Mum’s the word.
Major League Soccer has yet to officially welcome Las Vegas into its group with the league’s 30th franchise but franchise #31 may be coming in the not-too-distant future. The league apparently likes San Diego and its new stadium which is built for soccer specifications. San Diego may have some corporate money available as there is just Major League Baseball’s Padres in town as the sole big-league team. Apparently, San Diego officials have been talking with MLS officials about the use of the new San Diego State University stadium that is scheduled to open in August.
The MLS started an expansion journey in 2017 and it has been a very rocky trek at that. The league struggled to find four cities that would bring the number of teams to 28. Eventually the league landed its four, Nashville, Cincinnati, Charlotte and Columbus. The league then decided why not add two more teams, in St. Louis and Sacramento but Sacramento had financial troubles and never made it to the finish line. The league is banking on Las Vegas to fill that slot. Could the league end up with a 31st team? The MLS Commissioner Don Garber gave a garbled answer to that question. “We’ve got to get our 30 teams up and going, and then we can decide if Major League Soccer is going to expand beyond 30 to 31 or to 32. When we said we were going to have 28 teams, we never thought we would go beyond that. And then when we had a path to 30, we never thought we’d go beyond that.” Garber doesn’t know “whether MLS will be a 32-team league at some point in the future. But we’ve got some time to figure that out. There is no timetable for any decision beyond 30 teams.” The league has only 29 teams now.
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