Pro Soccer to Las Vegas!

Well here we are. Mere months away from professional soccer coming ashore in our very own town of Las Vegas.

I'm not going to lie, I thought this prospect was done and dusted after that vote a couple of years ago to prevent a soccer specific stadium from going up. It may not be an MLS team with a specific venue, but we can all be happy that some level of pro soccer is coming to town.

As of right now, we know the name and the location of the team, but everything else - from the logo, to the players, to the manager, to the color scheme - is still up in the air.

A few thoughts on the team name:

It was done through a controlled voting process. Nominations were taken from the community at large, vetted by the owners, and then they sent out a shortlist of six for the community to vote on. The six (if I remember correctly) possibilities were: Las Vegas FC, Las Vegas Action, Las Vegas Silver, Club Vegas, Viva Vegas, and Las Vegas Lights.

To be honest, I thought it was a pretty paltry list of options. There was the traditional stodgy "FC" option, then a parade of downright embarrassing choices (looking at you, Viva Vegas and Club Vegas).

At first I wasn't too high on Las Vegas Lights, but the more I think about it the more I like it. It's a very "American" choice (as in not a FC Las Vegas or SC Las Vegas). But hey, that's fine, we are in America after all, so it matches with the American sporting tradition. And if you are going to go with the [City Name] [Mascot] format, there are certainly worse options.

To be frank, it's probably the best name of a sports team in town. I'd much rather have "Lights" than the "Golden Knights" (what does that have to do with Las Vegas?) or the competitor for worst-team-name-in-history, the Las Vegas "51s."

So, at the end of the day, the Las Vegas Lights was a solid choice. Well done to both the general public and the ownership group for choosing something decent.

Next in the pipeline is the logo. Again, they are calling for suggestions, and we have to assume they are going to do the same vetting process and community vote for the logo. I've seen a few of the proposals so far, and some of them look pretty decent. I'll probably take a look at some of them in the next post.

Until then