Sacramento, as a city, has always had a chip on its shoulder. Despite the 2.5 million residents in its greater metropolitan area and its status as the capital of California, it has long been overshadowed by the likes of the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley and Los Angeles.
That dynamic inevitably spills over to sports, where its soccer team, Sacramento Republic of the second-tier USL, was infamously spurned last year by Major League Soccer only 17 months after it was very publicly awarded an expansion slot.
