Lansing has a soccer team. You may not have heard about it.

Most Americans who follow soccer have at least heard of MLS. The league drew over 11 million fans in 2025, Messi plays there and it keeps getting better. But here’s something the algorithm isn’t going to show you: the United States has a full soccer pyramid that goes six divisions deep. MLS is just the top floor of a building most people don’t know exists.

Below Division 1 sits the USL Championship at Division 2, fully professional. Below that is Division 3, then a semi-professional and amateur ecosystem stretching all the way down to state recreational leagues. We’re talking hundreds of teams, thousands of players, and almost certainly at least one club playing within an hour of wherever you’re reading this.

I didn’t grow up here. I grew up in Tokyo, Japan, about 6,500 miles from Lansing. But my wife grew up in this city, and for the past decade plus, I’ve returned twice a year, every summer and every winter, to a place that has quietly become one of my favorite places on earth. And somewhere along the way, I started paying close attention to what’s happening on its soccer fields.

Lansing Common FC was founded by fans after the previous Lansing professional team folded in 2019. It is supporter-owned, plays home games at a local high school football stadium and a ticket costs $5.30 online. Most players are college athletes. The club donates thousands of dollars to local organizations every year and logs over 100 volunteer hours at community events, not as a PR move, but because community is why the club exists. This isn’t a franchise. It’s a neighbor.

That distinction matters more than it seems.

Many sports teams are businesses that happen to play in your city. Lansing Common is the other way around: a community institution that happens to play soccer. The people running it, playing in it and watching are all from the same zip codes. And even as a Division 5 team, they still get hundreds of people regularly in the audience. When you’re in those stands, you’re not watching a product. You’re watching your city show up for itself.

Not too far away, Lansing residents can also venture off to Detroit to watch Detroit City FC (Le Rouge) at Keyworth Stadium, which holds just under 8,000 fans. Detroit FC is not an MLS team, but the 7,000-person average attendance can create a great environment and more noise than many of the MLS games I’ve been to. Tickets start at $14, and the whole experience, including a March to the Match through the streets of Hamtramck before kickoff, feels like a neighborhood event with professional soccer in the middle.

And it’s not just Michigan. Vermont Green FC only began play in 2022 , a brand new club in Burlington, Vermont, a city with no major professional sports team to speak of. They play in Division 4. They went undefeated in 2025, won the national championship, and sold out a 2,500-seat stadium in seconds. The founders estimate they could have filled 15,000. Most of their fans don’t even consider themselves sports fans, the club’s environmental justice mission was the entry point, the soccer followed. The lower you go in this soccer pyramid, the less it’s about the sport and the more it’s about community. An MLS team REPRESENTS your city. A Division 5 club IS your city. The $5 ticket isn’t just affordable, it’s a signal that this wasn’t built for shareholders. It was built for people who live on your street.

I come back to Lansing twice a year from thousands of miles away. One of the things I look forward to is a $5 soccer match at a high school field. That probably tells you everything you need to know.

Lansing Common’s season is coming up. Go find them.

Nickolas Hironao Harris is an IB Economics and World History teacher at the American International School of Riyadh and a founder and consultant at Harris International Education.