I’ll believe it when I see it, and the comments from the people in charge aren’t inspiring me with hope.
Hey, remember this article about the proposed soccer stadium just south of Straz Tower from early December? “working to secure financing,” “targeting early spring,” and so on? I kinda doubted their timeline for the USL soccer team to start playing in spring 2026?
Yeah, so, I was right to doubt them.
On Monday, Tom Daykin published an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel titled “Iron District soccer stadium project moves forward. Developer hopes for summer construction start.” As someone who thought the entire “early spring” timeline sounded a little shaky, I am obviously interested in a story that says “summer” is now the start time.
The good news from the article is that the land parcel has been sold. No, seriously, that’s good news. The group that acquired the land from Marquette has moved it along to “MDC Iron District LLC” as part of the process of allowing the project to accept the $9.3 million grant from the state of Wisconsin to assist with the construction project.
This is where I point out that Governor Tony Evers announced that grant in November of 2023 and they’re only just now getting around to the legality issues around accepting the grant. That seems somehow both good and bad. Good, because accepting the money presumably means they’re going to spend it pretty quickly, bad because it took over 14 months to line up all the ducks to actually start moving forward.
I’m going to drop this part in straight from Daykin’s article:
The land sale is an incremental step forward in completing the financing package for the Iron District, [Bear Development CEO S.R.] Mills told the Journal Sentinel. The developers hope to begin construction in early summer, he said.
Early summer. Moving the goalposts forward at least three months from what they said in November. Here’s the math I did back in November relative to when the stadium might open:
I don’t know how to tell them this, but 16 months from right now is early April 2026. 16 months from the first day of 2025 is the first day of May 2026. 14 months from “early spring 2025” where spring officially starts in late March is in May 2026 and 16 months from there is late July 2026.
And here’s Daykin again:
The plan is to have the stadium finished by the the spring opening of the USL Championship league’s 2026 season, Mills said.
If they threw a shovel in the ground today, February 28th, 2025, and finished the stadium in precisely 14 months, that’s April 28, 2026. If they throw a shovel in the ground on June 20th, 2025, the first day of summer and thus the earliest possible summer date, 14 months later is August 20, 2026.
Buddy, you are NOT playing soccer in that stadium in the 2026 USL season, not even with a “we’ll play some road games to start the season” plan. We can all do math, just admit the team’s not playing til 2027.
Oh, and by the way: “incremental step forward in completing the financing package” sounds an awful lot like “we’ve got a lot more work to do to finish up actually paying for this thing.” That’s not exactly filling me with confidence that they’re going to hit that early summer start date that they themselves are stating is their “hope,” y’know?
In the meantime, I’m going to keep driving past that giant pile of ground down hotel brick that’s sitting on the southwest corner of 6th and Michigan and wondering when exactly it’s going to go away…..
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