Major League Soccer has been aggressively expanding in recent years, and in an announcement made on Tuesday, the league updated its followers with news of another new franchise that will start up in the near future.
The league announced that a new franchise will be founded in St. Louis, Missouri in 2022, becoming the twenty-eighth club to form part of the United States’ premier soccer competition.
The franchise is now the fourth pending new addition to the league, with Nashville SC and Inter Miami set to join next year and Austin FC set to become a part of MLS in 2021.
This means that the league will announce two more new franchises before finishing its plans to expand to 30 teams over the next few seasons, a goal which the league established last year.
The new Missouri franchise is notable in that it will be the first franchise to have women as its majority owners. The group that will pay the $200 million franchise fee in order to join the league is led by Enterprise Rent-a-Car president Carolyn Kindle Betz. The league cited the city’s rich soccer tradition as a reason for establishing a new franchise there, apart from the money paid for the bid.
It’s another exciting step in a process of rapid growth that the league is undergoing with the goal of becoming one of the planet’s best soccer competitions.
