What, exactly, is San Diego FC?
Some thoughts from covering the launch of San Diego’s newest team
I am not tired of covering San Diego FC. I am tired from it.
In the last three weeks, I’ve written the following for San Diego Magazine:
“Will San Diego FC’s Style of Play Work in Major League Soccer?”
“San Diego FC Has Arrived—Here’s What it Means for the City”
“San Diego FC’s First Home Game Brings Excitement & Controversy”
This is on top of working a full-time job, writing other pieces, like a profile of world No. 2 golfer Xander Schauffele, and watching through my fingers the collapse of liberal democracy in the US.
The point is not to convince you that I’m superhuman, though I am, or that we should ban work, though we should. The point is I’ve been thinking a lot about San Diego’s newest team and how its launch and existence so far reflects broader trends and movements in society and culture. To most of the world, and even to many people who live here, San Diego is a coastal strip of land immaculately conceived to give tourists somewhere to spend disposable income.
Important things happen here, though, and those things often relate to what’s going on around the country and world. To articulate this, I asked myself a series of questions and answered them below, because no one overthinks a sports team like I do.
Is San Diego FC a team?
Technically, yes.
San Diego FC has players and a coach and they carry out soccer functions. In practice, SDFC is an antiseptic corporate entity that has all the personality and character of Initech.
The team’s principal owner Mohamed Mansour made his fortune in international supply chains, and Tom Penn, the team’s CEO and organizational architect, is a veteran sports executive, having filled senior roles at ESPN and MLS and in the NBA. These facts don’t make them bad. Penn is sharp and thoughtful, and his and Mansour’s success speaks for itself. But Bill Veeck these men are not. SDFC’s C-suite isn’t going to lean into eccentricity or accept unnecessary risk.
SDFC ownership paid the league a $500 million expansion fee, invested $150 million in a new training facility and player academy, presumably spent tens of millions on players—MLS releases pay data twice a year, but the league’s salary cap rules make as much sense as a Donald Trump speech, so I have no idea—and the team has covered two years of operational overhead before any meaningful revenue has come in the door. For that money, they could have purchased all but the six largest clubs in the English Premier League. They bought into MLS for two reasons.
The US is the largest soccer market in the world, despite our men stinking at the sport. The Club World Cup, World Cup, and Olympics will be played here over the next three years, and that’s because we Americans spend money for a living. Penn once described the US as world football’s ATM. He is correct.
More importantly, MLS is a closed league, like all the other major leagues in the US and unlike every serious soccer league in the world (much to my chagrin). It takes billions to invest in American major league sports, but that investment is guaranteed to return dividends due to the leagues owning legal or de facto monopolies.
MLS team valuation is up 30% since 2021. MLB garnered record revenue in 2024. The NFL’s bank accounts could replace the Federal Reserve, and the NBA is the new baseball. Basketball’s regular season is pointless and boring, but somehow the league is bigger and richer than ever. Investing in major American sports is one of the safest, most lucrative investments in the world, and once an owner is in the club their team doesn’t really need to do anything to make money. (See: the Miami Marlins.)
This pairing of mass markets and monopoly leads to a “flattening” effect. Team names are generic—I wonder how many focus groups it took to come up with “San Diego FC,” or before them, “LAFC”—and logos, crests, and wordmarks are simple and scalable, as SDFC’s logos are. And there is nothing to say about their kits. The primary colors are chrome, which is a web browser, and azul, an indeterminate shade of blue.
This isn’t unique to SDFC or MLS. In 2022, the Philadelphia Eagles switched to a generic wordmark. I imagine the input from the team was, “Take our current design and make it worse in every possible way.” Across the pond, Tottenham Hotspur changed its iconic logo last year to be simpler and more streamlined. This trend isn’t confined to teams. There’s a corner of sports fandom online that laments the demise of unique World Series and Super Bowl logos. In both cases, color has been drained and stylization has been abandoned.
Local culture and artistic style doesn't drive a team’s identity (or anything?) anymore. What does is the ability for Fanatics to easily reproduce a logo on different kinds of merchandise/junk.
“I’m excited for the team,” tweeted local journalist Scott Lewis, referring to San Diego FC, “but the branding has been so dull. Like radically dull.” I’m thankful my favorite team was founded in the 1880s, before modern marketing was invented. ‘Philadelphia Phillies’ wouldn’t make it past one consultant-led, Post-It-based brainstorming session.
I don’t mean to diminish fans’ excitement for San Diego FC or their contributions to it, but so far SDFC is more an idea of a team than an actual one. Culture, representation, style, and all the things that make a team feel like it belongs to a place are talked about but not actually imbued. I call it the commodification of civic identity.
The launch of the National Women’s Soccer League’s expansion franchise in Boston, BOS Nation FC, was a disaster because of this. When a team explicitly positions its brand in line with a region’s (perhaps stereotypical) identity, then it becomes a caricature. There’s no way for a fan base or the wider culture to shape what a team means or is when that’s predetermined. And that predetermined identity doesn’t exist for the local fans. In the case of BOS Nation FC, it exists to sell an idea of Boston to a growing national market for women’s professional soccer.
With the Phillies’ and Eagles’ recent success, the Philadelphia accent and other regional idiosyncrasies have exploded into social media feeds and the wider public consciousness. (May God have mercy on your souls.) We fans revel in the profligate use of “Go Birds”, emphasizing the Delaware Valley pronunciation, but to me that cheapens the camaraderie, reducing my fandom to a hoagie-mouthed slogan. I’d rather be an asshole than act like one for an audience.
For example, the Yankees didn’t name or rename themselves the “New York Greatests.” Their aura of elitism and their culture of excellence and greatness was born out of the team’s striving for winning and their fans’ expectation of it. If San Diego FC was instead called the Turds, but they were good and entertaining on the pitch, then the whole city would be saying, “I want to be a Turd!” and together we’d figure out what being San Diego Turds means. It’s a crass analogy, but that’d be more fun than the current state of things.
The corporate sheen is what billionaires, league executives, and mass audiences find inoffensive, which is what allows teams to recoup their investments with as little risk as possible, but it deadens the experience of being a fan. It prevents a team from taking root in a city. The sooner San Diego FC loosens up, the sooner it will start feeling like a team. The problem is the modern economy won’t let them. We’ve reduced humanity to and have confused it for consumerism.
Is San Diego FC a team for everyone?
Again, technically, yes.
The ball featured in SDFC’s logo is made up of 18 threads, one for each jurisdiction in San Diego County. They team has taken their “Chrome Ball Tour” to each of those places. They adopted the slogan “Woven Into One.” They’ve set up a committee of community leaders and artists to help design kits and implement the team’s vision. And Tom Penn told me this:
“I’m most excited about what this is going to mean for the community of San Diego. A sports team, properly executed, unifies the city like nothing else—across all regions, across all ethnicities, across socioeconomic backgrounds, across gender, across political parties.”
Then at the first home game fans repeatedly chanted a homophobic slur.
I’ve never heard such collective bigotry at a sports event, and I’m still processing it. To the team’s credit, head coach Mikey Varas, sporting director Tyler Heaps, and defender Paddy McNair all denounced the chant after the game. The team released a statement days later to reaffirm that position. “We will take immediate steps to address this behavior and will communicate a detailed plan prior to the next home match,” SDFC said.
On one hand, I understand that the team can’t control individual behavior, and it was their first home game. They’re learning. On the other hand, the slur is a common chant in Mexican soccer and SDFC has leaned heavily into the region’s binational culture. Penn was also involved with the launch of LAFC, when they faced an identical problem. Why wasn’t SDFC better prepared? What is their plan? What if it doesn’t work? To what lengths are they willing to ensure San Diego is woven into one? Would they be willing to walk off the pitch in protest, like the San Diego Loyal did?
I could slice and dice SDFC over this all day, but it’s not their fault that we live in a world in which values are degraded, which is epitomized by our president. There are no morals or values in Donald Trump’s world, only transactions. Who has leverage and who got the better deal, however that’s determined, is how he and his followers differentiate between good and evil. Trump explained away his infamous Access Hollywood tape as locker room talk. Similarly, most comments on social media posts about the homophobic chant at SDFC’s home opener can be boiled down to, “Relax, we were just having fun.” That that fun came at the expense of the LGBTQ community is irrelevant to Reply Guys because decency isn’t enforced and so it isn’t respected.
The two most important “values” in American life right now are money and power. It was probably always that way, but at least we pretended to appeal to our better angels. The charade is over. That makes it hard to consider corporations preaching inclusivity as anything but a marketing tactic. There’s too much money to be made in the mass market to not position your product as one for everybody. It is through teary eyes I look back at the Loyal (R.I.P.). It is with jealously I look at Bohemian FC, the fan-owned Irish football club with kits that express support for unions and refugees.
Is San Diego FC at least a good team?
Maybe!
San Diego FC is part of the Right to Dream network, a system of clubs and academies around the world that employ a common playing style that prioritizes winning possession and attacking the opponent’s net. I saw it in action for the first time at the preseason Coachella Valley Invitational. The defense looked panicked when trying to play the ball forward. The midfield couldn’t win or keep possession. The front line waited for chances that rarely came.
Then in their season opener SDFC smoked LA Galaxy, the reigning MLS champions, and there is no qualification. They dominated end-to-end for 90 minutes, and SDFC capped off the 2-0 victory with a highlight for the ages.
Before the game, I rushed around downtown San Diego trying in vain to find a bar that would air it. One bartender said, “San Diego FC? I don’t even know what that is.” (Thank you for inspiring this post, though.)
After the game, everyone heard of the team. Wait, we have a major league team that beat LA? I think the clip and the call of Anders Dreyer’s second goal—and not the goal or victory itself—did more for SDFC’s launch than their two previous years of announcements, marketing, events, and player signings. It was a perfect viral moment that led a week later to the team breaking the attendance record at Snapdragon Stadium in their home debut. I would have bought a Dreyer jersey, so enamored was I with the highlight, if SDFC’s kits weren’t the sporting equivalent of a drop ceiling tile.
In that second game, their star Hirving “Chucky” Lozano got hurt and immediately the quality on the pitch suffered. They lost their attacking threat and drew in a 0-0 snooze fest. Then they bounced back yesterday against Real Salt Lake, winning 3-1. My guy Dreyer slashed in a goal in stoppage time to put his team ahead, and improbably, the expansion franchise is undefeated after three games.
Will opponents figure out and exploit the Right to Dream style of play? Does SDFC have the depth to compete over a long season? Can anyone besides Dreyer score goals? Were SDFC’s opponents good? Bad? Who knows! Like with Bambi, it is heartwarming to watch a team figure out in real time who they are and what they’re capable of.
What is the future of San Diego FC?
The team’s raison d’être is Right to Dream, which Mansour also owns, and because of their proximity to the border SDFC can recruit in Mexico. There’s a world in which SDFC becomes the Brighton & Hove Albion of North America—a consistently competitive team powered by the play (or sale) of skillful academy grads and exciting young players. There’s also a world in which they become like every other MLS team—an unremarkable club slogging toward the playoffs because more than half the league gets in.
The determining factor will be the level of investment from ownership. San Diego has long been plagued by cheap sports team owners (except the Padres’ Peter Seidler, whose death in 2023 is one of the worst things to ever have happened to San Diego (but that’s an article for a different day)). It will take a few years to know whether SDFC ownership breaks that mold.
Is there anything else I should know about MLS?
I know a lot about SDFC. I don’t know much about MLS, or at least I find it to be the most confounding sports league.
MLS technically owns all the players and teams, with “team owners” as investors in that single entity, and now with 30 teams the league is one of the largest first divisions in world football. This is odd because the MLS’s viewership is minuscule and the quality of play is poor relative to top leagues around the world. In the 19th minute of SDFC’s game against St. Louis City SC, a St. Louisan passed the ball back to his goalkeeper from 40 yards away, except it wasn’t anywhere near his goalkeeper and went out for a corner kick. It was a poor decision and a worse play that would never happen in other top flights. And yet, MLS is growing like kudzu vine and features some of the most valuable clubs in the world.
All professional sports leagues exist to make money, and all major American leagues do that by owning monopolies, but at least the NBA, MLB, NFL, and NHL are the best leagues in the world in their respective sports. It’s the most American thing ever to make billions by suppressing competition. It’s the second-most American thing to make billions by being mediocre.
I guess I do know something about MLS. It’s the perfect reflection of the US in 2025.
For a counterpoint I suggest: Detroit City FC // the USL. That is a club which seems to be as grassroots as a professional sports team can be, even in a lesser (?) league.
I saw that DC United won last night. How about that!
My wife and I just got Washington Spirit season tickets. We went to a few matches last year and it’s fun to watch them win and be a top flight league.
Great stuff as always. Slainte!