Miguel Almirón of Atlanta, right, is challenged by Wilfried Zaha of Charlotte FC in their game on ... More March 1. Getty Images As Major League Soccer continues celebrating its 30th season, one of its biggest successes has been in making inroads on a region where pro sports of all shapes have had difficulty gaining a stronghold: The American South. Once again in 2025, Atlanta United (first), Charlotte FC (second) and Nashville SC (fifth) are among the top five in average MLS attendance entering Matchday 8. If you expand the definition of The South to include Florida and Texas, the region is home to eight clubs total – roughly 27% of the league and 30% of the league’s American footprint. Of those, only FC Dallas was part of the initial lineup of 10 clubs that launched the league in 1996. And it’s impossible to ignore the influence that the league’s southern growth has had on the potential willingness to eventually flip the MLS calendar to a fall-to-spring model, bringing the league in line with major European competitions. But how did we arrive at this point where a region known primarily for American football has been such a bastion for the world’s game? Here’s a few key factors that shaped MLS’ southward path. MORE FOR YOU Google’s Android Update—Bad News For Samsung And Pixel Users ‘NYT Mini’ Clues And Answers For Friday, April 11 China Raises U.S. Tariffs To 125%—Xi Urges EU To Back Beijing’s Pushback Against ‘Unilateral Bullying’ Expansion Slows In Other Sports In many cases, MLS has found a footing in local communities by targeting markets that are perhaps underrepresented in other North American major pro sports. And it just happens that many of those markets are in the South. For example, since the NHL’s Atlanta Thrashers relocated to Winnipeg, Atlanta has been the largest metropolitan statistical area in the United States without representation in all four “major” sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL). Orlando is the second-largest such area without representation in at least two of the big four. Austin is the second-largest such makret without representation in one. And before MLS began its southward expansion about a decade ago, the league had already experienced success at clubs launched in other markets that were underserved by other pro sports leagues, including Columbus, Portland, Montreal and Vancouver. So there was reason to believe Southern cities with similar characteristics could be strong MLS markets. Helpful Timing However, part of what made southward expansion palatable was the concept that having MLS soccer in their cities represented a legitimate major league sports experience. That was a far harder vision to sell during the league’s early days, when most clubs played before mostly empty stadiums as the second tennants at American football stadiums. And it wasn’t until an earlier wave of expansion that the standard of the matchday experience in MLS rose considerably. The work of early wave expansion clubs like the Seattle Sounders and Toronto FC was critical to creating a vision of MLS that later-arriving Southern cities could buy into. Had Southern MLS clubs launched before those peers in the True North and Pacific Northwest, they may have had a far more difficult time being taken seriously by the sports media and fanbase in their local markets. Easier Routes to Stadium Construction For the MLS ownership groups that have opted for the route of constructing their own stadiums, they have found the policy environment in the South far more amenable to securing land and some public funding for stadium construction. That doesn’t mean Southern cities have been willing to blindly fork over taxpayer dollars to fund construction; projects in Houston, Nashville, Austin and Orlando were underwritten primarily by private funds. But the land acquisition process was exponnentially quicker than it has been in some MLS 1.0 markets. Anyone who has followed the league’s entirety is well-acquainted with D.C. United’s effort for more than a decade to come up with a workable stadium plan before finally constructing Audi Field, which opened in 2018. The New England Revolution are still in search of a concrete plan to build their own soccer-specific ground closer to Boston. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Editorial StandardsForbes Accolades