[eplnut]

MLS Commissioner Don Garber includes Cleveland as 2008 MLS expansion candidate in Jack Bell's weekly soccer column in today's NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/sp.../03soccer.html

[BulaJacket]

Originally Posted by NYTimes - (here's all of the expansion talk)

Stadium Developer Chosen

Rowan University announced yesterday that it had selected the Milestone Group, a real estate and private equity firm, as the master developer for a new athletic complex on its campus that could include a soccer stadium for a team that would begin play in Major League Soccer in 2009.

"This is an extremely complex project, one that requires the master developer to have expertise in developing retail and housing as well as sports and entertainment facilities," Donald Farish, president of Rowan, said in a statement released by the university. "We were very impressed with the proposals we received, but the Milestone team had the right combination of talent and experience that we believe will best suit our needs as a university."

Rowan is in Glassboro, N.J., about 20 minutes from Philadelphia. Milestone will work with a number of subcontractors on the development, and it will have exclusive development rights to the project if a contract is signed with Rowan by July 1. That is also the deadline M.L.S. gave Rowan for landing a team.
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MORE EXPANSION The league is soon expected to add a team for the 2008 season, the league's 14th, and Commissioner Don Garber said it would be in the Midwest — St. Louis, Milwaukee or Cleveland. The group seeking an expansion team for St. Louis is led by Michael Huyghue, the former general manager of the Jacksonville Jaguars. He is the president of Axcess Sports, an entertainment company that represents the rapper Snoop Dogg, among others. The group is considering a site in the Metro East area, across the Mississippi River in Illinois, to build a soccer stadium because of more favorable tax laws that enable the state to back construction bond issues, according to an article in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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