I agree with your perspective on the playing surface issues and there's another consideration regarding capacity. The soccer folks are looking at a 20K seat venue for their purposes and the football folks are thinking 30K+.
Thats a legitimate issue in regard to partnering.
Republic’s plan is to build to 12,500. There could be a plan for further expansion (and there’s ways to design a stadium that can be done incrementally),
The following things are happening on the soccer end of things:
- USL announced intent to begin a first division “Premier League”
- In March, USL owners voted to institute promotion and relegation beginning “2027-2028”
- This week, a piece claimed sources as saying US Soccer and USL were discussing changes to “Professional League Standards” that currently exist and are sometimes ignored by MLS (those standards actually require promotion and relegation, which is obviously news to MLS). Reduction of minimum stadium size for D-1 from 15K to 10-12K and reduction or redefinition of market size regulations are the main issues.
That these discussions are taking place indicate that US Soccer is likely to allow that Premier League. I could speculate on some reasons US Soccer might be taking shots across the bow of MLS, though the main issue could easily be anti-trust.
Another thing… notice how I wrote “2027-2028” for instituting pro/rel? There’s already a women’s USL Super League, it got granted first division status (despite NWSL already having that). They play a late July to end of May schedule with a winter break from mid-December to mid-February. The quote I used is how USL announced it, and yes, that’s some cute ambiguity. It’s possible USL is switching to a fall-spring schedule.
So I offer that the likelihood for partnership on a stadium has diminished significantly.