Chivas USA’s future is up in the air as league considers selling
Nearly eight months after Major League Soccer assumed control of Chivas USA, the future of the league’s most troubled franchise remains unclear.
But a resolution may be near. And it’s one that could force the team to miss the 2015 season.
Earlier this month, MLS Commissioner Don Garber said he expects to complete the sale of the team by “the end of the season.” He will meet with the league’s Board of Governors next week to discuss Chivas, among other matters, and the announcement of a new ownership group could soon follow.
That, however, is just the first step of a long, complicated process that could last a year or more. Among the questions still to be answered, where will the team play? What will it call itself, and who will be on its roster?
“Everything’s on the table,” said Nelson Rodriguez, a former league executive who is serving as Chivas’ caretaker president.
Garber has repeatedly said he opposes relocation, preferring to keep the team in Southern California. But he wants to move it out of the StubHub Center, where it has been overshadowed by the Galaxy, and into a new soccer-specific stadium. Plus the franchise will have to be renamed and rebranded. That’s a lengthy to-do list that’s unlikely to be completed when the new season kicks off in March.
“Once we get an ownership group in place, we’ll sit down with them and make a decision as to whether or not we will keep that team operating in 2015 and beyond,” said Garber, who has had detailed discussions with more than a dozen potential buyers.
The commissioner is in a difficult spot even though MLS has never been healthier: League attendance averages nearly 19,000 a game. A newly minted TV contract is worth $720 million over eight seasons; and cities such as Sacramento, Minneapolis, Las Vegas and San Antonio are lining up with nine-figure expansion checks to join the party. And ridding the league of its weakest franchise figures to make it stronger.
But in the short-term, any decision over Chivas USA’s future is problematic.
Suspending the franchise for a year would give its owners time to construct a new home and a fresh identity while putting some distance between it and a team that hasn’t had a winning season since 2009 and has seen its attendance fall by more than half, to a league-low 6,492 a game.
That could create trouble elsewhere though. How would sponsors, who bought into a league with two teams in Southern California, react if one of those teams suddenly vanished? Would broadcasters demand a discount if the nation’s second-largest TV market went down a franchise? And what about scheduling?
Then there’s the question of what to do with the players. The most likely solution would be a dispersal draft, probably timed to coincide with December’s expansion draft for new teams in New York and Orlando.
“It’s a lot more complex than it would appear,” said David Carter, executive director of the Sports Business Institute at USC’s Marshall School of Business. “You start talking about that from a player personnel standpoint, from a sponsor perspective. If the team shuts down, are they going to sue the league?
“It takes time to figure out exactly what to do.”
The league bought out Mexican businessman Jorge Vergara and his wife, Angelica Fuentes, in February, after a disastrous run that in which the team won just 29 games in four seasons while being sued by three former employees who claimed they were discriminated against because they weren’t Latino and didn’t speak Spanish.
Last fall, Forbes put the team’s value at $64 million — lowest in the league and about a third the estimated worth of its StubHub Center roommate, the Galaxy. And in 2012, Chivas lost $5.5 million, a figure that has surely grown since then.
Rodriguez was brought in to stop the bleeding, but he hasn’t been able to do much about the team’s performance on the field: With Saturday’s 4-2 loss to the Seattle Sounders, Chivas has gone 12 games without a win — and in nine of those, it didn’t even score.
“I would be disingenuous if I didn’t recognize, for some people, it is Groundhog Day,” Rodriguez said. “It’s a familiar pattern of the last four years of just an incredible nose dive at the end of the season. So it’s natural for there to be a human reaction that kind of says, ‘Here we go again.’
“It’s my job to try to continue to push high standards, high effort, energy and positive attitude.”
But until a decision over the team’s future is made, Rodriguez is essentially treading water, paddling away from the past yet uncertain where the team is headed going forward.
Carter says there isn’t enough time to do a full franchise makeover between the end of this season, which concludes with the MLS Cup Final in early December, and the start of the 2015 season. However, he believes Chivas’ already-low profile could make the transformation easier.
“The team has been in utter disarray for several years,” he said. “It has had no material presence in our community, and this is obviously a very competitive community. The teams around here do very well. They’re high-profile successes [with] superstar players, coaches that bring with them a lot of personality. All of that was lacking at Chivas.”
“It’s possible that Chivas, with a rebrand in Southern California, could work for the precise reasons that no one knew about them,” he continued. “It could be that one of their biggest flaws could actually be a business opportunity in this market.”
Twitter: @kbaxter11
