TopMenu

Detroit City FC Gearing up For 2017

Detroit City FC

Emerging as a formidable success, Detroit City FC is already making plans for 2017. 

The Detroit City FC is an interesting story among the professional soccer ranks. After several seasons worth of strong attendance figures, the National Premier Soccer League franchise felt that it needed to grow beyond the 3,100-seat Cass Tech stadium. A solution was to renovate the 6,000-seat Keyworth Stadium, and Detroit City FC’s owners received more than $700,000 in crowdsourced funding for the project funding under the Michigan Invests Locally Exemption. Roughly 500 individuals contributed to the initiative, and Crain’s Detroit Business reported that they will be splitting $107,000 in revenue sharing funds.

Detroit City FC continues to post strong attendance figures and, with 2017 on the horizon, is looking to spruce up Keyworth Stadium. More from Crain’s Detroit Business:

DCFC wants to upgrade Keyworth’s turf to grass in 2017, but that remains in the discussion stages.

“The funds from the community investment campaign were pretty much exhausted on the renovations we have completed up to this point, so any upgrade to the field surface would require an additional infusion of investment capital or would have to be paid out of operating funds,” team co-owner Todd Kropp said via email. “A number of things would have to fall into place for us to overhaul the field surface by 2017. Not impossible but somewhat unlikely.”

Ownership has been reluctant to take on debt, but said it had made arrangements for additional money for stadium work through the Detroit Development Fund, a nonprofit community development financial institution that provides financing for Detroit-based neighborhood businesses and services. The club also has discussed taking on additional investors — not the preferred option.

“It’s been a remarkable year in terms of the growth of DCFC,” Kropp said in a statement. “We set extremely ambitious goals for 2016, and with all the supporters who once again rallied behind us we proved that a club that has close ties to its community can be a huge success. Although we met or exceeded most of our targets for 2016, we are not going to get complacent. We’re already looking at how we can reach an even wider audience for 2017.”

The passion for Detroit City FC is something that has gotten attention across the soccer landscape. We recently looked at whether the interest in Detroit City FC can eventually lead to an MLS expansion entry.

Image courtesy of Detroit City FC. 

RELATED STORIES: Can Passion for Soccer Scale in Detroit? 

, ,

August Publications