'Now is the time': Sporting Jax president eyes ambitious targets for soccer club

Top-division women's soccer is officially a reality for Sporting Club Jacksonville.

If club president Steve Livingstone gets his wish, Sporting Jax men's soccer may be on its way to the top flight before long — provided the organization can make headway in its long-running stadium search.

Livingstone discussed the franchise's targets for top-tier soccer in an interview with the Times-Union, accompanying the Aug. 23 debut of the Sporting Jax women's team in the Gainbridge Super League.

After a process that began in 2017, now there's a team on the field.

"They've worked tirelessly for years and they've had that dream to get this up and running," Sporting Jax women's head coach Stacey Balaam said. "It's finally here. It's finally happened."

But for Livingstone and a Sporting Jax ownership group that also includes Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and Pro Football Hall of Fame finalist Fred Taylor, getting the women's team off the ground is only one part of the mission.

The Sporting Jax men are due to begin competition in the spring of 2026 in the USL Championship, at the second tier in the United States Soccer Federation pyramid for men's soccer.

Hiring a coach. Signing players. Those steps are coming soon for the Sporting Jax men in a process that will lean significantly on Mark Warburton, installed as head of soccer on March 20 after decades of management experience in England and Scotland with clubs including Brentford, Nottingham Forest and Scottish giants Rangers.

Between last Saturday's women's debut and the planned men's soccer kickoff lies more than half a year, a stretch that Livingstone hopes will go a long way toward cementing the Sporting Jax name in the Northeast Florida landscape.

"We're hoping we get a little bit of a spin-off from the women's team, some of the excitement and interest that's been generated around that, and keep that momentum going," Livingstone said.

Sporting Jax men eye top division

While the Sporting Jax men would begin 2026 in the Division II USL Championship, they're hunting for bigger game.

In March, USL chief executive officer Alec Papadakis announced plans to launch a new league at Division I level, which would potentially rival the 30th-year Major League Soccer. Once that Division I league receives sanctioning from U.S. Soccer, the Sporting Jax men intend to apply to become one of the founding members.

"We will chase that down," Livingstone said. "Hopefully, we'll get that done as quickly as possible, and be competing at major league level, certainly by 2030 if not before."

First-division status would greatly enhance Sporting Jax's ability to sign higher-quality players for its men's team, potentially including players with experience in World Cups or major European leagues. Jacksonville's Tea Men and Armada have fielded the likes of Archie Gemmill (Scotland), Jean-Pierre Tokoto (Cameroon), Jaime Castrillon (Colombia) and Alhassane Keita (Guinea) in the past.

USL also intends to implement a promotion and relegation system between its still-pending Division I league, the second-level USL Championship and the third-level USL League One. Receiving the call as a charter Division I member could quickly establish the Sporting Jax men in the top flight, without the nerve-racking promotion process.

Under the preliminary blueprint, Livingstone said, the Division I USL league would begin in 2027 or 2028 with 12 franchises. These charter members would likely include teams already in USL Championship membership if they meet requirements for stadium size, metropolitan area population, organizational resources and similar factors.

Assuming the Division I league's launch proceeds on schedule, Jacksonville likely faces heated competition for those 12 spots.

On Aug. 19, that list added another member. Pittsburgh Riverhounds owner Tuffy Shallenberger announced a project to expand the Riverhounds' USL Championship venue, Highmark Stadium, from 5,500 to 15,000 in order to qualify for the top-division league. The estimated cost for that expansion, Pittsburgh television station WTAE reported, is $125 million.

After the 12-team start, the top-level league would then expand to 16 over four years before instituting annual promotion and relegation, as seen in most soccer leagues worldwide. Under that system, each year's first-place team in the Division II USL Championship would climb up to the top flight, while the last-place team in Division I would drop down one level.

"It's easier and important for us to be in that first launch [of the top division]," Livingstone said. "It's very difficult to win leagues and gain promotion, especially if there's only one team going up. So that's a major consideration for us."

Stadium search continues

Another major consideration: where to play. Three years after receiving their USL franchise, Sporting Jax's stadium search goes on.

Livingstone describes the stadium's importance as one of the primary lessons from his tenure as president of the Jacksonville Armada during its North American Soccer League debut in 2015. If Sporting Jax is to play first-division men's soccer some day, it's a necessity.

"We've learned a lot," he said. "And I think one of the most important things is to be in your own stadium."

To qualify for first-division status under U.S. Soccer's standards, any stadium planned for Division I soccer must seat at least 15,000 spectators. That's more than Hodges Stadium, which lists its capacity at 9,400, can hold.

Livingstone said the club continues to envision the future site as more than just a soccer venue, and the process of identifying and acquiring the needed land and clearing related hurdles has encountered numerous delays.

"It's harder than you would think in Northeast Florida to come up with anything that's 100 acres-plus," he said. "Our project involves not only a stadium development but a large-scale commercial development around that, and that takes land. It's not an easy thing to find, and you get into negotiations with potential suitors and things don't always work out."

In the short term, Livingstone said, Hodges Stadium is "probably" the home for the men's team for the USL Championship kickoff in 2026. He estimated that developing a new stadium to operational status would likely take at least another year or two.

"We just have to be patient and work through the process and bring that to fruition," Livingstone said. "We know that the future of the team is dependent on it, and the long-term sustainability is dependent on it."

Jacksonville: Another shot as prime soccer territory?

The soccer tide appears high now for Sporting Jax, which officially reported a sellout ahead of its women's opener on Aug. 23, even though only a small fraction of those fans ended up waiting out hours of weather delays for the 9:59 p.m. kickoff. But will the initial surge of momentum last?

A decade ago, the Armada recorded 13,934 fans for its preseason opener and 16,164 for its regular-season North American Soccer League debut on April 4, 2015 at EverBank Field. That came less than a year after 52,033 fans watched the United States men defeat Nigeria in a World Cup tune-up at the stadium, a regional-record attendance that earned Jacksonville a national reputation as a soccer hot spot.

Over the next two and a half years, though, First Coast soccer fervor faded. By August 2017, with the NASL heading toward the rocks, Armada attendances for league matches sometimes dipped below 1,000. The Armada has continued to compete with an Under-23 squad in the amateur ranks, although the club is targeting a professional return within the MLS Next Pro league with plans to develop a stadium site just north of the city's sports complex on the Eastside. The Armada's project initially received City Council clearance in January 2020.

Since the Armada's 2015-17 NASL tenure, Jacksonville's sports scene has only grown more competitive. Hockey's Icemen, who dropped their first puck on Oct. 14, 2017, now record the largest crowds in the ECHL. Baseball's Jumbo Shrimp, formerly in Double-A and still known as the Suns through 2016, now fields the Miami Marlins' most advanced prospects in the Triple-A International League. The Jaguars, with a major stadium renovation coming and a high-profile rookie in Heisman Trophy winnerTravis Hunter, enjoy more current buzz than in the bleak years of the mid-2010s.

Livingstone is confident that Jacksonville's soccer fan base has likewise expanded to match the challenge.

"I think the market has matured a little bit since we launched the Armada," Livingstone said. "We've certainly got more soccer fans in the market, as Jacksonville's continued to grow. We've seen a lot of people moving here from the Northeast and California, and up from South Florida. So it all bodes well. We've got a bigger soccer audience than we had 10 years ago, probably tripled.

"So now is the time to make this successful."

A May 2025 survey from UNF's Sport Impact Jax research initiative and the university's Public Opinion Research Laboratory showed healthy initial interest in the women's soccer project across boundaries of age, sex and politics. Kristi Sweeney, co-director of Sport Impact Jax and associate professor at UNF, summarized the report's initial indications as favorable.

"This kind of cross-demographic enthusiasm and interest speaks to the broad-based appeal and potential for Sporting Jax in our city," Sweeney stated in her conclusion.

Still, as the storms confronting the Jacksonville Tea Men (1980-84), the Jacksonville Cyclones (1997-99) and the Armada have shown, the pitfalls are many.

In five years, Livingstone hopes, Sporting Jax can prove that Jacksonville's fourth time with professional soccer is indeed a charm.

"I think in 2030, we're in a position where we're in a new stadium, we're in a great commercial district that's built around the stadium and there's sustainability there," he said. "There's funds coming back into the team from the stadium, from the commercial district. And we've put together a product that's going to be first-class in terms of match-day experience, and also in terms of the teams themselves."

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Sporting Club Jacksonville: Steve Livingstone on USL, stadium, future