LAFC: The challenge that awaits – Part 2
PART 2 – THE FANS AND THE FRONT OFFICE
If nothing else, MLS expansion bids have to answer the most basic of questions from the league, and they’d better answer in the affirmative: will people come to watch your team? MLS has done an admirable job evaluating potential fan support, and not being seduced by ownership groups that can offer the cash without a proven plan for the future. Philadelphia, Toronto, New York, and Portland all won expansion teams thanks in no small part to local, organized supporters groups (for as-yet-nonexistent clubs, no less!).
I personally was skeptical for years that New York City had the fan-base to support a second team when the New Jersey version wasn’t setting the place on fire, but the Borough Boys and others worked their tails off to show the league that it could trust the fans to be there if deep-pocketed owners came calling. There was plenty of fan support, it turned out, for a potential club that played within the bounds of New York City (the Red Bulls are a several miles West in New Jersey). The result, one year in, is that NYCFC has been a success at the turnstiles.
So what went wrong across the continent in L.A with Chivas USA? For one thing, the Galaxy were already there, and they were marketed to fans more intensely than any other club from the league’s debut in 1996. The league obviously felt there was some profile of an L.A.-dwelling soccer fan who didn’t connect with the Galaxy but was ready to embrace the Northern version of a popular Mexican club. Let’s not sugarcoat it – Chivas USA was envisioned, if not by the league then certainly by the owners, as a club for Latino fans, while the Galaxy would presumably put their emphasis more on upper-middle class whites. As the Chivas USA President openly stated, “Mexican owners finally own their Mexican team.”
This strategy, and its ham-handedness, injected unnecessary racial connotations into the conversation, ignored how many of the Galaxy’s fans were Latino, and made it a lot less surprising when Chivas USA and owner Jorge Vergara were subsequently hit with multiple lawsuits alleging discrimination against non-Latino employees and players (those suits have since been resolved, though the nature of the resolution isn’t public). Oh, and it also didn’t work. The fans, Latino or otherwise, never materialized.
So what, then, is the profile of a future Los Angeles FC fan that isn’t already an MLS fan that supports the Galaxy? None really leaps to mind, and MLS’ recent fluff piece on the fans left me open-minded on the subject but no less bewildered. Putting a second team in New York worked not just because co-owners Manchester City and baseball’s Yankees did what they do best (drown the world in money), but because there were a legion of waiting fans with a common profile – people who wanted to support a team in the five boroughs of New York City, rather than one in New Jersey where the Red Bulls have always played (and where most of their supporters live).
There are some geographical divides in Los Angeles, but both teams will be in the South relatively close to one another by the standards of L.A.’s legendary sprawl. There are massive class divides, but no reason to see Los Angeles FC as a natural working class team, the moniker that undergirds the decades of success of L.A. institutions like baseball’s Dodgers and basketball’s Lakers. And can we just not do the whole racial divide thing again?
But all is certainly not lost. There doesn’t necessarily have to be a logical reason for supporters to choose Los Angeles FC. Sometimes fans choose to support teams for reasons not immediately discernible to cynical columnists like me. Los Angeles is a massive metropolitan area that supports two teams in the National Basketball Association with no problem (and no discernible reason fans choose the Clippers over the Lakers, but a minority of them do and always have). And MLS is still a small enough fish in a big enough pond that there could easily be enough future growth to go around. Maybe the total lack of fan support for Chivas USA could attributed entirely to apathetic or incompetent management.
Right, about that:
Nothing will ruin a club in any sport faster than an uncaring or malignant owner. With no threat of relegation looming (there’s no relegation in MLS or any American sport), Chivas USA owner Jorge Vergara was free to do – or not do – whatever he damn well pleased. And he did. His contempt for the entire American sports world – fellow owners, the league, the media, his own players – was palpable. One of Commissioner Don Garber’s biggest victories of the last three years was getting him to sell.
Now, after a brief period of MLS owning the club, Henry Nguyen takes over. To fans, Nguyen represents an essentially unknown quantity, flanked by major co-owners with some limited experience running sports teams (and, weirdly, producing major Hollywood movies). Nguyen is one of the new breed of sports owners – a venture capitalist, in contrast to the old-money industrialists who usually wind up owning teams. He and his inner circle are saying all the right things, sounding excited about the opportunity and talking up the money they plan to invest, but in all honesty, they’re experienced businessmen shrewd enough to know exactly what to say, to the point that longtime MLS fans could write their press releases word for word by now.
But hey, this is Hollywood! Let’s skip right to the obligatory mention of the celebrities who are throwing some of their cash into the new venture as well – though their star power is clearly a much bigger asset to Nguyen and his partners. Big names include comedian Will Ferrell, Lakers legend Magic Johnson – also an investor in the Dodgers – inspirational speaker Tony Robbins, former Dodgers star Nomar Garciaparra, and his wife Mia Hamm, two-time World Cup winner and widely considered the greatest female footballer ever.
Whew! That was fun! And very distracting from the embarrassment of a one-year delay in the team’s kickoff that was so hushed up that I can’t even remember when I heard about it or how.
But again, all is not lost. Pretty much anything the new regime does will look good next to Vergara, starting with their proposed stadium plan (Chivas USA never took any significant steps to get out of the Home Depot Center, in which they were – wait for it – paying tenants of the Galaxy). The renderings look awesome. Local politicians are gushing. For the moment it’s giant ball of hot air cooked up by the usual PR crowd, but there’s no reason to think it has to remain one when the team kicks its first ball in two years’ time.