Now that St. Paul will be the new home of the Minnesota United FC, fans are cheering the future site of the Major League Soccer team’s stadium.
Jim Oliver, president of the Minnesota United fan club the Dark Clouds, said many of his group’s nearly 500 members live in the Twin Cities’ urban core and look forward to ditching the drive up to the National Sports Center in Blaine, where the team currently plays.
“I think everybody is pretty psyched on it,” Oliver said. “If it’s transit-adjacent and easily bike-able, it’s perfect. … Putting it where everybody in town can get to it is huge.”
The Dark Clouds have operated a shuttle bus on game days because many fans balk at the drive to the suburbs, he said.
Tim Alexander, founder of Duluth-based Minnesota United FC fan group Wolf’s Head, said membership in the team’s fan groups has risen steadily in recent years. Interest jumped when it was announced that the team was joining Major League Soccer, and the new stadium will bring in even more new fans, he said.
“It’s been years in the making, so it’s incredible to actually see it happening,” Alexander said. “It’s going to make things 100 times better for the team to have its own place that’s centrally located.”
The new stadium will likely also be popular among St. Paul’s immigrant communities.
Local economist Bruce Corrie’s recent survey of 319 African immigrants in Minnesota found that 20 percent said they bought season or single-game tickets to Minnesota United games.
“We are more than excited about this news,” said Najat Hamza, interim executive director at the Oromo Community of Minnesota. “We all came from East Africa, and the love of soccer is ingrained in the fiber of our society.”
Hamza said she expects the stadium to “change this community in a very dramatic way.” Currently, some diehard fans in the Oromo community make it out to the games in Blaine, but the greater community finds the stadium too far away and the experience not as inclusive as it could be, she said.
Hamza expects that to change with a stadium in Midway, which will be just a few Green Line stops from the Oromo Community of Minnesota’s headquarters in St. Paul.
“Not everybody in Minnesota is in love with baseball or American football or what have you,” she said. “This is the world-recognized sport that every nation on Earth participates in. I think it’s about time that Minnesota embraces that part of worldly identity as its own, as well.”
Former Minnesota Thunder coach Buzz Lagos, a teacher at the predominantly Somali-American and Oromo charter school Higher Ground Academy on Marshall Avenue, said he frequently takes 8 to 20 low-income kids to games in Blaine. His son Manny Lagos coaches the United team.
The students already follow the exploits of any number of local and international players, he said. Soon, they’ll be able to walk to games. “They’re heroes already,” Lagos said.
Joy of the People, which oversees free-play youth soccer at the South St. Anthony Rec Center, expects nothing but positives. “Soccer is the world’s most common language,” said artistic director Ted Kroeten.
Frederick Melo contributed to this report.
Nick Woltman can be reached at 651-228-5189. Andy Rathbun can be reached at 651-228-2121. Follow them at twitter.com/nickwoltman and twitter.com/andyrathbun.
