an affiliation agreement with Columbus Crew SC in November, then playing host to three big-league clubs in preseason friendlies at the inaugural ATX Pro Challenge in February, and finally winning a tune-up match against the Houston Dynamo days later. Now that’s progress.

Although the MLS looks to expand upon the 22 teams it will have in competition as of 2017, the relatively nascent interest puts Austin—the nation’s 11th-largest city—behind a handful of locales that have the league’s immediate attention after years of lobbying. San Antonio, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Sacramento and St. Louis are all in position to be awarded a franchise by the league in the next five years.

Accordingly, van de Zande stresses patience in what will undoubtedly be a slow collaborative march with city officials toward a big-league target. (The city had not responded to a request for a comment at press time.) “We are at least five years away in order for [a stadium] to happen,” van de Zande says. “So let’s build the fan base at the grass roots first; then the rest will come.”