INDIANAPOLIS -- Deputy Mayor Dan Parker told FOX598/CBS4 that there was only one city talking up its potential to be a Major League Soccer expansion site at this week’s All-Star Game in Columbus, Ohio, and only one delegation that got the attention of MLS Commissioner Don Garber.
”The mayor of Indianapolis was the only mayor identified by the commissioner in his remarks at his press conference,” said Parker.
“Many of you may have seen the mayor of Indianapolis that was here over the last couple of days,” said Garber at a Wednesday night news conference when he was asked about Indianapolis’ expansion potential. ”There is no specific timing in place. Mayor Hogsett was at one of our events last night. He came to New York and met with us in the league office. The folks at the state and other people around the city are very bullish about an MLS team in Indianapolis, but we’ve done this a lot. We’ve expanded by over 20 teams over the last 25 years, so we understand how to manage this process. We love the city. We love the support from the city leaders and from the state. We think there’s an interesting ownership dynamic. We like the location that they’re talking about for the stadium, so we’ll continue to work with them and see how it plays out. If there’s a good market for us to expand in, if a market makes sense, we have the right owner and the right city, like any league, we would consider strongly expanding beyond the 30 teams that we have now.”
Parker was at Joe Hogsett’s side as the mayor networked with Garber, MLS officials and owners of other teams.
“We just talked about the process,” said Parker. “We want to bring Major League Soccer to Indianapolis. We want to anchor downtown in a soccer-specific stadium that we think would be very beneficial to the league. We talked about what could become regional rivalries between Indianapolis and Columbus and Cincinnati, Nashville and St. Louis and Chicago that would really benefit Major League Soccer to have all of these teams really clustered in the Midwest.”
MLS is set to welcome a San Diego franchise to the pitch in 2025 and the World Cup to the United States in 2026, but Garber said there are no firm plans or processes in place to open the expansion window in the near future.
”I think they’re doing so far everything right,” he said of the Indy approach. “They’re following the playbook.”
Garber also had high praise for Tom Glick, a North Carolina-based sports advisor who helped land the Charlotte FC franchise and is putting together the presumed international team of investors who would own and operate an Indianapolis club.
“Tom’s a very experienced guy,” said Garber. “He’s worked for the City football group. He’s worked for Charlotte. He’s worked for the NBA. He’s overseas and worked for Derby County FC. He’s a very experienced guy and he knows how to build a team and build a proper soccer team, so, I think they’re doing everything right. This is a process. It takes time and these are teams that require a whole lot of constituents to come together from ownership to city leaders and other partners and we’re very much in the beginning of this process.”
The price for the San Diego team to join MLS was $500 million plus start-up costs.
The price tag approached $1 billion to privately finance the recent St. Louis expansion franchise including stadium construction.
MLS has a $2.5 billion media deal with Apple+.
The identity of the Indianapolis ownership group, and whether it includes local investors as MLS has shown a preference for, will likely be revealed as the City’s Professional Sports Development Area special taxing district proposal makes its way through the Indiana Statehouse next month.
The PSDA would capture tax revenue from approximately a dozen downtown developments currently in the works and divert that money to pay off the city’s construction bonds on the proposed $220 million soccer stadium to be built on the site of the soon-to-be decommissioned Heliport in the southeast quadrant of downtown.
”The league is very familiar with the site that we have identified at the Heliport,” said Parker. “They wanted to know how our relationship was with the state to make sure that the PSDA got approved and that’s just the next step, so, we were encouraged by our trip to Columbus and its full steam ahead to get approval from the State on the PSDA. The next step in the process is to submit it to the Indiana Finance Authority for review. They would then submit it to the State Budget Committee which would need to be on an agenda for a State Budget Committee meeting. From there then it would go to the State Budget Agency for final approval. It would not go into operation until we would actually be committed to building a stadium so no taxes would be generated until there was a commitment made. We have already said, we are not gonna cbuild a stadium unless we receive an MLS club.”
Parker said design work on the proposed stadium and surrounding development could begin once the ownership group is determined.
By the end of this year, the city will begin demolition of the former Marion County Jail and Sheriff's Office adjacent to the proposed stadium site while the mayor plans to submit a franchise application to MLS by the first of 2025.
”Oh, I think it’s a green flag,” said Parker. “What I heard Garber say is, ‘Indianapolis is doing everything right.’ We need to keep down the path and the plan that they shared with the mayor back in April when he visited with the commissioner in New York City. Everything we heard from the league, from other owners, was, ‘Stick to that plan and keep moving down the road towards getting this done.’”
Left on the sidelines during this conversation is Ersal Ozdemir, owner of the Indy 11 USL soccer team who has labored unsuccessfully for a decade to get the attention of MLS and the deep-pocket partners it will take to buy into the league.
Ozdemir purchased 20 acres on Kentucky Avenue at the site of the former Diamond Chain plant, tore down the factory and began recovering the remains of hundreds or even thousands of people buried on the site of four cemeteries on the land in order to make way for a planned $2.5 billion soccer stadium and surrounding development.
When the Hogsett administration became aware of what it said was Ozdemir’s difficulty in lining up financing and preparing the site, the city withdrew its support of the Keystone Group owner and forged its own path to MLS headquarters in NYC and identified the Heliport site which fit in with its plan to redevelop the southeast corner of downtown.
The city has offered to pay Ozdemir $12 million to buy back the Diamond Chain site and turn it into a green space.
Parker said the mayor’s office has yet to hear back from the team owner on its offer.
The Indy 11 owner did not respond to a request from FOX59/CBS4 for comment on the MLS commissioner’s news conference.