Phoenix Rising FC

The club that now calls itself Phoenix Rising FC entered the second tier on March 13, 2014 as Arizona United SC, the project of Kyle Eng, an advertising agency owner who took the franchise on after the collapse of Phoenix FC. The first match set the tone for the early years: a 4-0 defeat at Oklahoma City Energy FC on April 12, 2014, on the way to a 10-13-5 debut season. The team was itinerant from the start, playing at the Peoria Sports Complex in 2014, moving to Scottsdale Stadium for 2015, and moving back to Peoria in 2016.

Results did not improve much. The 2015 side finished 10-16-2, tenth in the Western Conference, and head coach Michael Dellorusso was not retained that September. Frank Yallop, who had won MLS Cups with San Jose, was hired in December 2015, but Arizona United in its original form never found a settled home or a real crowd. It is the kind of three-year record that usually ends with a franchise quietly folding.

On November 28, 2016 a new ownership group led by Berke Bakay renamed the club Phoenix Rising FC and moved it to a purpose-built temporary ground on Salt River Pima-Maricopa land near Tempe, marketed as Casino Arizona Field, with a capacity of about 6,200. The change of name was really a change of intent. The new owners wanted MLS, and they went about getting noticed in the most direct way available: on April 12, 2017 they signed Didier Drogba, the Chelsea and Ivory Coast forward, who also bought into the ownership group as a player-owner.

Drogba made his debut on April 23, 2017 in a 4-3 win over Swope Park Rangers and finished the season with nine goals despite a groin problem. Around him the team went 11 matches without defeat and won five in a row, both club records at the time. The season ended in the playoffs against those same Swope Park Rangers, a 1-1 draw settled on penalties, but the point had been made. A club that had been an afterthought a year earlier was drawing national coverage.

The 2017 signing of Didier Drogba was less a football decision than an announcement: Phoenix intended to be taken seriously.

Rick Schantz, promoted from within, coached the club from 2018 to 2022 and built the best regular-season side the USL Championship had seen. Phoenix won the Western Conference in 2018 and reached the final, losing away to Louisville City. In 2019 the team won 20 consecutive league matches between May 5 and September 14, a professional record in the United States, and clinched the Regular Season Title on September 28 with a 2-2 draw at New Mexico United. It finished with 78 points and 24 wins from a 34-match season.

The one thing that run did not deliver was a trophy that counted as a championship. Phoenix went out in the first round of the 2019 playoffs, and the 2020 final against the Tampa Bay Rowdies was cancelled after a COVID-19 outbreak in the Tampa organization, leaving the club a Western Conference winner for the second time but with no cup. Solomon Asante, the Ghanaian winger, was league MVP in both 2019 and 2020, and Schantz's teams also collected the Pacific Division in 2021 after the move to Wild Horse Pass in Chandler.

The championship, when it finally arrived, came from an unlikely position. Under Juan Guerra, appointed in 2022, the 2023 team finished sixth in the Western Conference and twelfth overall in the regular season. It then beat San Diego Loyal in the first round, won the Western Conference for the third time, and travelled to Charleston Battery for the final, where it took the club's first USL Championship on penalties. Six years after Drogba, and four after the 20-game run, the trophy arrived in the least dramatic of Phoenix's good seasons.

Guerra left the following year. Danny Stone took charge on an interim basis in 2024, and Pa-Modou Kah, the former Norway international, was appointed head coach on November 18, 2024. The ownership has stayed large and public: Advantage Sports Union, led by Alex Zheng, bought a share on February 10, 2018 to strengthen the MLS bid, and the group still lists Drogba alongside the musicians Diplo and Pete Wentz.

Phoenix Rising has played at five grounds in its first decade. After Peoria and Scottsdale came the Tempe site from 2017 to 2020, then Wild Horse Pass Stadium in Chandler for 2021 and 2022, another 10,000-seat temporary build on tribal land. Since 2023 the club has played at Phoenix Rising Soccer Stadium in the city itself, again a modular ground of roughly 10,000 seats. The colors are red and black with gold, white and grey as secondaries, and the crest carries the phoenix that gives the club its name.

The relevant link for this archive is the club's spell as the owner of FC Tucson. Phoenix Rising bought the Tucson club on October 11, 2017 and ran it as a development affiliate through its promotion to USL League One, before transferring ownership on February 18, 2021. For four seasons the two Arizona clubs were one organization, with players and staff moving up and down Interstate 10. Tucson later stepped back to the amateur tier while Phoenix kept chasing the top division, which says a fair amount about the economics of the two cities.

• Founded March 13, 2014 as Arizona United SC; renamed November 28, 2016
• Ground: Phoenix Rising Soccer Stadium, Phoenix (2023-present), capacity around 10,000
• USL Championship, Western Conference
• Owned FC Tucson from October 2017 to February 2021