David Beckham has the charm: can Miami's Latino fans make his football dream work?

Football News | Article posted on February 8th, 2025

David Beckham arrives at the Kendall soccer park to meet young soccer team and play with kids in Miami. Photograph: PacificCoastNews/Kaffee/Monier

“This is the gateway city to Latin America,” says José Galindo, owner of Galifutbol, a football equipment shop in Miami’s Little Havana. “Every Latin and Central American country is represented here. The one thing that brings us together is soccer. It unifies the whole city.”Galindo, originally from Guatemala, has been here for 13 years, selling every kind of strip and boot. A faded poster of David Beckham hangs in the window – already a world superstar, but now a figure of renewed fascination among Galindo’s growing army of local customers obsessed with the almost as soon as Beckham stepped from his limousine at Kendall Soccer Park in Miami last week, a vision of sports perfection between a stand of vibernum and ficus trees, he was engulfed by fans energised by both his global celebrity and excitement over his plans to start his own US league team in a purpose-built stadium on the shore of Miami’s Biscayne the deal faces numerous hurdles, financial and political, and the kick-off whistle won’t be blown until at least 2025. But the plan has one major attribute beyond Beckham’s easy charm and marketing savvy: Miami, like Los Angeles where the 38-year-old former England captain played for six years with LA Galaxy, has a population of Latin American football fans eager for a team to throw their enthusiasm behind. That’s the theory behind Beckham’s Major League Soccer side, and he and his backers are prepared to invest millions to test more than ever, Miami acts a bridge between continents: a nexus for Latin money and culture. Beyond the tourist glitz of South Beach, Spanish is, de facto, the first language. Large communities of Nicaraguans, Guatemalans and Hondurans have taken the place of Cuban-Americans in Little Havana. Further north, Argentinians, Brazilians, Colombians and Uruguayans have settled, each bringing distinctive sensibilities and their love of beckham’s proposed stadium is within walking distance of Galifutbol, but so too is the Orange Bowl, once home to Miami FC, an MLS team that folded four years ago, its stadium ignominiously converted into a baseball the city of Miami is about 70% Hispanic, 16% black and 11% white. Russians and Jews live north in Sunny Isles; most whites and Cuban-Americans are in the vast suburbs stretching north and west to the Everglades. Beckham’s stadium is close enough to downtown for fans to walk. “Fans love to commute,” he said last week. “They love to walk. I’m hoping that’s the same in Miami.”Galindo believes Beckham could succeed where Miami

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