Soccer team Detroit City FC will play in the first round of the US Open Cup at 7 p.m. on Wednesday , May 7. The opposition will be RWB Adria from Chicago, and the game will take place at Stevenson High School in Livonia. Admission is $10.
The Open Cup games are not included as part of the season ticket packages.
Detroit City played it’s first ever season in 2012 in the National Premier Soccer League’s Midwest Division, playing its matches at Cass Tech. Nicknamed Le Rouge and with a crest featuring the Spirit of Detroit, the team ended with a respectable record of five wins, two ties and five losses. At the end of the season, Canadian Kofi Opare left City to sign a professional contract with the LA Galaxy.
The co-owners of Le Rouge are Alex Wright and Sean Mann, local businessmen looking to offer something back to their community. Well aware that Detroit City isn’t about to compete with the Tigers, Lions, Red Wings and Pistons, Wright says that the whole thing is easier if your ambitions are modest. “Sean and I didn’t look at it from that business macro point of view,” Wright says. “We are both local Detroiters and our work is in the city. We came together through a rec league Sean had founded, discovered the interest and tapped into that. We decided to start small and smart. When you do that, you don’t have the worries that the pro teams have.”
Wright says that soccer is already popular in the States, so the idea that Detroit City is going to be the team to carry the sport forward is nonsensical. Rather, he and the team simply have to tap into a couple of thousand fans in Southeast Michigan and encourage them to come to Cass Tech to see a game. “I do think it’s inevitable that eventually the pro-soccer experiment will come to Detroit,” says Wright. “But pro-soccer will only succeed if the small clubs grow first. Our job is simply to build the supporter base and provide a winning team. It’s hard to imagine Detroit City going pro, because the amount of capital required to build a pro team is astronomical. It’s just not the way the business works.”
For more information, visit the Detroit City FC website.
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