MLS expansion into San Diego: What you need to know about team name, owner and local history

Sep 17, 2022; San Diego, California, USA; A general view inside Snapdragon Stadium prior to the match between Angel City FC and San Diego Wave FC. Mandatory Credit: Ray Acevedo-USA TODAY Sports
By Pablo Maurer
May 18, 2023

On Thursday, Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber announced some long-awaited news: MLS’ 30th team will be based in San Diego, California. 

Garber was joined by the ownership of the new team and San Diego’s mayor at a press conference at Snapdragon Stadium, the club’s soon-to-be home, to celebrate the occasion. It will be the latest development in what’s become a dizzying run of expansion in the league, as the league has tripled in size since 2004.

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Ownership for the team is paying a staggering amount to enter the league, a reported $500 million expansion fee. It’s $175 million more than Charlotte FC owner David Tepper paid for an MLS franchise in 2019 and 67 times larger than what Real Salt Lake paid to enter the league in 2005 ($7.5 million). The league is in the first year of a $2.5 billion media rights partnership with Apple, another display of its financial growth.

Here’s the basic history and framework of San Diego’s successful bid, along with some helpful context. If you haven’t had your eyes on the expansion bid over the past year or so, this will help catch you up.

Who owns the San Diego MLS team?

The yet-to-be-named club is co-owned by Egyptian billionaire and former politician Mohamed Mansour and the Sycuan band of the Kumeyaay Nation. Mansour heads up the Mansour Group, a global conglomerate worth around $7 billion that works in automotive sales, capital management and technology. He is a British citizen, lives in London and is the senior treasurer for the UK’s Conservative Party. His uncle was a member of the Egypt team that played at the 1934 World Cup in Italy.

Mansour, who has an estimated net worth of $3.6 billion, according to Forbes, has his hands in other soccer ventures. Through Man Capital, the investment arm of the Mansour Group, he holds an ownership stake in Danish Superliga club Nordsjaelland and, as of 2021, he also owns the Right to Dream football academy, based in Ghana. The academy has produced some 20 players in professional football across Europe. A number of graduates have landed in MLS over the years, with the New England Revolution’s Emmannuel Boateng and journeyman midfielder David Accam among them. It’s widely believed that San Diego’s MLS franchise will open another branch of the residential academy in San Diego, too. 

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Mansour studied in the United States in the ‘60s and ‘70s at North Carolina State and Auburn University, and formed long-lasting business ties that eventually made him a very rich man. His company is one of the world’s biggest distributors of automobiles produced by General Motors, and at various times has had been involved with other global titans — McDonald’s, Marlboro, among others. 

Mansour’s MLS venture may be a step toward something bigger. In December, as the sale of Manchester United dominated the news, the Daily Mirror reported his interest in purchasing a British football club. Mansour’s son Loutfy was part of a failed bid to take over Chelsea, which eventually landed in the hands of American businessman Todd Boehly and his partners.

The Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation are a tribe of Mission Indians who have lived in the San Diego area for thousands of years. In the mid-1700s, they were displaced by Spanish missionaries and by the mid-1800s, as the U.S. government forcibly removed large numbers of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands, their population had been cut nearly tenfold, to about 3,000. The land on which the tribe currently resides, a one-square-mile reservation in San Diego’s Dehesa Valley, was returned to them in 1875. 

In recent years, the Sycuan Band has become a player in the gaming and entertainment industry. In 2001, they formed the Sycuan Tribal Development Corporation which owns the Sycuan Casino, Singing Hills golf resort and the U.S. Grant Hotel, among the oldest hotels in San Diego. Through their casino, the Sycuan Band has also been involved in the promotion of combat sports and boxing. 

The tribe first expressed interest in acquiring an MLS club in 2021 and worked with the league to find a suitable equity partner, which is when the Monsour group emerged.

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San Diego’s MLS venture also has a number of minority partners. According to MLS, “other founding partners include Brad Termini (Co-founder, Zephyr Partners); Tom Vernon (Founder, Right to Dream) and Dan Dickinson (Board Member, Right to Dream). Highly-respected sports executive Tom Penn will serve as the club’s CEO.”

What will the team be called?

The club was launched without a crest or colors, but CEO Tom Penn said it will either be FC San Diego or San Diego FC. 

Another FC? Who could’ve guessed that. They’ll be MLS’ 10th “football club.” 

As for crest and colors, Penn said the club will have an announcement on that front in summer or early fall.

Where will the team play?

Many MLS expansion franchises have been awarded to teams who’ve had to construct their own stadium. That’s not the case with San Diego, as the club will be tenants at an existing facility.

San Diego’s MLS franchise will play their home matches at Snapdragon Stadium on the campus of San Diego State University. The 35,000-seat venue was completed in 2022 and is the home of the NWSL’s San Diego Wave and the San Diego State Aztecs (American) football team. The San Diego Legion of Major League Rugby also play their games at Snapdragon. The venue will host a number of international soccer matches this summer, including a Mexico national team match in June and a CONCACAF Gold Cup semifinal a month later.

Unlike most modern MLS stadiums, Snapdragon is almost entirely uncovered, a throwback to the days when MLS clubs played in college and NFL football stadiums. That design has proven to be a problem at times — during the first-ever San Diego State football game at Snapdragon in September 2022, the temperature inside the stadium reached 100 °F and some 200 fans had to receive medical treatment for varying heat illnesses, with 20 of them requiring hospitalization. On social media, fans of the San Diego Wave have also expressed frustration with the lack of shade. 

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Sources who were briefed on talks between the league and San Diego’s ownership have told The Athletic over the past few months that building a partial roof around the stadium was, from the league’s perspective, a potential must for granting a franchise. Costs for doing that work ranged from $50 million to $125 million, one of those sources said. Those same sources say the league’s tone has softened on those demands, largely due to the now-standardized nature of the league’s schedule. Most matches kick off in the evening, lessening the impact of the sun in general. The franchise will still have to do some work to Snapdragon, though — namely the construction of an upgraded visitor’s locker room.

They’ll also need to build a training facility, with one MLS stakeholder who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter suggesting to The Athletic that the club could end up dumping about $100 million into that endeavor. 

A lease agreement between the MLS club and SDSU was secured on Monday night, according to the San Diego Union Tribune’s Mark Zeigler. The university had sought to be flexible with lease terms and had expressed interest in acquiring an equity stake in the franchise as part of the payment arrangement, but that option was declined by MLS, said sources briefed on talks surrounding the arrangement. 

Snapdragon, incidentally, was built on land that may have once been earmarked for an MLS stadium. In 2018, a push to build a soccer-specific stadium on the site and lure an MLS franchise was rejected in a public referendum. 

What happens to San Diego Loyal?

MLS clubs like Nashville SC and FC Cincinnati were direct offshoots of USL franchises. That isn’t the case with San Diego’s MLS franchise, which will have no ties to San Diego Loyal, the USL Championship club that’s called the city home since 2019.

Loyal, who play at Torero Stadium on the campus of the University of San Diego, have a strong local following and regularly sell out their matches. They reportedly held talks with the MLS ownership group but nothing came of them. The club was co-founded and is currently led by U.S. legend Landon Donovan, who spent the bulk of his career in Major League Soccer.

“We have become aware of an independent ownership group that intends to launch their own club in San Diego,” the club’s chairman and owner Andrew Vassiliadis said in a public statement last week. “Our unwavering commitment is to the vision of growing soccer in this city, and we want to make that abundantly clear. Landon Donovan, the entire San Diego Loyal team and I are dedicated to this mission, and we will continue to work tirelessly to achieve it. Our passion for soccer and for our community will never falter. San Diego, we are one with you. Our love for this city runs deep. This is our home, and we are proud to be part of its rich and diverse fabric.”

San Diego is home to a third men’s professional team as well, NISA’s Albion San Diego. That club has existed since 2015 but only began playing professionally last year.

Notably, the city is also home to the most decorated professional indoor soccer team in American history, the San Diego Sockers. The club has won 16 indoor championships since they began playing the indoor game in 1978. They remain a cult favorite in the city.

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How will the team populate its roster with players?

Historically, MLS clubs have taken a number of approaches toward building their initial roster.

First and foremost, expansion teams get their crack at selecting five players from other MLS rosters via the league’s expansion draft. Other clubs across the league can protect a dozen or so of their players, with the rest available for selection. In 2022, for example, St. Louis City SC, the league’s newest entrant, chose Orlando City forward Niko Gioacchini, Inter Miami midfielder Indiana Vassilev, New England Revolution center back Jonathan Bell, FC Cincinnati left back John Nelson and New York Red Bulls forward Jake La Cava in the expansion draft. Teams often work out trades directly following the draft. La Cava, for example, was swiftly dealt to Inter Miami last year for $150,000 in allocation money. Sometimes, selected players never end up playing a competitive minute for their new team.

Clubs that have made the jump from USL to MLS via expansion have often brought along a handful of players from their lower division side, a moot point with San Diego, which was created from scratch. MLS’ college SuperDraft has also proven a valuable tool for expansion franchises in past years. And then there is the international market — some expansion franchises, like Inter Miami and NYCFC, have populated their initial rosters with big-name acquisitions from abroad: Frank Lampard, David Villa and Gonzalo Higuain, to name a few.

What’s the history of professional soccer in San Diego?

San Diego’s first professional team was the San Diego Toros, founded in 1968. The franchise was a charter member of the newborn North American Soccer League and nearly won the league’s first-ever championship match, but folded later that year. The NASL would return to the city in 1976 with the San Diego Jaws, who were named after, well, the movie Jaws. They played at San Diego State, drew poorly and relocated later that same year, becoming the Las Vegas Quicksilvers. Shockingly, the Quicksilvers, playing in cleat-melting 100-degree heat in a city that had no soccer history to speak of, didn’t last much longer. The franchise moved back to San Diego and became the San Diego Sockers in 1978.

From 1978-84, the Sockers were perennially competitive, finishing within one game of the league final on multiple occasions while playing at Jack Murphy Stadium. By the end of their run, though, the club was last in the league in attendance. Think about this: in the mid-’70s, the New York Cosmos, the darlings of the NASL, would draw crowds for a single game that were larger than the Sockers’ attendance over the course of an entire season.

For years, the Sockers, via the indoor game, were the city’s only link to professional soccer. That changed with San Diego Loyal, and the city’s MLS club is set to become its first top-flight outdoor team since the early ‘80s.

What’s next for MLS expansion?

MLS has long said that it will press pause after team 30 and evaluate the idea of further expansion. The league could grow to a number of other markets in the future — Garber has mentioned Phoenix, Sacramento (which once looked like a shoe-in), Detroit and Tampa Bay as potential expansion markets. 

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Las Vegas, which was widely considered the fellow front-runner for the slot San Diego looks set to take, was also once considered a shoe-in. Earlier this year, though, Garber spoke of the difficulties surrounding that bid and the difficulties associated with it.

“When you’re in a place like Las Vegas — we have to have a stadium that is a covered stadium,” Garber told The Athletic. “And that is enormously expensive. But I can’t imagine not having a team in Las Vegas at some point.”

The Vegas bid was led by Bill Foley, who also owns the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights. Foley eventually purchased Premier League side Bournemouth for far less than what he’d have paid to get into MLS.

“The MLS unfortunately requires a stadium to be built and the stadiums now in the US are costing $600 million, $700 million,” Foley told the BBC. “The franchise fee itself is I think ($500 million). So, you’re into it for a billion dollars before you even have a team. I thought Bournemouth was a bargain really. I’m buying a Premier League team, it’s already got a stadium, it’s already got players and I can improve it. I can make it better. So, I don’t see us being involved in the MLS. I’m just not that interested in it.”

Wherever MLS goes next, one thing feels certain — as long as there are people paying half a billion dollars (or more) for a franchise, the league will continue to expand.

“Other leagues have more than 30 teams,” said Garber. “MLS is structured very differently than every other pro soccer league in the world. I don’t see any reason why, at the right time, if we’re able to accommodate it as it relates to schedule and players and the ecosystem of MLS, why we couldn’t have more teams in the future.”

(Photo: Ray Acevedo-USA TODAY Sports)

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Pablo Maurer

Pablo Maurer is a staff writer for The Athletic who covers soccer, with a particular focus on the history and culture of the game. His writing and photography have been featured in National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, Gothamist and a variety of other outlets. Follow Pablo on Twitter @MLSist