Like other revitalization pioneers in Detroit before him, Sean Mann is standing amid a toothless urban landscape, surrounded by decades-old detritus, permanent graffiti, and pockmarked vistas — but he’s inspired by his own vision of what’s possible, and propelled by the hope that others see it, too.
Mann isn’t dissuaded by the fact the creaking skeleton of a huge, abandoned building looms behind him; it’s just one of the obstacles standing in the way of a new stadium he wants to build as a permanent home for the Detroit City Football Club.
Specifically, the co-founder and CEO of the professional soccer team is showing off the future site at the southwest corner of the intersection of Michigan Avenue and 20th Street in an area between Corktown and Mexicantown.
On the other side of a hurricane fence stands Southwest Detroit Hospital, now just the husk of a half-century-old structure that closed nearly two decades ago but was never torn down. Mann recently struck a deal to demolish the structure and build a venue on the site that would usher in the future of pro soccer in Detroit. It would open in time for the 2027 season.
“This stadium will draw people year-round,” Mann says, waving his arm in a semicircle toward 20th Street and finishing his panoramic turn at the hospital, where broken-out sections of the exterior invite occasional squatters, and an inadvertent pond outside the service dock is home to some transplanted koi. The decaying building looks like an upside-down gray, layered birthday cake that landed on the property.
“And it’ll be more than our stadium; we’ll have an entertainment district,” Mann adds. “On a summer day five years from now, you’ll see a dense urban landscape of bars, restaurants, and retail on both sides of the stadium, creating a seamless connection from Michigan Avenue to Mexicantown.”
Mann needs to come up not only with funds, but also with partners so he can create the critical mass to cement his team as the true nucleus of professional soccer in Detroit for decades to come. It’s been one thing for established leagues and owners to build new homes for the Tigers, Lions, Red Wings, and Pistons, but Detroit City doesn’t enjoy anything like the other teams’ stature, economic impact, fan bases, or legacies.
That’s one reason why there are plenty of skeptics about Mann’s plan. Another is the built-in limitations of generating revenue from stadiums that can be very expensive to build and maintain.
“Stadiums are terrible at economic development,” says John Mozena, president of the Center for Economic Accountability, a not-for-profit, nonpartisan think tank in Michigan, who describes himself as a Detroit City fan. “We think of them as these super-vibrant places because that’s what they’re like when we go there, but most of the time, there’s nothing going on at the stadium.”
Detroit City already owns the past and present of pro soccer in Detroit; Mann and his company are trying to own the future of the sport, as well. There’s little sign of interference in that goal from Major League Soccer, whose interest in putting a club in the city has been in the background for several years but never seems to reach fruition (see sidebar).
And Detroit City — nicknamed “Le Rouge” because of its red-and-gold uniforms, the city’s original French settlers, and a nod to the Rouge River — has been extending years of sterling performances on the field. This season, Le Rouge made a strong playoff push in the USL Professional League behind stars such as goals leader Maximiliano Rodriguez and Elvis Amoh.
In the U.S. Open Cup tournament in May, Detroit City upset the Houston Dynamo, defending MLS champions. That followed a stretch in 2020 and 2021 in which the men’s team didn’t lose a match for 364 days in its previous association with the National Premier Soccer League.
Newly elevated to the USL since 2022, Detroit City now reaches an audience of millions of people in televised games, including some national telecasts on CBS on Saturday afternoons. The club has an amateur women’s team that plays in the USL W League and made its own robust showing in the playoffs this season.
Detroit City also is affiliated with youth soccer clubs around the state that number more than 3,000 players.
All of this has grown in just 12 years from what began as a bootstrap operation conceived by Mann and a few friends. While now bigger and more secure, Detroit City remains basically that sort of from-the-ground-up enterprise today, engendering tremendous loyalty from fans and supporters who justifiably view the venture as their own — and who like this version of professional soccer that retains an amateur personality.
“We wanted to be something rooted in the city, something that reflected the city, and it wasn’t long before we were having the goal of becoming Detroit’s soccer team — in a unique, grassroots way,” says the 44-year-old Mann. “That still guides us to this very day.”
Relative to mammoth professional leagues for native sports that are more than a century old, professional soccer remains a very young player on the American sports scene. It wasn’t until millennials and Gen Z came along that youngsters in the U.S. grew up with soccer as a mainstream recreation in their communities and families, with participation fueled by growing immigrant communities.
Now soccer is arguably more common as a youth sport in America than the traditional pursuits of baseball, basketball, football, and hockey.
Meanwhile, the explosion of cable TV channels, followed by internet access and social media, have fueled American spectator interest in the professional game, fed by telecasts of contests from around the globe that range from pugnacious European leagues to World Cup tournaments. Now Detroit youngsters are donning the jerseys of Messi, Ronaldo, and other international soccer superstars, supplanting the preferences of earlier generations who wore Barry Sanders and Miguel Cabrera gear.
But all of this hasn’t translated quickly into matching popularity for professional soccer in the United States, although it got a huge bump from fan interest in the FIFA World Cup games in the U.S. in 1994 (some games were played at the former Pontiac Silverdome) and the subsequent establishment of MLS.
The men’s U.S. national team almost made it to the round of 16 in the World Cup in 2022, further piquing interest. And the U.S. women’s team featuring stars such as Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain, who were far more marketable than any standouts on the U.S. men’s teams, has medaled in every women’s World Cup and Olympics tournament in the last decade except for one of each. A new group of female athletes triumphed at the recent Paris games.
“What’s been changing is that, in the United States, the sport has become more commercially viable than it was,” says Stefan Szymanski, a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who held similar posts in the UK for many years. “People are now willing to pay more to go watch a game they’re interested in,” he says.
Le Rouge players are unionized and earn salaries in “the mid-five figures to six figures,” Mann says, plus club-provided housing in Lafayette Park, east of downtown Detroit. They’re among the 50-some full-timers on Detroit City’s payroll, which includes a sporting director who oversees soccer operations, as well as coaches, tech people, and office staff. To get competitive players, Detroit City participates in a worldwide recruiting scrum with a network of freelance scouts who try to sniff out promising talents from Scotland to Senegal.
And despite the growth of its expenses and its reach, Le Rouge offer an affordable ticket for local fans: prices range from $69 to $99 for a package of four tickets, four cheeseburgers, and four drinks.
“It’s a tough balancing act,” Mann says. “We have to pay our guys to be professional players, but we can’t offer the same thing as the major sports in town. We try our best to be the most affordable and accessible event in town, but also try to be a viable business.”
Indeed, the rising costs of attending other pro-sports contests in Detroit — which easily can reach $500 to attend a game for a family of four — arguably have helped Le Rouge’s prospects. The team “might not have the popularity they do if you could go see a (Tigers) game for 50 cents,” Szymanski says.
Mann is a Livonia native who graduated from Kalamazoo College and then earned a degree in international affairs at the University of Bristol in England. He wanted to join the U.S. Foreign Service, but a visa glitch gave him an extra year in England. He spent the year working in the House of Commons for the sports secretary.
All of this came after Mann had grown up watching European soccer on American television. “Soccer is so dominant over there,” he says. “Here, it’s more fractured. You can compare it to college football in the U.S., where people care deeply about it and (devotion) is passed down from one generation to the next. But soccer is much more accessible there than college football is here. Anyone can follow a team; (fan interest) transcends class, education, race, and in some cases, religion.
“And there are different points for access. In the UK you’ve got Manchester United, and Newcastle, and just miles away you have fourth- and fifth-division teams playing in front of 5,000 people who are just as passionate as the (higher teams’) fans,” Mann notes. “Fundamentally, they’re playing the exact same sport and they’re all professional; they just have different entry points and there’s a different identity set to it.”
Mann captured memories of his soccer experiences in Europe, but he parked them for a while. When he came back to the U.S., he served a stint in Lansing as a policy adviser, then as a lobbyist for the Michigan Municipal League, before becoming a multi-client lobbyist. He moved to Detroit in 2010, wanting to participate in the economic renaissance.
Mann bought a house in southwest Detroit and rehabbed it, relying on skills he’d learned from his father, a high-school industrial-shop teacher. Next, Mann and his wife bought the house next door, an 1890s-vintage, five-bedroom, four-square structure on West Grand Boulevard. They rehabbed that place and have lived there since 2016.
But he couldn’t let go of the “football” bug that had bit him in England. “I was trying to think of a way to get involved with neighbors in southwest Detroit, and we started by cleaning up vacant lots,” he says. “The thing about soccer is the community aspect of it, the tribal identity associated with it. I wanted to create the same passionate community experience here.”
So in 2010, Mann started a neighborhood soccer league as a community-organization project. “It was very recreational, friends and neighbors, co-ed,” he says. “In the early days, there were as many people picnicking and watching as playing. We got up to 300 people playing in 11 neighborhoods.” These days, the league that Mann established includes more than 1,000 players in 30 Detroit neighborhoods.
Mann’s soccer dreams grew from there. “At the time, so many of my friends in Detroit were entrepreneurs and small-business owners, and there was a lot of excitement among people who were taking chances, opening bars and restaurants,” Mann recalls. “Some other guys I knew through our neighborhood league thought, ‘Why not create a soccer team for Detroit?’ ”
Detroit City launched in 2012, “the definition of a bootstrap,” Mann says. Each of the hanful of co-founders kicked in $2,000 to buy goals and pay an entry fee in the amateur NPSL.
Eager fans like Dion Degennaro jumped on the Detroit City bandwagon immediately. “I bought the highest-level season tickets available in 2012, for $60, and got a jersey, a scarf, and tickets,” says the general manager of Sergio’s Pest Control in West Bloomfield. He became an avid fan of the game in part because of his Argentinian grandfather, who founded the company.
“I went to every game that year and the following year,” Degennaro says. “This was a soccer team in Detroit, which didn’t exist at that time. And even at the first game there were crazy fans and a culture around the team that really set the tone and was a major factor.
“This was a fourth-division team, and all amateurs, (but) I was still really excited about the prospect of having a team. I know what it takes to run a business; you’re not going to start out with a $500-million budget. The philosophy was turning the team we had into one we wanted, with a larger fan base. What better way than to take something that was there and make it into something bigger?”
Turning Detroit City into an economically viable, as well as community-supported, business would prove a challenge. Le Rouge started out playing its games in the stadium at the former Cass Tech High School in Detroit, renting the field for $125 a game. Later, it moved the games to Keyworth Stadium in Hamtramck — a now creaking, 7,933-seat venue that was opened by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936.
“The Hamtramck school district prioritized funding, and Keyworth didn’t get it, so by the time we were launching, most of the stadium had been vacated,” Mann says. “It wasn’t deemed safe, and the district was talking about tearing it down to build something new.”
Detroit City originally approached Hamtramck’s school leadership in 2012, when the club was brand-new, about renting the facility, but was turned down. Then the team sold out every game at Cass Tech, demonstrating its drawing power, and it was in dire need of some sort of partnership so it could keep growing attendance.
At that point, Hamtramck’s school brass saw the light, and Detroit City raised $750,000 from supporters in 2016 under Michigan’s MILE Act, a new crowdfunding mechanism, as part of a total $1-million investment in refurbishing Keyworth Stadium.
Detroit City has been investing in Keyworth ever since, Mann says, leveraging support from nonprofits and foundations, as well. “Now the field is in better shape than it was before,” he asserts.
Fan support of the team has been crucial, and not just in showing up at Keyworth to take in a game. A nucleus of early, rabid Detroit City fans tried to create some of the same mania around their team as they saw in Europe.
Called the Northern Guard, they’ve been a constant support for Detroit City, known for showing up in the dozens and hundreds, wearing rouge and gold to the games, and contributing to the overall experience with chants, singing, drums, cowbells, and colorful smoke bombs.
Joe Novak is one of the stalwarts of the Northern Guard. Like Mann, the Livonia native grew up playing soccer and was on the team at Clarenceville High School. “I was like everyone else, watching the teams in England,” says the 45-year-old business analyst for an insurance company. “But there was never anything here for us.”
Then, in 2012, Novak read about the launch of Detroit City and, happening to be in Buffalo, N.Y., on business, he attended the club’s first away game, a 0-0 draw. Soon he was not only attending home games with his wife and young daughter, but also helping launch the Northern Guard.
Nowadays, before home games, members of the Guard will flock to the group’s rented space at the Russell Industrial Center in Detroit to create banners and flags that they display at Keyworth on match day. These creations are props for the drama Guard members act out at every contest to back their team.
“We’ve taken a lot of influences from all over the place, because we have supporters from all over the place, like anything else that’s Americanized,” Novak says. “There’s certainly influence from European supporters, like songs from fans from England, and smoke and pyrotechnic displays from people from eastern and southern Europe, and drums from supporters from Mexico and Central America.”
The 34-year-old Digennaro and his partner, 36-year-old Jackie Carline, also were early sign-ons to the Northern Guard, with Digennaro helping with the team’s website (detcityfc.com) and Carline, a communications director for a mortgage company, helping run the merchandising side of the Northern Guard out of their basement and garage in Farmington Hills.
Along the way, Detroit City became a performance leader in the NPSL. It joined other city clubs in attempting to launch its own professional league, but got stymied by the costs of insurance as well as the internal politics of American soccer, Mann says.
So, in 2020, Detroit City joined a third-division professional league, the National Independent Soccer Association. Excitement ran high about how the team was ratcheting itself up in the ever-changing and broadening landscape of U.S. professional soccer.
The men’s team’s first game in that league was on Feb. 29, 2020. Within a couple of weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, pancaking its progress. “It was a tough time,” Mann quips, “to be in the business of gathering large groups of people together.”
Detroit City squeaked through on federal income-extension programs meant to help businesses get by during the pandemic. And in the fall of 2020, Mann and company launched a “Reg CF” (Regulation Crowdfunding) effort under a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission program, selling 10 percent of the equity in the club to more than 2,700 people.
“We reached the cap on what we could sell in just 72 hours,” Mann says. (Detroit City planned a secondary market offering for this summer so that owners can sell their units to others.)
Four years ago, all of that wasn’t enough for Mann and his partners, nor the soccer fans. NPSL “was struggling in 2021,” he says, and “we had legitimate concerns about its viability.”
At the same time, Keyworth was proving problematic. Contributing to its physical decay was the fact that it’s one of the few — and perhaps only — professional-sports venues in the U.S. that also is essentially a public park. When the Detroit City men’s or women’s teams aren’t playing or practicing there, Keyworth is open to all players of all ages.
“After school every day, there are 50 kids pretending to be Messi and scoring the winning World Cup goal,” Mann says. “It’s an awesome place. It doesn’t meet a lot of the standards for contemporary stadiums, but it makes up for that in charm.”
Still, charm wasn’t enough. Mann sought to join the USL Championship League, in the division just below MLS, but the league was “very hesitant” about its teams playing in Keyworth, Mann says.
“Keyworth has been a great host, but it’s basically a public park,” Novak notes. “It’s hard to maintain that, and also hard to provide stability for your club when you’re renting. If Detroit City wants to continue to be Detroit’s soccer team and have stability in the long term, not just on the field, they need to have their own space and to control that from a financial standpoint — a home and a place people feel comfortable (in) and can make it their own.”
In late 2021, the future of Detroit City came to a climax. “In the very short window of six weeks,” Mann recalls, “we navigated bringing on additional investors, exited the old league, and joined USL — all with the eye toward being in a stable league that would grow our reach. It was very abrupt and very quick, but we pulled it off and launched in the USL Championship league in 2022.
“It’s been a very positive experience for us. We’ve got a higher platform that has great credibility, much more stability, and all of our games are broadcast both locally and nationally. We’re also set up to finance and build a stadium.”
All of that led to the point where Mann is now, where he hopes to follow in the footsteps of great Detroit urban-renewal pioneers including Henry Ford II, Peter Karmanos Jr., and Dan Gilbert. And, of course, he’s practically on the path of the most recent of those bold revitalizers, Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford Motor Co. who bet nearly a billion dollars of the company’s money on refurbishing and repurposing the former Michigan Central train station three blocks to the southeast of Mann’s site, on Michigan Avenue.
“We’ll be collaborating and leveraging (Ford Motor Co.’s) cooperation,” Mann says. Detroit City also plans to seek brownfield redevelopment tax incentives from the state, which help transform properties that are either contaminated, obsolete, or blighted. To add more space, the City of Detroit will likely relocate a public-works yard at Michigan and 19th Street to add room for parking or other ancillary needs.
A prime exemplar of “blighted,” Mann’s hospital site is a massive piece of property bounded by interchanges for I-96 and I-75, where 2 million people a day pass by, according to Mann.
Southwest opened in 1973 as the first Detroit hospital to acquire and accredit African-American doctors and nurses. It closed in 1991, declaring bankruptcy. In 1997, it reopened as United Community Hospital, but then closed again in 2006, and has been abandoned since.
Mann declines to discuss many details of the transaction or of the planned open-air stadium, which will have a capacity of around 15,000 seats. The site was purchased for $6.5 million in March by a limited liability company linked to Edward and Emily Siegel. The site was sold by an entity linked to Dennis Kefallinos, a landowner whose entity bought the property for less than $8,000 in 2016.
Where graffiti-covered buildings now stand, and weeds proliferate, Mann sees the future of Detroit City.
“A remarkable amount of growth has already taken place in that neighborhood,” he says, including, of course, a flourishing prompted by Ford’s revamping of Michigan Central. “We see bars and restaurants, a year-round destination that ties Michigan Avenue and (nearby) Vernor Highway into an entertainment district.
“The stadium will draw people year-round, and we’re working with other developers for activations in the area. I have long personal relationships with entrepreneurs in the area, and I’m having exciting conversations with friends about projects.”
Among Le Rouge fans, even this point amazes longtime supporters such as Digennaro. “Twelve years ago, if you’d have told me the goal was to build a stadium in Corktown, I would have said you’re crazy, it’s never going to happen. But we’ve got motivated people, and everyone’s chugging on the same page and building something toward a shared goal.
“The way it usually works in capitalism is survival of the fittest,” he adds. “Whoever gets here first and has a stadium first has a much higher chance of surviving and being successful. I personally would like to see the one built from nothing to be the one that survives, and I’m hoping the stadium gives (Detroit City) the footing they need to withstand economic pressures.”
Adds fellow Northern Guard devotee Novak: “We’re 13 years into this, and a lot of folks have been around from the beginning,” he says.
“My daughter’s first (Detroit City) game was when she was 2 years old, and now she’s on the fence line every game. A lot of supporters have kids who’ve grown up with the club and the idea. So we want a day where we pass this on to the next generation. Having a home like the stadium in southwest Detroit would go a long way toward ensuring that.”
