Inter Miami brings MLS back to South Florida — Will this time be different?

MLS expansion failed once before in Miami, but despite years of false starts, there are reasons for hope that 2020 debutantes Inter Miami can do better this time around.

After a nearly two-decade absence, MLS has returned to South Florida.

On Sunday, long-awaited expansion side Inter Miami CF will take the field for the first time, facing off across the country against the league’s previous hot expansion product LAFC. Two weeks later, MLS is officially back in Fort Lauderdale when Inter host the other LA side in Miami’s home opener.

At times, it didn’t ever seem like this moment would come.

After all, the last MLS attempt in Miami — the Fusion — were announced as one of the league’s first expansion sides in 1997, debuted in 1998 on the same piece of land in Fort Lauderdale as Inter Miami will, won the Supporters Shield in 2001 but were contracted anyway shortly thereafter in Jan. 2002.

The club just could never quite capture the heart of a tough sports market. Attendance at Fusion games wasn’t dreadful; the club averaged 11,000-plus in their final campaign, a decent number back in those early days of MLS, but season tickets sales were bottom of the league and in the end, the league opted to save teams in other markets first.

Now South Florida gets a second chance under a Miami-based ownership group that famously includes David Beckham and American Idol’s Simon Fuller, among others, even if it was a long road to get here.

The idea of Inter Miami has survived, and now all eyes will turn toward what happens on the field.

Off the pitch, the club’s rollout has been rocky, at times a slow-moving Hindenburg of a PR idea that appeared ready to catch fire, crash and explode into flame at any instant.

There have been enough “announcement” press conferences for multiple franchises, multiple stadium plans swallowed up by Miami’s political thicket and even now, even the most optimistic Inter Miami supporter can’t be certain when, if ever, the club will play in its ambitiously-conceived Miami Freedom Park home.

And yet the idea of Inter Miami has survived, and now all eyes will turn toward what happens on the field.

In that regard, Sporting Director Paul McDonough has quietly built a roster with a quality blend of exciting youth and veterans that should lay a competitive foundation for the future. McDonough is a veteran of the spectacular Atlanta United build that saw the Five Stripes capture an MLS Cup in only their second season and he has followed a similar blueprint in Miami.

McDonough started with a host of savvy signings on defense. He brought in steely World Cup veteran Roman Torres, MLS battle-tested Alvas Powell and the versatile A.J. DeLaGarza, a key cog in three MLS Cup champions during his lengthy stint with the LA Galaxy.

In Atlanta, reliable veterans like Michael Parkhurst and Jeff Larentowicz became essential foundational pieces on a roster brimming with young star power.

McDonough will look to replicate that here, pairing this group of veterans with Argentine signing Nicolas Figal from Independiente, who at only 24 has made over 100 appearances in the Argentine SuperLiga. They’ll also hope these veterans are a quality influence on uber-talented fullback Dylan Nealis, the Hermann Trophy finalist Inter Miami took with the third overall pick in the MLS SuperDraft.

Shielding the back four and strengthening the spine will be Wil Trapp, who for all his shortcomings as a U.S. international has been a stalwart performer in MLS for several years and at only 27, should have plenty of good soccer left in the tank.

The strong spine should suit new manager Diego Alonso, the Uruguayan who has twice won the CONCACAF Champions League. Alonso’s teams have a reputation as pragmatic units plenty content to stay compact and wait for chances to pick you apart on the break, and that’s exactly the type of team McDonough has put together for Alonso out of the gate.

Counterattacking soccer can be riveting, exciting soccer — at least when it’s played with pace and flashy attacking pieces — and there’s no shortage of those on McDonough’s first Inter Miami roster.

Again replicating the Atlanta build, McDonough and Beckham’s scouting network scoured South America for the “next big thing”, hoping to find players willing and able to play the roles Josef Martinez and Miguel Almiron did for Tata Martino’s blistering counter-attack in Atlanta.

Enter two sensational young Argentine talents, Matias Pellegrini and Julian Carranza, along with Rodolfo Pizarro, the 26 year-old Mexican international from Monterrey who was one of the most popular, electric playmakers in Liga MX.

Despite not yet landing the kind of global mega-star DP that Beckham and Co. have been linked with, they still have one DP spot to work with and this attacking trio sets the Herons up nicely to be one of the quicker teams in MLS on the break.

So the soccer should be good, but of course, as the Fusion demonstrated, there’s more to succeeding in the Miami/Fort Lauderdale sports market than being a good team.

Winning cures plenty of ills, but owner Jorge Mas’s pronouncement late last year that “winning will cure everything” is somewhat misplaced.

Miami is a tough sports market, an “event” town where spectacle oftens sells as much or better than success.

Marlins Park is a midsummer mausoleum.

The Dolphins, whose home is a state-of-the-art renovated building off the Florida turnpike, give away seats to avoid blackouts. The Miami Hurricanes — once the city’s heartbeat — share the place and now play to half-empty crowds on most college football Saturdays.

The point?

If you aren’t an event, a place to be “seen,” Miami may not care. Even if you win.

The Heat are the area’s favorite team, but even that isn’t just about a city being in love with basketball, it’s about the Heat being a part of the city.

Going to see the Heat in the “Heatles” era saw plenty of remarkable basketball and winning. But going to a Heat game then was just as much about the spectacle of seeing LeBron and Dwayne Wade at the height of their powers as it was winning games.

Still today, with the Heatles long gone, the Heat continue to do well at the gate. They draw crowds from across the sprawling city to American Airlines Arena’s location in dreary downtown Miami, which is more industrial, urban chic than take-my-talents-to-South-Beach glitz and glamour.

But the Heat’s staying power is now about combining the event of being at a Heat game with the way the franchise has embedded itself in the city’s DNA. From the murals in Liberty City to the men in Coral Gables cafes drinking cafecito and talking Tyler Herro to the abuelas in Hialeah wearing Udonis Haslem jerseys, there’s a connection the city has to the Heat that has overcome the “event” rule and captured the spirit of the city’s diverse population.

Is there room for that with the return of MLS? More importantly, can Inter Miami capture the heart of the Magic City while the team plays in northern Fort Lauderdale indefinitely?

Perhaps.

Certainly much has changed, both locally and with soccer in the United States since the last time MLS was played in South Florida.

Success in Miami would be a boon for MLS, which is probably why the league has been so willing to bend the rules to accommodate Inter Miami’s expansion.

Soccer in America has grown rapidly, buoyed by the successful USMNT World Cup teams in 2002 and 2010, the always-dominant USWNT, increased investment in MLS and game-changing television contracts that have brought the sport from obscure cable packages and internet streams to the mainstream in just two decades.

On a more local level, demographics changes in South Florida since 2001 have been favorable to the growth of the sport in the area.

Specifically, Fort Lauderdale’s Broward County has become much more multi-ethnic and is now home to the second largest concentration of soccer-crazed West Indians in the country. In Miami-Dade, the continued influx of South Americans that began en masse in the 1990s, as well as affluent European immigrants from Italy and Spain, has created additional market demand for professional soccer.

MLS wanted back into Miami for television market to be sure, but as one league official told me, “there’s a much different, better and satiable demand for the sport in the region now.”

That said, despite demographic changes and high local demand for televised games from the elite leagues in Europe and South America, domestic professional soccer in South Florida has been met with mixed results. Can Inter Miami tap into the increased demand for soccer in South Florida despite being in MLS?

Certainly the league hopes so. Miami is the fourth-largest urban area in the nation, bringing with it the third-largest Hispanic TV market in the country and one of, if not the most, cosmopolitan, Pan-American cultural city in two hemispheres.

Success in Miami would be a boon for MLS, which is probably why the league has been so willing to bend the rules to accommodate Inter Miami’s expansion.

But will it work?

It could. Fort Lauderdale has embraced the club, even if the club has been slow to embrace Fort Lauderdale. The stadium in northern Fort Lauderdale, flanked by national soccer hotbeds to the north and west, is close enough to key demographics to draw well, at least while the novelty still exists. And Paul McDonough’s Pan-American roster build has been intelligent, aiming to generate excitement among the diverse populations that make up South Florida.

What’s more, there’s recent precedent for breakthrough in brutal markets.

Despite the recent runaway success of MLS in medium-sized places like Portland and Seattle, MLS hadn’t conquered the big markets or the consciousness of the media internationally until Atlanta United burst onto the scene and LAFC joined the fray to rocking crowds and widespread acclaim a season later.

Almost no one expected soccer to work down south — now Atlanta is a model for what’s possible. As for LAFC, maybe that’s an even more encouraging model for Inter Miami. LA is an “event town” too and a second club alongside the LA Galaxy had already folded once — but with a great manager and an exciting brand of soccer, LAFC works. Then again, playing in Fort Lauderdale is a little more like playing in Carson than LAFC’s homegrown advantage in the Banc, a reminder that Inter still have some hurdles to contend with.

The good news? After nine years and countless false starts, we’ll know soon enough. They’ll be on a field, a real club, playing real soccer. And whatever happens, it looks like the soccer will at least be appealing out of the gate.