Portland is to be the 18th team in Major League Soccer, the North American soccer league said on Friday, awarding a franchise to Merritt Paulson, a former basketball marketing executive who also owns the city's minor league baseball team.

His introduction of his team, the Portland Timbers, will set up a regional rivalry with nearby Seattle Sounders, new to the league this year, and the Vancouver Whitecaps, also set to join MLS in 2011.

Seattle's team kicked off the 2009 MLS season on Thursday with an emphatic 3-0 victory over last season's losing finalists, the New York Red Bulls.

More than 32,000 raucous fans packed the lower tiers of Qwest Field to watch the return of professional soccer to Seattle on Thursday, defying concerns that the faltering economy will hurt sports attendance.

Portland will play games at PGE Park, currently the home of the Portland Beavers, the city's Triple-A baseball team. Earlier this month Portland approved plans to build a new stadium for the Beavers.

Both the Timbers and the Beavers are run by Shortstop LLC, which is majority-owned by Paulson, a Portland local who was previously in charge of marketing and business development for the National Basketball Association.

His father, Henry "Hank" Paulson, the former Secretary of the Treasury, has a minority stake in Shortstop.

The MLS did not say how much Paulson's company paid for the soccer franchise.