Early in February, after a press conference at the Bier Markt on The Esplanade, Paul Beirne sat at a table with a pint of Carlsberg in his hand. A long-time employee of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, the bespectacled, spiky-haired Beirne is the director of business operations for Toronto FC, the company’s heralded new entry into Major League Soccer. As such, one of his responsibilities is to develop a loyal fan base for the team, and given the failures of pro soccer in this city’s past, it is always on his mind. So when one of the FC players, Andrew Boyens, happened by his table, Beirne leaned toward him. Pointing to a group of young supporters at the bar, he murmured, “Do me a favour. Go over to those guys and say hi.”

Like some wincing tropical flower, pro soccer has had a hard time thriving in Toronto. Six pro teams—the Toronto Falcons, the Metros and the Blizzard among them—have sprouted up here over the past 40 years, often to great excitement and substantial crowds, then perished. So it was going to take a moneyed and pretty self-confident group of sports executives to give it another try. Money, of course, isn’t an issue for MLSE chairman Larry Tanenbaum and his crew, and confidence is often a matter of circumstance and timing.

Looking for new growth opportunities to please its ever ravenous shareholders, MLSE, a few years ago, started to wonder about soccer, the one major sport that wasn’t represented in the city by a fully professional team. The question was whether a potential audience existed for such a team, and a little research showed that there were 500,000 registered soccer players in the province, a number the company found encouraging. But even more intriguing was the fact that Toronto was turning into a hot market for soccer spectators, and not only during the World Cup.

Several years ago, when the CRTC expanded Canada’s television landscape into the digital realm, a number of the licences went to niche channels serving groups divided along ethnic or national lines, many of which devoted chunks of their programming to soccer—European leagues, South American leagues, Central American leagues, they were all represented. MLSE did some market comparisons and discovered there was more soccer available on TV in Toronto than anywhere else in the world. More than in New York, more than in England. “That was a big indicator for us,” says Beirne. “All of these channels are tiny little operations, but when you take them as a whole, holy smokes, it’s bigger than anybody thinks.” Having picked up a number of digital channels of its own, MLSE saw an opportunity. What it needed was a property to draw those viewers together.

Soccer’s international governing body, FIFA, noticed the burgeoning audience here, too, and in 2004 chose Toronto to host the 2007 FIFA Under-20 World Cup. FIFA awarded the bid on the condition that a new soccer stadium be built, and when the Argo­nauts failed in their attempt to piggy­back on that effort, with proposed sites at Varsity Stadium and York University, MLSE stepped in.

Through the typically chummy process of pro sports, MLSE made its interest known to Major League Soccer and paid an expansion fee of more than $10 million to acquire a new franchise (with the ethnically neutral name Toronto FC, for “football club”). Then the company pushed the soccer stadium project to Exhibition Place, where it saw potential synergies with Ricoh Coliseum, its minor hockey facility. In the fall of 2005, the city approved the stadium, MLSE paid $18 million toward the structure, which included the power to sell the naming rights, and its president Richard Peddie started to talk publicly about the soccer franchise to come.

By now, everyone expects the first year of the city’s latest pro soccer experiment to be at least a financial success. By March, spurred by the news that David Beckham would be moving to L.A. and joining the league, roughly 6,000 soccer fans buying season tickets had locked up about 13,000 of the 20,000 seats at the newly named BMO Field. (Research conducted by the team on the first 1,500 buyers suggests a large number are first-generation Cana­dians of European descent.) Tom Anselmi, MLSE’s chief of operations and the team’s president, capped sales at 14,000, just to have enough left over for group buyers, community associations and the curious but as yet uncommitted. He couldn’t ignore that last group. No one can. Because the big question for this team is not “Can we sell out the first year?” which seems almost a given now, but “Can we keep fans coming after the novelty is gone?”