Soccer in Arizona

Arizona's place in American soccer starts with the weather. The same dry winters that made the Phoenix area the home of baseball's Cactus League make it a natural preseason base for soccer clubs that train in the cold half of the country. From the early 2010s Tucson in particular built a business around this: MLS teams came south in February to train and play friendlies, and the local sports complex hosted the matches.

FC Tucson is the direct product of that trade. The club was organized in 2010 with the stated aim of bringing MLS preseason events to the city and using them to build interest in a team of its own. Its first match, in March 2011, was against a New York Red Bulls reserve side that happened to be in town. It is hard to think of another American club whose founding logic was a hospitality calendar rather than a league fixture list, and it says something about how the state relates to the sport.

Arizona's contribution to American soccer began as logistics: warm fields in February for teams that lived somewhere colder.

The state's only professional men's club plays in the USL Championship, the second division. Phoenix Rising FC was founded on March 13, 2014 as Arizona United Soccer Club, spent its first seasons rotating through borrowed baseball grounds in Peoria and Scottsdale, and rebranded on November 28, 2016 under a new ownership group. The rebrand was followed within months by the signing that put the club on the national map: Didier Drogba, who joined as a player in April 2017 and took an ownership stake at the same time.

On the field the Rising became one of the USL Championship's reference clubs. It reached the final in 2018, won the regular-season title in 2019 and 2021, and in 2019 strung together twenty consecutive wins, a league and North American record. The playoff trophy finally came in 2023, when the club won the USL Championship. Off the field it has moved house repeatedly, from a purpose-built complex in Tempe to Wild Horse Pass in Chandler and, since 2023, to a 10,000-seat stadium in Phoenix itself.

Two hours down Interstate 10, FC Tucson has covered more of the pyramid than any club in the state. It joined the Premier Development League in 2012, won four division titles by 2017, and pulled off the state's best-known cup upset in the 2013 U.S. Open Cup, beating the professional Phoenix FC and San Antonio Scorpions before losing to the Houston Dynamo. In 2019 it turned professional in USL League One, and after four seasons it stepped back down to USL League Two, where it won the Western Conference in 2024.

For a while the two clubs were one organization. Phoenix Rising FC bought FC Tucson on October 11, 2017 and ran it as its amateur affiliate until February 18, 2021, when the club was transferred to new owners; the group led by Jon Pearlman that had founded it regained control in October 2022. The arrangement was sensible on paper and short-lived in practice, which is roughly the history of affiliation deals in the American lower leagues.

Tucson's home, Kino North Stadium, holds about 3,200 and was dedicated in October 2013. The club also fields FC Tucson Women in the Women's Premier Soccer League. The state has had other lower-league entries over the years, including the short-lived professional Phoenix FC that FC Tucson beat in 2013, but Rising and Tucson are the two that have lasted.

The USL League Two model runs on college players, and Arizona supplies them unevenly. The state's two big public universities, the University of Arizona in Tucson and Arizona State in Tempe, both field NCAA Division I women's programs but neither runs a men's varsity soccer team. That leaves Grand Canyon University in Phoenix as the state's Division I men's program, with the remaining men's college football played at the Division II, NAIA and junior-college levels.

In practice that means a summer squad in Tucson or Phoenix is assembled from players attending colleges all over the country who want to come home, or come to the desert, for June and July. Below the college level the Phoenix metro area runs one of the larger youth club scenes in the Southwest, and Phoenix Rising FC operates its own academy. The pipeline exists; it simply routes most of its best products out of state before they turn twenty.

• Grand Canyon University: the state's NCAA Division I men's program
• University of Arizona and Arizona State: Division I women's soccer only
• Phoenix Rising FC academy and the metro youth clubs feed the professional and amateur sides
• USL League Two summers in Tucson draw college players from across the country

Arizona is a useful case study because it has everything except a top-flight club. It has a professional side that has been good enough to win its league and has repeatedly been discussed as an MLS candidate without ever being admitted. It has an amateur club that has been up to the third tier and back. It has a preseason economy that brings the country's biggest teams through every winter. And it has a population of more than seven million, most of it in one metropolitan area, that the sport has not yet fully organized.

That combination makes it a place where the lower leagues are the main event rather than a footnote. In cities with an MLS team, the USL Championship and League Two are a sideshow. In Phoenix and Tucson they are the whole professional and semi-professional structure, and the records they produce are the records of soccer in the state. This archive exists because those records were thin, scattered, and in several cases about to disappear with the websites that held them.

Everything that follows in these pages, club by club and player by player, is an attempt to give the desert game a proper written history.