Beckham’s Inter Miami explores potential academy site

Article posted by Coliseum, November 7^th, 2018

Image: Inter Miami CF

As David Beckham’s Inter Miami CF gears up to make its Major League Soccer (MLS) debut in 2020, the club continues to seek a site for soccer academy for young players from across South Florida and may have even found one: A 47-acre ground just outside of Doral, Florida, according to the Miami Herald.

The site is an old landfill, closed and capped in 1987. Since 2012, it has been seeking a developer for a soccer complex.

Beckham’s partners have already been in talks with the county about using the 47-acre site just outside Doral city limits for a Major League Soccer youth academy, but a representative of the Beckham group said other locations are also under consideration, the Herald reported.

“They’ve looked at that,” Steve Marin, a consultant with the Beckham group, told the Herald. “And they’ve looked at a bunch of places.”
Inter Miami haven’t yet decided on a definite site for the Academy to be based, but it likely won’t be at the same site as their stadium, which is proposed for Miami Freedom Park. Recently, the club released the renderings for that potential new stadium.

The Miami Freedom Park & Soccer Village site will include over 160 acres of recreation space, 110 acres of green space, 70 acres of sports and entertainment facilities, baseball fields and a children’s waterpark, with the new MLS team’s 25,000-seat stadium the centerpiece of the US$1bn development.

In the latest renderings, the designers behind the project, Arquitectonica, have included a playground, skate park and golf facility on the city-owned portion of the park, which, if built, would be constructed with public funding.

The curving canopies of the stadium, which swirl around the open field and resemble an aperture, will extend out to cover other public areas. Miami residents will vote on whether to move ahead with Freedom Park this November.

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