Commerce City: soccer capital.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: Sports Biz

STEP RIGHT UP, FANS.

This is your Denver Sports Cathedral Corridor tour. First stop: Invesco Field at Mile High, sprouting up from behind Interstate 25 like a regal overlord. Around the bend and underneath that Dish Network sign? That's Stan Kroenke's Pepsi Center, located conveniently within a slap shot's range of brickwall eateries and Bohemian coffee shops. A short distance ahead of that we have Coors Field, dug deep into the bedrock of LoDo, a neighborhood of bars named after reptiles and $6 Jell-O shots.

Yes, sports fans, Denver's hallowed trinity of pro sports temples is tucked into a chunk of the city so snugly you can hit all three in an eight-minute ride on the light rail.

So when it came time to decide on a location for a new Major League Soccer stadium in this sports-mad town, the obvious choice ... the safe choice ... the no-brainer, slam-dunk, money-in-the-bank, was ...

Commerce City.

That's right: That Commerce City.

Industrial muscle-town where the smokestacks spew and the streets are dusty from mud cakes flung by tires of delivery trucks. The city whose industrial skyline reminds you more of Andrew Carnegie than Alberto Delgado (he's a soccer forward, you ignoramus).

That Commerce City has been anointed the proud new home of Kroenke's Colorado Rapids.

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You might think that over the lunch hour you could come up with a dozen locations more suitable to a cushy new home for the Rapids than Commerce City. But if you did, you wouldn't be E. Stanley Kroenke, who has more billions of dollars (1.4, according to Forbes) than Jake Plummer has NFL playoff victories (one) or you and I have Stanley Cups (zero). Kroenke has made his fortune mainly from guessing right on where to plant new retail developments, and his latest bet has been placed squarely in the humble working-class environs of Commerce City.

Kroenke Sports Enterprises agreed in late July to invest $65 million of the company's cash to help fund a new, 20,000-seat stadium in Commerce City's new Prairie Gateway development, a 360-acre swath combining a sprawling nature preserve with retail space, city office buildings and a new visitors' center. That's half of the sum needed to develop the project. Commerce City is asking voters to OK new investment bonds to raise the remaining $65 million.

Kids get to play, too: Kroenke will lay sod for 10 or more new playing surfaces for youth soccer, plus two regulation-sized soccer fields just outside the stadium. The...