by Saturday, October 19th, 2019 – Detroit City FC 0 Milwaukee Torrent 1
On January 1st, 2012, the amateur and professional soccer landscape in Detroit and the Metro area was a barren wasteland.
Detroit Arsenal won the NPSL Championship in its inaugural season, 2005, then played one more year and promptly folded. Meanwhile, up in Pontiac, the Michigan Bucks were running roughshod over most of their PDL competition, but were only drawing crowds comparable to medium-sized dinner parties. Then along came Detroit City, and everything changed.
I’ve spent the past 6+ years documenting the whys and hows of the club’s rise, so I won’t rehash all of that here. Instead, I’ll try to condense it down into a simple formula:
Professionalism + healthy dose of ambition balanced with an equal amount of realism + community engagement = Success!
The enthusiasm generated by City’s first season did not go unnoticed. Almost immediately, imitators began to pop up, looking to ride the wave of a massive hit, a la Battlestar Galactica in the wake of Star Wars.
The first, FC Sparta, came along in 2013, eager to get a piece of that sweet sweet supporter-driven action. While their ambition was sky-high, they lacked every other crucial element and got zero traction. Now in their third/forth/fifth? incarnation, they’re still trying to get it right.
After them came Dan Duggan and his plans to bring a USL team to Detroit and build a 5000 seat stadium in 90 days. Unsurprisingly, this highly-ambitious yet in-no-way-reality-based plan also fell flat.
Most recently, the Gilbert-Gores MLS to Detroit bid posed a very real existential threat to City and its future prospects. Luckily, for whatever reasons you choose to believe, MLS turned its attention elsewhere, bilking other municipalities out of millions of taxpayer dollars and folding existing independent clubs into the collective.
Through it all, City persisted, setting and accomplishing reasonable goals and biding their time while those around them bit off far more than they could chew. Now, every would-be local competitor has fallen by the wayside, and City stands poised to join the wider footballing world as a fully-professional club. This fall’s toe-dip into those waters showed that they’re more than ready.
As the amateur/semi-pro chapter of the club’s history closes, another begins. There will be new friends, new foes, new trash-ass, player-hatin’ refs, and unforeseen obstacles to overcome. That said, much will continue as currently constituted. City’s stable, competent ownership and well-established culture of professionalism has the club well-positioned to become a national, and perhaps one day, continental power.
More importantly, in lieu of a worthy challenger emerging, City will remain Detroit’s football club – today, tomorrow, until forever.
Gallery photos by Franzi Loetzner
