Professional outdoor soccer will return to Milwaukee in 2016 with the creation of the Milwaukee Torrent.
The team will be owned by Andreas Davi of Glendale-based German Fit LLC.
“You have the Bucks for basketball, you have the Admirals for hockey, you have the Packers for football,” Davi said in a news release. “But there’s nothing for outdoor soccer, a professional organization for kids to say, ‘One day, I want to play for this organization.’”
The team will play its home games at Uihlein Soccer Park’s Time Warner Cable Stadium at 7101 W. Good Hope Road in Milwaukee.
The Torrent will be the first outdoor pro soccer team in Milwaukee since the Milwaukee Wave United played in the USL A-League in 2003 and ’04; the outdoor offshoot of the Milwaukee Wave indoor franchise replaced the Milwaukee Rampage.
It has not been determined yet in which league the Torrent will play. Davi has had discussions with the National Premier Soccer League, the USL Premier Development League and the new Great Lakes Premier League.
“You have to start somewhere,” said Davi. “I don’t think people are that (worried about) if this is NPSL, PDL or (the second-division North American Soccer League). I think they’re just happy that we will have professional soccer as an independent brand. To make this a successful operation, we want to start on a lower level … where we don’t have to worry about, ‘Can we pay salaries? Can we pay this or that?’ This is why we made the decision to start at a lower level, to show that we’re doing this the right way – with patience. I am the most impatient person in the world, but with this, you have to be patient. We have time – this is the good thing, we have time to make this work.”
