OK, I’ve got a lot of people wondering about what’s going on in Philadelphia and what it means for St. Louis. And I was going to post this last night, but it was late, I hit some wrong buttons, and it never made it. Actually, it made it, but to a different blog.

 First, the announcement is expected to be a letter of intent, which is not the same as the legislature actually approving something. They apparently won’t take an actual vote until sometime in February. There’s still a decent chance it might not happen, or they might not get all the funding.

But if Philly does get a team, it’s not the worst thing for St. Louis. (I mean that in a relative sense.) I’ve maintained all along that the league likes having St. Louis out there because it works as leverage to get a better deal out of Philadelphia, which is what it really wants. If not for the artificial deadline and competition, the Pennsylvania legislature may not feel as much pressure to get a deal done. Once Philly gets a deal, everything goes back to normal. Of course, they might also think St. Louis could be used as leverage for deals in New York and Miami. (If you subscribe to that line of reasoning, you probably remember St.Louis trying to get an NFL team and, yes, it could be a problem.) But that would be a pretty shabby way for the league to treat a potential investor like Cooper, who has worked pretty closely with the league for a couple years now.

I spoke with Jeff Cooper on Wednesday and he remains unflaggingly optimistic. But the events pretty much assure that there won’t be MLS in St. Louis in 2009. If we see professional soccer here, it will be in 2010.