On Wednesday, Major League Soccer side Inter Miami released a video announcing that they will begin playing at Freedom Park — the team’s long-awaited new home — in 2026.
To many observers and fans in Miami, it felt familiar.
Miami co-owners David Beckham and Jorge Mas have made many of these announcements over the past decade as their club navigated stadium trials at four different locations. With each of them, there was some pomp and circumstance.
There was certainly some measure of that in 2014, when Beckham first addressed his decision to bring an MLS team back to the Florida city, 12 years after the Fusion folded, answering a reporter’s question “Why Miami?” very simply. “Why not?” he asked.
Over the years that followed, Beckham would get his answer as he tried and failed repeatedly to get a stadium deal over the line. Miami’s ownership, however, was persistent, and in 2026 they will finally get their reward: a 25,000-seat stadium, part of a larger, mixed-use facility adjacent to Miami International Airport.
It’s not the glitzy, waterfront stadium Beckham envisioned when he chose Miami in the first place, but after such a long and arduous journey, it’ll do.
Here’s a look at how Miami got here…
PortMiami (2014)
Beckham’s ownership group unveiled its earliest stadium plans the way every MLS owner does: with a futuristic, sometimes unrealistic CGI rendering.
The team’s “PortMiami” concept called for a 25,000-seat stadium to be built on the city’s waterfront, adjacent to the Kaseya Center (then called American Airlines Arena), home of the NBA’s Miami Heat and NHL’s Florida Panthers.
The plan, which also included provisions for commercial development, faced immediate scrutiny, most notably from cruise ship giant Royal Caribbean. That company formed an alliance with other tenants of the port, asserting that the proposed stadium of Inter Miami would worsen traffic in the area and interrupt the continuous work of the port.
In May 2014, the Dade County government voted – almost unanimously – against the idea of putting a stadium at the port.
Museum Park (2014)
Inter Miami’s next proposal was somehow even more ambitious. The team, along with Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Giménez, floated the idea of filling a massive boat slip not far from the original PortMiami site and building there.
The plan had too many moving parts: parts of the land on which the stadium would sit was owned by the county, another by the city. Millions would have to be spent pumping water from the site and filling it with stones and earth. And local residents had their own concerns — obstructing their multi-million dollar beach views, for example.
The plan was scrapped after just a few months.
Plans are inspected at Miami’s Intercontinental Hotel in May 2014. (Aaron Davidson/Getty Images)
Little Havana (2015)
MLS first eyed land in the Little Havana district for a soccer stadium long before Inter Miami was even a thing.
In 2007, the league flirted with the idea of forming a team with FC Barcelona of Spain on a franchise that would have been owned by Marcelo Claure, a local businessman. Claure looked at land adjacent to Marlins Park, home of MLB’s Florida Marlins. That never materialized but, in 2015, Beckham’s group revisited the site, striking a tentative deal with the city to build a stadium next to the Marlins’ stadium. But Beckham and company struggled to do the same with local landowners, and that deal fell apart quickly.
Around this time, the Miami ownership released a statement saying there were “many cities” that would welcome Beckham and his ownership group. MLS commissioner Don Garber applied his own pressure, suggesting the league simply won’t expand to Miami without a solid downtown stadium deal.
Overtown (2015–2018)
Beckham’s group later moved to a location in Overtown, just northwest of downtown. After the three failed attempts detailed above, this was the site that got the furthest away.
Beckham and company negotiated deals with private landowners, even going so far as to purchase a small plot of land on the site. They sought to secure the rights to another block adjacent to where the stadium would be and, in late 2015, the MLS board approved the site.
The whole plan, however, was scrapped after construction and engineering Jorge Mas – and his brother Jose – joined Beckham’s ownership group.
Miami Freedom Park (2018–present)
The addition of the Mas brothers, who are intimately familiar with the complexities of doing business in south Florida, was a crucial step in Miami’s efforts to get a stadium deal over the line.
Ownership worked quietly throughout 2018 on their Freedom Park proposal and went public with it in July of that year, releasing – what else? – a series of stadium renderings. “I give you a try,” Jorge Mas wrote in a post on X, then Twitter.
The plan was ambitious: a 25,000-seat stadium, plus space for restaurants, retail establishments and hotels. A public park was part of the proposal as well, as was a “golf recreation facility,” perhaps aimed at alleviating heartburn over the loss of Melreese Golf Course, the area’s only municipally-operated set of golf links in a traditionally underserved area of Miami.
Mas, along with the other owners of Inter Miami, touted the potential benefits of the project: at least $2.7 billion in rent paid to the city for use of the land and a projected 15,000 new jobs.
Beckham listens to Jorge Mas address a meeting of Miami City commissioners in July 2018 (Rhona Wise/AFP via Getty Images)
In the fall of 2018, after only a few days of consideration, county commissioners voted to put the idea of leasing the land to Beckham and company to a public referendum that November.
Environmental experts had their concerns as the vote approached: the golf course was built on the former site of a municipal incinerator, and the ash and groundwater were badly contaminated with several toxic chemicals, among them arsenic. To some, the initial amount set aside to clean up the site — about $36 million — felt inadequate compared to similar projects in the area.
And then there was the venue’s proximity to Miami International Airport – just a stone’s throw away from one of the world’s busiest air hubs.
But in November 2018, Beckham and his co-owners scored a major coup when about 60 percent of the voting public approved the city’s plan to negotiate exclusively with the team’s ownership group over a lease of the golf course. That, however, was only part of the equation: Miami’s owners had to win the approval of four of five Miami city commissioners to fully move forward with the lease.
The group would face other challenges as well – even before the referendum, local residents opposed the initiative, with one filing a lawsuit to overturn its results. A judge ruled in favor of the city of Miami in that case in 2019. There were other concerns, including an ethics complaint filed against a Miami property alleging that Mas and company engaged in improper lobbying. That complaint was also dismissed.
In the meantime, Beckham has set a very ambitious goal for his MLS club: they will move into their new home in 2022. That would end up proving almost farcical.
In August 2019, those aforementioned environmental concerns reared their ugly head when testing revealed levels of arsenic and barium more than twice the legal limit and even revealed pieces of glass, tile and other debris in the topmost layers of soil at the site. Melreese Golf Course, which continued to operate until 2023, was closed while inspectors determined whether players and staff at the course were in any immediate danger. It reopened a week later.
Beckham’s team was scheduled to take the field for the first time in 2020, and they did so at DRV PNK Stadium, a modular facility in Fort Lauderdale, a short drive north of Miami itself. The stadium, part of the club’s training facility, was built on the footprint of Lockhart Stadium, the former home of the NASL’s Fort Lauderdale Strikers and the Miami Fusion, the first attempt at placing an MLS franchise in the city.
Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez celebrate at DRV PNK Stadium in May this year (Megan Briggs/Getty Images)
At the league level, Garber and others were growing impatient with Miami’s timeline. In March 2020, just a week after Inter Miami played an MLS match for the first time, the commissioner expressed his concern about the protracted timeline.
“I think their temporary stadium is going to be great, and we hope to get the big stadium in downtown Miami over the finish line,” Garber said, as reported by The Miami Herald. “They’re going to play (in Fort Lauderdale) as long as they have to, but they’re not going to stay in Fort Lauderdale. There will come a time where we will have to push the envelope and close that deal. We’ve been doing it for 10 years.”
GO DEEPER
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For their part, Miami’s owners continued to suggest they could bring a lease before city commissioners in a few months, but that math was changed not only by political complexities but by the outbreak of Covid-19.
Finally, in April 2022, Beckham and company won their most important victory to date – by a 4-1 vote, city commissioners approved a 99-year land lease to the Inter Miami property. In September, a vote by the same margin approved qualifying regulations for the site, clearing the way for construction to begin.
That happened soon after, with Inter initially targeting a debut sometime in 2025 – the final season of Lionel Messi’s contract, by which time he will be 38.
Earlier this week, however, 2025 became 2026, just the latest — but hopefully the final — delay in their long-awaited stadium project.
(Top photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)
