The Miami FC turned things around in the last ten minutes of last night’s game versus Pittsburgh Riverhounds to grab all three points in an important matchup at the top of the USL Championship Atlantic Division.
Magic City Soccer will take the last 10 days of 2019 to review the last 10 years of Miami-Dade County soccer. Today in Miami Soccer in Review, we take a look back at 2015. An unexpected rival enters the Miami professional soccer market, and plans to be playing games sooner than anyone would imagine.
By the middle point 2015, the David Beckham proposal bandied about anonymously in 2013 and shared publicly in February 2014 was looking ragged. Proposals for Dodge Island and Downtown were shot down. A compromise location next to Marlins Park was being stonewalled by property owners abutting the stadium’s property. It was clear that building a stadium would be the defining problem of the plan.
Seeing the instability, Italian businessman and investor Riccardo Silva made a play. Silva and Italian legend Paolo Maldini announced that The Miami FC would be competing in the North American Soccer League in the 2016 season. Instead of building a new venue, it would play at Ocean Bank Field at FIU Stadium. A head coach (Alessandro Nesta) and jersey unveiling soon followed.
Magic City Soccer will take the last 10 days of 2019 to review the last 10 years of Miami-Dade County soccer. Today in Miami Soccer in Review, we take a look back at 2013. An international superstar started to sniff around Miami, but what many hoped would be the beginning of the end of Miami’s time without Major League Soccer would turn out to only be the beginning of the beginning.
It felt like Miami was the center of the sports world in the summer of 2013. The Miami Heat were on their way to a second consecutive NBA Finals win, and attracting attention from all corners. One of the interested parties was soccer superstar David Beckham, who sat courtside during Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals. He was the guest of a high-profile Miami-based CEO: Brightstar’s Marcelo Claure.
Their presence at that game on May 30 was a hint of a larger story to break the following week: Beckham, who retained a $25 million expansion fee clause with Major League Soccer, would look to bring a side to Miami-Dade County.
Magic City Soccer will take the last 10 days of 2019 to review the last 10 years of Miami-Dade County soccer. Here, we begin our look back at a decade of Miami soccer in review with 2010, an Annus Horribilis.
The decade of the 2010s was supposed to open with a bang for the Miami soccer community. In October 2008, Barcelona announced that it would be partnering with Brightstar Corp. CEO Marcelo Claure to bring an Major League Soccer team to FIU Stadium, possibly as soon as 2010.
If you know anything about soccer in Miami this decade, you know this couldn’t have compared less favorably with what actually happened. In fact, the only constant was Claure, now involved in the ownership of Inter Miami CF.
In a topsy-turvy match, The Miami FC overcame an early deficit then and withstood 35 minutes of playing down a man after a red card was issued to Kwadwo Poku to beat the New York Cosmos 2-1 and come even closer to the NASL spring championship.