MY DREAM COMES (partially) TRUE as USL side Miami FC will play two home games this weekend at the venerable Orange Bowl, near Miami's Little Havana neighborhood. The grand old stadium, which has hosted a plethora of international matches, club friendlies and even an AC Milan friendly, is set to host its first regular season professional American league soccer match ever. It also marks the first time that a soccer team with the name "Miami" in it will actually play within Miami city limits, as the old MLS Miami Fusion played in Broward County and the current Miami FC plays its matches in the Miami suburb of Kendall.
Miami will take on the Minnesota Thunder Friday night at 8 (which will be broadcast live on Fox Soccer Channel) and on Sunday will face the Atlanta Silverbacks.
Hopefully these matches will generate a good turnout and give notice to the MLS that perhaps Miami should have a team once again. I always thought that the Orange Bowl would be an ideal location to host a Miami MLS franchise because of its central location within Miami-Dade county, where, in theory at least, the majority of potential fans reside. I remember in the old Miami Fusion days, that the majority of the members of the supporters club resided in Miami-Dade and made the lengthy trip up to Lockhart Stadium to support the Fusion. The distance made regular attendance to Fusion games hard for many fans and thus hampered the potential success of the club. Even though the OB is an American football stadium, it isn't the ultra modern ones that used to awkwardly host all of the MLS teams and actually would do quite nicely if an MLS team with a (impossibly?) large fanbase can plant roots within our fair city. We can all hope, yeah?
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