The Minnesota Monsters are leaving Duluth behind. After just one season playing in Arena Football One, the franchise has announced it will relocate to the Twin Cities metro area ahead of the 2027 season, trading its Lake Superior home for a shot at a much bigger media market.
Team owner Jacob Lambert said the decision was not simple, according to FOX 21 News, but he framed it as the clearest path forward for a young organization still building its footprint. Lambert said the move to the Twin Cities gives the team the best opportunity to strengthen its organization, and he said relocating will increase the team's visibility while helping build a sustainable future. Per the same report, Lambert also expressed gratitude to the city of Duluth, to the team's partners, and to the fans who supported the Monsters during their brief stay.
The relocation comes with tangible upside on paper. FOX 21 News reports the Monsters will gain access to a larger regional market, expanded corporate partnership opportunities, a broader fan base, and additional resources to support future growth — the kind of commercial scaffolding that a smaller northern Minnesota market simply can't offer a national indoor football operation.
A Championship Pedigree Built in Duluth
Before it was the Minnesota Monsters, this franchise was the Duluth Harbor Monsters, and it built its reputation the hard way. The team launched in April 2023 in The Arena League and won back-to-back titles at ArenaMania I and ArenaMania II in 2024 and 2025, according to Wikipedia. That dominance in a lower-tier regional league set up the franchise's next move: on September 24, 2025, ownership announced it was leaving The Arena League altogether to join Arena Football One as an expansion team, rebranding from the Harbor Monsters to the Minnesota Monsters in the process, Northern News Now reported at the time.
The organization doubled down on Duluth even as it aimed for a national stage. In December, the team upgraded its home venue, moving games from DECC Arena to the 6,700-seat AMSOIL Arena — the primary home of University of Minnesota Duluth Bulldogs hockey — for the 2026 season, per theaf1.com. That bigger arena hosted a genuinely successful debut campaign: the Monsters finished 8-4 overall, per FOX 21 News, and reached the AF1 semifinals as the No. 3 playoff seed before falling 69-56 to defending champion Albany Firebirds on August 1, according to 104.5 The Team ESPN Radio.
New Coach, New City
The on-field success wasn't enough to keep the franchise anchored in Duluth, and leadership changes soon followed. On August 11, owner Jacob Lambert named general manager Willie Howard — a former Minnesota Vikings draft pick — as the team's new head coach, consolidating front-office and sideline authority under one person, according to Howie Hanson. Howard had joined the organization only in June as a senior consultant before climbing into both executive and coaching roles within a matter of weeks.
Team promotional materials and website updates published Thursday indicate the Monsters intend to kick off play in the Twin Cities metro area for the 2027 AF1 season, with the franchise's branding shifting to “Twin Cities 2027” immediately after the departure was announced, per mnmonsters.com. Exactly where in the metro the team will play, and how Minneapolis-St. Paul fans will respond, remain open questions the organization has yet to answer publicly.
A Market With a Rocky Track Record
The Twin Cities has not been kind to arena football before. The Minnesota Myth folded in May 2024 after playing just two games at Target Center in the restarted Arena Football League, a collapse tied to league-wide financial trouble and canceled games, according to CBS News. And the Monsters name itself isn't new to the region — an earlier Minnesota Monsters team competed in the Professional Indoor Football League back in 1998, playing at the Warner Coliseum on the State Fairgrounds before folding after just one month due to unpaid bills and forfeits, per Wikipedia.
Whether Willie Howard and Jacob Lambert can avoid that fate will likely come down to corporate backing in an already crowded Twin Cities sports landscape. Arena Football One itself reported a 61 percent jump in social media engagement across its platforms during its 2026 regular season, according to Howie Hanson, as the eight-to-nine team national league works to expand its footprint — a growth story the Monsters are now hoping to ride into a market that has swallowed two indoor football teams before.
Back in Duluth, the Monsters had built a real local media presence in their lone season, with games and coach shows broadcast on Northland FAN 106.5 FM and 560 AM as the franchise's exclusive radio home. That local infrastructure will now be left behind as the organization starts over in a new city, betting that a bigger stage outweighs the roots it just started to grow.
