The MLS expansion team in St. Louis has announced its name. And they continued in the recent MLS trend of not being creative at all. Instead, they became the latest MLS team to name their team the European way, going with the ultra-original "St. Louis City FC."
MLS has expanded significantly over the past several years. St. Louis will be the league's 30th team, and the 12th added since 2015. Of those 12 teams, eight have some variation of "(City) FC/SC." There are also two "Uniteds," 2017 additions Atlanta and Minnesota, and David Beckham added "Inter" before Miami (naturally in a nod to Inter Milan). The only exception is Sacramento Republic FC, which is simply keeping the name of the existing USL club when it joins MLS in 2023.
Once all four expansion teams (also Austin FC and Charlotte FC) begin play, more than half of MLS will have European-style names. The number will either be 17 or 18, depending on how you want to count the New York Red Bulls (this might be the first time that I didn't call them the MetroStars). And nearly all of those teams have joined MLS as expansion franchises over the past 15 years.
That hasn't always been the case. When MLS debuted, virtually every team had a nickname common to other North American professional franchises. The only exception was DC United. That remained the case until 2005, when the Dallas Burn changed their name to FC Dallas. The 2005 season also marked the debut of an expansion team in Salt Lake City, which got the whole European-style thing started when it bypassed the traditional naming convention and named itself "Real Salt Lake." (There was also a second LA team that debuted that season, "Chivas USA," which was partly owned by the owners of the Mexican team known as "Chivas.") Since then, we've seen more European-style names than not.
We're even seeing it at the lower levels. The USL is the second tier of North American professional soccer. A lot of MLS expansion teams are successful USL franchises in larger markets that have shown they can support an MLS club. And even the USL has become overrun with "FCs" and "SCs."
Over the first decade or so of MLS, the league wasn't taken very seriously. There were a number of reasons for this, and the team names were one of those reasons. Some of that criticism was warranted. A lot of it was not. But MLS franchises were particularly sensitive to the name thing.
Everyone likes to compare MLS to European leagues. And one of the trademarks of European leagues is that the teams have "traditional" names. They all have unofficial nicknames that are used by their supporters, but the formal name of the teams is the standard "(City Name) FC" or something similar. So, I guess as a way to legitimize themselves, MLS teams started adopting that naming convention. (Although, it's worth noting that the sport is called "soccer" here. We all know what "FC" means, but it comes off as a bit pretentious when North America's "football" is a completely different sport.)
Does any of this make an actual difference? Of course not! Teams are free to name themselves whatever they like. But that change in how MLS clubs are named can is almost directly proportional to the growth of soccer in the U.S. More specifically, the increased popularity of European soccer in the U.S.
All four of the biggest European domestic leagues have U.S. TV deals. NBCSN pays a fortune for the Premier League and shows like five games a weekend. England's not your cup of tea? That's OK. The Bundesliga is on FS1. Or you can watch La Liga on beIN, with the occasional Serie A game making its way onto ESPN. The Champions League has had a bit of a vagabond existence, with its U.S. TV rights moving to CBS Sports Network during the pause.
It's not a fair comparison to rate the quality of play in the top European leagues with the quality of play in MLS. But what MLS teams can do to make people think of these European clubs is adopting similar names. Which is why, you'll notice, it's only soccer teams that have taken the European naming convention. Every other expansion team in every other sport, goes with the American standard of "Location Nickname."
Here's the thing, though. No one is going to confuse an MLS team with a European team. So what exactly is the point of using the European name style? Is it because that feels more legitimate? Is it because they think they'll be taken more seriously if they're known as "(City) Football Club" instead of by whatever nickname they choose?
If that's the case, there's nothing wrong with it. It's just so boring and unoriginal, though. Your name is your identity. People were anxiously waiting for months to see what Seattle was going to name its hockey team. Now we're waiting just as anxiously to find out what the Artists Formerly Known as the Washington Redskins will be known as moving forward. (Their temporary name, the "Washington Football Team," would fit right in with MLS. I can even envision a nice little intercity rivalry with DC United.)
Maybe the problem is that the unoriginal has also become the predictable. When Real Salt Lake joined the league, their name was unique. At the time, everybody except for DC United had an American-style name. But do you know the last time a team joined MLS with a name that was more than simply "(City) FC/SC" or "(Place) United"? 2012, when the Montreal Impact joined MLS from the USL. The last team to enter the league as a brand new franchise that actually has a nickname is the Philadelphia Union, who joined in 2010.
Since then, MLS has added 15 teams. The only four with actual nicknames (Montreal Impact, Portland Timbers, Vancouver Whitecaps, Sacramento Republic) were elevated from USL. Everyone else has a European-style name. It's become boring in more than one sense. Not only do the names lack any sort of creativity, everybody has essentially the same name!
How can teams develop their own identities when the only difference in their names is the city? It's confusing! Sure, it doesn't matter to their own fans, but when those same fans refer to their team by the nickname they came up with for them, no one's gonna know who they're talking about! Likewise, if you say "the Sounders" or "the Galaxy," everybody knows who you mean. All the FCs and SCs and Uniteds have to be referred to by just their city name, though. That doesn't really do much to promote a brand.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with any of this. If that's what they want to do, it's their prerogative. (Full disclosure, my favorite MLS team is New York City FC.) I'd just like to see the MLS teams work a little harder to build their own identity. Just because you're a soccer team (sorry "football club"), you don't have to copy what's done in Europe. You're not in Europe. You're in North America. You should embrace that. And one way to embrace that is to have an American-style name.
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