http://www.examiner.com/democrat-in-birmingham/birmingham-should-bring-mls This is the best "design" I could find:
It could work, but like elsewhere you would still need to find the big bucks owners and $40M for the franchise. Good luck to Birmingham City - no hang on that might be taken already. Well good luck just the same.
If that name went anywhere, I'd want it to be Atlanta; AV represented ATL in 1969, for the first half of the NASL season. Birmingham Vulcans. Birmingham Bulls Birmingham Blazers. (for UAB)
Grand vision and all, but Legion Field isn't exactly in the best part of town. I know everyone on BigSoccer clamors for a downtown stadium, but this is one place where something in the suburbs would work better; building something next to Regions Park in Hoover might work.
Birmingham Alabama? Doesn't exactly roll of the tongue like 'LA' but.. meh. Hopefully MLS decides up the number of teams in the league past the 22 they have stated they wish so that smaller market teams have a chance. Personally I feel that soccer, being a subculture here in the States, that MLS should try and set up franchises in places that are not already bloated with other pro-teams. For it is like Robert Killebrew once said, "Whole towns shut down on Friday night for games. Every small town. I was born here in California. I know it isn't like that here."
i feel that MLS is going against the small town feel though...For instance, look at how badly they want the New York Cosmos to return. they want places that will look 'sexy' in the international market for players to come play their trade. still, i would love nothing more to see Atlanta, Birmingham, Carolina, Nashville, Tampa Bay or Orlando, and Miami in MLS one day.
Vulcan FC. Uniforms would be purple if you wanted to do some serious Birmingham history. I haven't lived in Birmingham for awhile, but I hear that a lot of the progress that it made as a city in the 90's and early 00's has swung back the other way. I think it'd be a bad move for MLS. Birmingham politics are arcane at best, and pretty nasty at worst. The crime rate in that city has a habit of spiraling out of control from time to time. The population might well embrace their own professional team, but then again, they might just decide they have better things to do. And I don't know what the population growth has been out there over the last few years, but I suspect that it hasn't been stellar. Wouldn't be a total surprise if Huntsville eclipsed it as the biggest city in the next few decades. Beyond that, while there's some money in B-ham, I don't think there's anyone with 40 millon dollars to blow on soccer. Birmingham's got a lot of old, conservative money. Not a lot of internet startups going on out there, though.
That's a pity. Guess the Providence Gold Bugs will never return then, let alone the Kalamazoo Kangaroos..
There won't be anymore. The city chose high school football over international soccer when they put the fieldturf in Legion Field. I'm hoping that UAB gets their stadium built within the next few years and makes it wide enough to accomodate soccer so that we can bring back the USA matches.
Legion Field is like RFK with field turf, aka a really bad idea. I could see them tearing it down and building something new, but even then the location sucks and the current government is more concerned with a domed stadium by the BJCC (at least it was with Langford, wonder how he's holding up in prison).
They've been trying to build a domed stadium for at least ten years now. I think it's because a domed stadium would create even more graft and kickbacks than an open field ever could.
Birmingham City FC. Nickname-'The Blues.' Perfect name if they ever got a team. Wait. Haven't I seen that somewhere?
