Why can't Chester and soccer get along?

In early 2008, as politicians from here to Harrisburg were scraping together $87 million in public funding to bring a professional soccer team to the Philadelphia area, Ed Rendell made a trip to Chester to offer his vision of what the hard luck town would look like after a proposed 18,500-seat, soccer-specific stadium was built along Route 291, a stretch of industrial wasteland pocked with abandoned houses on dead-end streets. After wading through a crowd of backslappers at the Wharf at Rivertown, a power plant-turned-office complex adjacent to what is now PPL Park, the governor stepped up to the podium: "It's going to change the face of Chester forever," he predicted.