Los Angeles Gets New ‘Football’ Team, And Look Who’s Throwing Their Cash Behind It
Los Angeles officially became the home of a new football team on Thursday — the kind of football played in the rest of the world, not in the NFL. The aptly-named Los Angeles Football Club will start play in Major League Soccer with the 2017 season, going head-to-head in the turnstile wars with the current local franchise, the Los Angeles Galaxy, four-time winners of the the league’s championship trophy, the MLS Cup.
But while the Galaxy, who appear in well positioned for a fifth MLS title as the 2014 season winds down, have brought soccer royalty to Los Angeles in the form of superstars David Beckham and Landon Donovan, the new Los Angeles Football Club, while it may not have any players yet or even a stadium to play its home games, brings the star power with its roster of high-glamor Hollywood investors.
The ownership group announced at a Los Angeles press conference Thursday is headed up by longtime Hollywood producer and executive Peter Guber, the former head of Sony Pictures and producer of numerous blockbuster films, including the 1989 version of Batman, The Color Purple, and Rain Man.
Guber’s partner in the new Los Angeles soccer franchise is Vietnamese-American business tycoon Henry Nguyen, but the investor group also includes Magic Johnson, women’s soccer legend Mia Hamm and her husband, retired baseball All-Star Nomar Garciaparra, motivational guru Tony Robbins, and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley.
Guber and Magic Johnson also purchased shares in the consortium that currently owns the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The new Los Angeles Football Club replaces the now-defunct Chivas USA, a spinoff of Mexican powerhouse club C.D. Guadalajara — which goes by the nickname “Chivas.” But Chivas USA never found an audience in Los Angeles, especially when sharing the soccer stage with the formidable Galaxy.
“Los Angeles is a huge market with a lot of folks that really love the game, and we believe our sport is going to grow with passionate rivalries,” MLS Commissioner Don Garber said at the press conference. “It didn’t work with Chivas USA because the whole formula didn’t make sense. That formula exists here.”
Garber didn’t specify what the new “formula” will entail, but presumably it consists largely of the considerable piles of cash brought to the table by the team’s formidable roster of super-rich investors.
Malaysian billionaire Vincent Tan is also a major backer of the new Los Angeles Football Club. Tan already owns one professional soccer team, the Welsh-based Cardiff City F.C., which now plays in England’s Football Championship — the country’s second division — after suffering relegation from the Barclays Premier League after just one season in 2013-14.
