April 13, 2023 – Major League Soccer (MLS) – FC Cincinnati News Release
Installing seats in the lower bowl seems to have been an unnecessary expense.
Such was the dry commentary of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch last month when St. Louis CITY SC played its first MLS home game. The prolonged frenzy from supporters too geeked to sit down – think a bowl-full of Bailey – caused jaws to drop. So had the hours of pre-match crowd-control challenges for blocks around the fashionable new CITYPARK, some 10 minutes west of the Gateway Arch.
These were not just the pumped-up soccer stalwarts one finds in colorful abundance in Cincinnati, Nashville or Seattle. These folks, multiple reports mutually confirmed, were nearly crazy.
“It was incredible,” said star midfielder Eduard Löwen, whose penalty kick goal put City ahead to stay in a 3-1 victory over Charlotte. “The moment I stepped out I had goosebumps. You could tell the whole city was waiting for this moment so long.”
More of the same is no doubt in store for FC Cincinnati this Saturday, when the still unbeaten (5-0-2) and still Eastern Conference leading Orange and Blue take their MLS-longest nine-game road unbeaten streak into the Missouri maelstrom.
The match is also a homecoming for FCC head coach Pat Noonan, who grew up in the St. Louis metro community of Ballwin, Mo. As well as anyone, Noonan understands the forces behind the city’s frenzied embrace of CITY SC. It’s one of the more curious sidebars to the growth of MLS that a franchise took so long to materialize in “The Lou,” because the city’s soccer history outside MLS is unquestionably the richest in the U.S. The enthusiasm surfacing now has been pent up for decades.
“I was fortunate to grow up in a soccer town,” Noonan says. “A lot of attention was put on the sport, because we all knew that so many of the biggest names in U.S. soccer had come from our town. And now, with St. Louis having an MLS club, you can feel the positive energy in that town around that team.”
Not an expert on soccer history pre-FCC? Still think this MLS newcomer may be somehow terribly presumptuous to proclaim that the “SC” in its name stands for “Soccer Capital” as well as just “Soccer Club”? Then Noonan would have you consider:
*Reports of soccer games in St. Louis newspapers date back more than 150 years, at least to 1872.
*In 1907, St. Louis was said to have “the only professional soccer league in America.”
*In the 1950 World Cup, when the U.S. Men’s National Team stunned England…
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