Photo by Ashley Gieseking
Jim Kavanaugh
A group of investors, including World Wide Technology CEO Jim Kavanaugh, announced Tuesday they are making a bid to bring a Major League Soccer team to St. Louis.
Members of Enterprise's Taylor family—including Executive Chairman Andy Taylor and his niece, Senior Vice President Carolyn Kindle Betz—along with World Wide Technology CEO Jim Kavanaugh announced Tuesday they are making a bid to bring a Major League Soccer team to St. Louis. In April 2017, voters struck down a ballot measure that asked the public to partially fund a soccer stadium. This time around, the team, Betz says, would be privately financed—they aren't going to be asking for taxes to pay for the stadium. If the group of investors succeeds, the team will be the first in the league's history to be majority women owned—and one of few in professional sports.
The other owners would be six members of the Taylor family, all women, so while the women-led ownership wasn't planned, it's still remarkable.
"For some reason, I don't think our family has a history of traditionally having boys in the family. Andy was the last male born into the family," Betz said.
Betz continued: "I think it's very exciting to be able to say that the first female[-majority-owned] club would be here in the city of St. Louis. I can tell you that when we embarked on this adventure, it wasn't to have the goal being the first female-owned club. It was, 'How do we continue to enhance what's going on here in the city? ... We want to continue to enhance the city, make it more vibrant, and make it an international destination for tourism and business as well."
So why soccer?
Betz said that they have been "looking at soccer and where it's going, and we believe that it's only going to continue to increase in popularity—it truly is a global force. We feel that it would bring a sort of unity to our community."
Another good reason: The World Cup is coming to the Americas—Canada, the United States, and Mexico—in 2026.
"We certainly would want to be one of those [locations], and we intend to have a stadium that will be very attractive for that," Taylor said.
The group of investors, according to Betz, is eyeing a lot to the west of Union Station as the to-be-secured team's future stadium, with the VP calling the space a "preferred location." Still, "there's a lot left to be discussed," said Taylor, meaning that St. Louis is competing against other cities for the team, and would need to work with the city and state to bring it here. Fox 2 reported at the end of September that MLS Commissioner Don Garber previously mentioned Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and San Diego as other options for a new team.
As for the timeline, MLS isn't releasing information, Betz says. But "what we can say right now is that we are officially in the running to try to be able to score one of the newly expanded franchises."
