When St. Louis City SC takes the field at Energizer Park on the evening of October 14, the club will be chasing something no Major League Soccer team has ever done: a 21st consecutive match without a loss across all competitions. A victory over the Vancouver Whitecaps would also clinch a playoff berth and would vault St. Louis past Vancouver for first place in the Western Conference.
It is a remarkable position for a franchise that did not exist a decade ago, and one whose roots run far deeper than its 2023 debut suggests.
The road to that Wednesday night kickoff began in 2019, when Major League Soccer awarded an expansion team to St. Louis. The winning bid was led by Carolyn Kindle Betz, a granddaughter of Jack Taylor, the founder of Enterprise Rent-A-Car. The Taylor family, which had built Enterprise into the largest privately held company based in St. Louis, paid a $200 million expansion fee. Kindle Betz has said she was not much of a soccer fan at the time — she admitted to buying a copy of "Soccer for Dummies" early in the process — and that the family's motivation was less about the sport than about the city.
"It's a multigenerational feeling that everybody agrees upon, that we need to do something to make this city as special as we believe it is," Kindle Betz told Sports Business Journal. "When we got this team, it was my goal to put St. Louis back on the international map."
That investment made St. Louis City SC the first club in MLS history with a majority female ownership group — a distinction the family did not set out to claim, but one that followed naturally from the Taylor family's structure. Jack Taylor and his first wife, Mary Ann, had two children, Andy and Jo Ann, both of whom entered the family business; the ownership group that emerged was majority women.
The club's identity was deliberately local. Its name, crest, and colors were drawn from the city itself: the Gateway Arch and wavy lines representing the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, rendered in red and navy blue borrowed from the St. Louis flag. The club markets itself as bringing MLS to "America's First Soccer Capital," a nod to a soccer heritage that long predates the modern league. St. Louis was the cradle of the American game, home to the players who produced the 1950 World Cup upset of England — goalkeeper Frank Borghi among them — and to generations of amateur and scholastic soccer that made the city a national power long before MLS arrived.
The stadium itself was conceived as more than a venue. Energizer Park, known as CITYPARK during its inaugural 2023 season, was designed by HOK as the anchor of a 25.5-acre development in the city's Downtown West district, next door to the historic Union Station. The 22,500-seat venue is the largest urban professional sports campus in the United States, and the only MLS club with all of its facilities — headquarters, training facility, and practice fields — consolidated in one central downtown location. The design deliberately turns outward rather than inward, inviting the city into the soccer experience rather than walling it off.
The economic bet appears to have paid off. In its inaugural year the stadium generated more than $168 million in economic impact, with more than 18 percent of that coming from outside the region, and hosted more than 200 private events in the 2023 season. Since MLS announced its expansion into St. Louis in 2019, nearly $820 million has been invested in Downtown West. In October 2024, the club announced that the stadium would be renamed Energizer Park beginning in 2025, under a partnership with the St. Louis–headquartered battery and car-care manufacturer, which employs more than 400 people locally.
On the field, the club's debut season was one of the best ever by an MLS expansion side. St. Louis reached the playoffs, becoming just the fourth MLS expansion team to win its first two games. The two seasons that followed were less kind, and the club has since moved on to a new head coach, Yoann Damet, as it sought to recapture that early momentum.
That search appears to have found its footing in 2026. St. Louis enters the Vancouver match on a franchise-best unbeaten run, sitting second in the Western Conference with 50 points, one behind the Whitecaps' 51. With a win, the club would leapfrog Vancouver into first, clinch a playoff spot, and set a new MLS record for the longest unbeaten streak across all competitions at 21 matches. A draw could also be enough to secure both achievements, depending on results elsewhere in the conference — Portland, Real Salt Lake, San Diego, and Colorado all figure into the various clinching scenarios.
The match is scheduled to kick off around 7:30 p.m. at Energizer Park, with Apple TV carrying the broadcast. For a club built on the premise that St. Louis deserved a place on soccer's map, it is the kind of night the founders had in mind: a record within reach, a playoff berth on the line, and a downtown stadium full of people who came to watch it happen.