The mistakes have been legion, though last year in particular was an object lesson in PR disasters. Whoever buys the team has plenty to learn from. “Team LA,” as the players began to refer to themselves in the locker room, or “Chivas TBA,” as Twitter soon christened them, would play one final year in the iconic red-and-white stripes of Guadalajara before the team’s assets would be sold to someone who believed they could make a second L.A. The owners, Jorge Vergara and Angelica Fuentes, were forced to sell the team, though at an admittedly very handsome reported $70 million “market value” markup on the $7.5 million buy-in fee they and their former partners, the Cue brothers, paid in 2005.Īfter the league buyout, former MLS official Nelson Rodriguez was installed as an interim president, charged with running the team for its last season while the league searched for a buyer. This year, MLS, whose recent bullish expansion drive had begun to stand in sharp contrast to the sight of empty Chivas USA stands, emphasized by a frequently televised advertising tarpaulin covering the seats at one end of the stadium, finally stepped in.
It spent much of the next decade limping from crisis to crisis as many onlookers shook their heads and wondered how - and sometimes just as pertinently, why - they were still around. The team, which at one time heralded the start of Major League Soccer’s slow emergence from a painful contraction in 2002, was launched as a branding exercise on the part of Mexico’s most storied team, Chivas Guadalajara, in 2005. In the United States in particular, teams have been revived decades after playing their last game and found their new incarnation adopted by newcomers and sentimental veterans alike.īut few teams have lurched toward death amid such widespread indifference, if not outright hostility, as Chivas USA. Teams broken up by wars or regime changes, then reuniting as history changes course. There’s a recurring romantic idea in world sports of the team that would not die: Bankruptcies staved off by fan coalitions.
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