MIAMI — The words from Francis Suarez, city of Miami mayor, and from Jorge Mas, Inter Miami soccer team principal owner, were flowing like champagne and why not? It was a long battle hard-won. It deserved a toast.
Now, it is the “What’s next?” that fascinates as the newly green-lit Miami Freedom Park stadium project takes root and begins to grow toward a planned spring 2025 grand opening. Because when you set the bar not modestly but with your very highest of hopes, you better make sure what sounds like hyperbole becomes reality.
When you promise champagne, you better not serve apple juice.
“Today, a dream commences,” proclaimed Mas.
The pressure to deliver big — to see this as a grandiose vision that succeeds spectacularly — comes from the dreamers themselves.
Suarez called this “the best sports deal in the history of this country.” And “a transformational moment for our city” — one that “will put us once again on the world stage.”
Mas said Miami Freedom Park will make the city “the centerpiece of futbol in the world,” and promised that “the best players in the world [will be] playing in your city and your stadium in Miami.”
Unspoken but more than implied:
The new stadium, after what will have been the club’s first five seasons of Major League Soccer played at the temporary place in Fort Lauderdale, finally will catapult Inter Miami to the MLS flagship expected of a team at the gateway to the Americas.
With “the best players in the world,” perhaps starting with a career swansong here by the sublime Lionel Messi, who just happens to own an oceanfront condo in Miami.
Inter Miami part-owner and glamorous face of the franchise David Beckham crowned a near-nine-year journey to finally realize a stadium in Miami with Thursday’s 4-1 city commission vote.
It is a 99-year no-bid lease, the no-bid aspect what fueled the critics.
Here is the thing, though.
Allowing Mas, a developer, to lease 73 acres of city-owned land and include on it not just a 40,000-seat stadium but also hotels, office space and other revenue generators is precisely why the stadium can be privately funded — no taxpayers dollars at all.
This is something South Florida has not seen since Joe Robbie built a football stadium in the 1980s, something you wondered even still existed in America.
Will the city get as much from annual rent as it maybe should have? No. But, if you are asking yourself, “What are Miami taxpayers getting out of this?” the answer is simple:
They are saving the money it otherwise wold have cost to subsidize Miami Freedom Park if Mas was not covering the tab. That is how others cities do it. Example: Buffalo and the state of New York (read: taxpayers) are paying $850 million to build the Bills a new stadium — the largest direct public subsidy ever for an NFL stadium.
The negotiations prior to Thursday’s Inter Miami vote all benefited the city. Amendments included a hike in annual rent from $3.6 million to $4.4 million, and a boost from 5% to 6% in the city’s share of gross revenue.
The stadium, completed in 2025, also will enhance Miami’s efforts to be a host city for the 2026 World Cup, which is to be co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico. It will give Miami a second and brand new major venue, along with Hard Rock Stadium, to offer as a site.
Mas also tantalized with the idea Miami Hurricanes football could find Miami Freedom Park as a future home, when UM’s lease with Hard Rock expires after 2033. Hard to imagine. But easier than it was before Thursday’s vote.
Losers in Thursday’s vote were few.
You can’t even call Fort Lauderdale one, because that was always a temporary home, Inter Miami’s training facility and academy will remain there, and Mas said he will work to land a women’s professional soccer team will take his team’s place in Lauderdale.
Certainly the golfers at Melreese who will be displaced have lost big. But that was a niche use of massive city-owned land, and it was an annual financial drain to the city. There are 25 other golf courses in Miami-Dade County and 40 in neighboring Broward. It isn’t as if the Melreese crowd must now retire clubs and give up the sport.
Oh, yeah. One other big loser: the tandem of Miami filmmaker and activist Billy Corben and former Marlins president David Samson, who teamed to release a viral, acerbic anti-stadium video just days before the vote.
Pairing Corben, an outspoken critic unpopular at city hall, with Samson, notoriously unpopular for negotiating the Marlins Park deal that proved a big a loser for the city, might in retrospect not have been a great idea. Henceforth, we suspect that if Corben and Samson offer to endorse any candidate running for office in Miami city politics, that person will be running like Usain Bolt in the opposite direction.
After all of the rancor and delays and Miami being Miami, Freedom Park is to open in just under three years from today.
It will have taken more than a decade of machete-ing through the labyrinth of Miami politics to get there — to get to what Mas auspiciously trumpets as “the centerpiece of futbol in the world.”
It had better live up. It better have been worth the wait.
