The Courier-Journal’s sports columnist in residence Tim Sullivan published a column tonight that covered a wide range of topics, many of which are familiar to you:

• Louisville City needs a stadium to remain viable, if not competitive in USL;
• FC Cincinnati and Tampa Bay Rowdies’s owners have a lot of money;
• The Yum! Center is going to make funding a new stadium a little dicey; etc.

The news part of the piece, though, was that Aodhan Quinn, Louisville City’s captain for 2016, would be signing with the Knifey Soccer Lion Kings up the river for 2017. He’ll join Kadeem Dacres on that be-facechalked squad, in case you forgot. Quinn played all 28 USL games for City last year, totaling nearly 2,300 minutes on the field with three goals, three assists, and, to be fair, a team leading eight yellow cards.

From a Louisville City perspective, this sounds bad. It might even be bad. But the truth of the matter is FC Cincy has more money than we do. Players are going to look out for their own interests, which is getting as much money out of their playing career as possible. Sullivan’s article quotes James O’Connor as saying Elsie could have matched FCC’s offer, but doing so would have made it “hard to fill out the rest of the squad.”

Cincy’s pilfering of our roster can be taken a different way, though. The Blorange couldn’t hack it in the playoffs with players Toyota John Harkes scouted and signed on his own, so he had to take some of ours who’ve reached two conference finals in a row. You’re welcome, cake-eaters.

We also shouldn’t be surprised that Cincinnati can pay players more than we can. As any FCC fan will tell you, Carl Lindner’s worth $3 billion, peasant. Our combined ownership’s net worth probably isn’t approaching that. While we can and will celebrate the improvement in on-field product and business strength of the USL, the byproduct of that is stronger clubs who have more money to buy better players. Louisville City is fortunate to have a coach in James O’Connor that is an amazing scout and evaluator of talent. More competition for similar players will make those diamonds in the rough more difficult to unearth.

All that said, there are still at leas four or five more roster spots that JOC needs to fill. Yes, two fan favorites left for those louts in Losantiville. But City has the bones of a squad that could be really, really good in 2017. Let’s finish the roster and then decide whether the sky is actually falling.

COME ON, CITY!