The short, bumpy journey of Chivas USA

There’s a recurring romantic idea in world sports of the team that would not die: Bankruptcies staved off by fan coalitions. Teams broken up by wars or regime changes, then reuniting as history changes course. 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.

But few teams have lurched toward death amid such widespread indifference, if not outright hostility, as Chivas USA.

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. 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.

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. 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. 

After 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. “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. team work.

Whoever buys the team has plenty to learn from. 

The mistakes have been legion, though last year in particular was an object lesson in PR disasters. Having bought out the Cue brothers, Vergara had attempted to reassert the club’s original emphasis on Mexican players to build an audience among the large Hispanic base in Los Angeles. The subsequent accelerated recruitment and trade policy raised eyebrows and hackles — staff members reported being publicly humiliated for not speaking Spanish, and two youth coaches made claims of constructive dismissal. The debacle peaked with a segment on HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” in which former player James Riley was asked if he felt his race was the basis of his being forced out of the club.

On the field, the news was little better. Three coaches came and went, and Chivas USA finished at the bottom of the Western Conference standings, with crowds dwindling to a league low average of 8,366 per game. The memory of their last playoff place, in 2009 seemed a world away.

The failures of Chivas USA have been further thrown into sharp relief by the success of the team they currently share a stadium with — the L.A. Galaxy, which now counts their championships and is preparing for the summer visit of Manchester United in the latest of a series of high profile exhibition games. Chivas USA has drifted into its current state of limbo. And while there have been many factors that have contributed to that demise, it’s hard to look further than the foundational myth of the club as the offshoot of Club Deportivo Guadalajara.

“I hope I’m respectful and fair, but I will candidly say that I remember when I was at the league office and Chivas USA was announced and the proposition became public, that ‘We’re going to be different, and we’re going to be Hispanic.’ And I thought, ‘Boy, that’s really interesting,’” Rodriguez said. “And then their first major decision was hiring Thomas Rongen, who I think is an excellent coach with a proven track record, but he was neither different nor Hispanic. And so for me, from 3,000 miles away, I immediately cocked my head and said, ‘Hey, that’s not what you sold me.’ And again, I can’t stress enough this has nothing to do with Thomas, who I actually consider a friend. So right away it seemed a little strange. And then the second biggest thing is they just underestimated the league. They underestimated what it would take to succeed on the field and at the gate.”

There’s also an argument that Chivas Guadalajara underestimated the antipathy to its brand from Hispanic Angelenos who already had affiliations to other Mexican teams — many of whom had little interest in what they saw as a plastic version of a rival. Even among Guadalajara fans in L.A., the support wasn’t unequivocal. Some fans embraced the connection to the team they or their parents had grown up with, while others felt condescended to or shortchanged by a poor and increasingly neglected facsimile. 

There’s also a general agreement that Chivas USA was a missed opportunity to reflect the city around it rather than the branding aspirations of its parent club.

“When I look at Los Angeles, it’s diverse, it’s multicultural, and we should reflect that,” Rodriguez said. “There’s a real possibility of an alternative to the other team that plays here. There’s an opportunity to capture a market and initially rival them and maybe eventually supersede them.” 

Rodriguez is reflecting a prevailing sentiment among L.A. soccer fans who haven’t bought into the Galaxy project and who see opportunities for an L.A. team that reflects more of the racial, economic and cultural diversity of the city itself. Fan groups like Black Army 1850 take their name from the date the city was incorporated. Both they and the longer established Union Ultras have pledged to follow the new team in whatever form it takes. Among the hard-core fans, there will seemingly be no defection to the Galaxy.

But where will that support end up being directed? It’s unclear. The league has reportedly employed an investment bank to handle the sale, with Rodriguez clear that his remit is to run the club in its current form rather than sell it. Intriguingly, so far he has done so very proactively — he and head coach Wilmer Cabrera have been aggressive in trying to build a team of experienced players, such as U.S. international player Carlos Bocanegra, Argentinian playmaker Mauro Rosales and striker Erick “Cubo” Torres, who is a contender for leading scorer in the league and is the only Mexican player left on the roster. 

Rodriguez speaks of “an obligation to Club Deportivo Guadalajara and Chivas USA to defend those colors with pride.”

“There are a lot of people who’ve supported this team over the first nine years with limited moments of glory, and so we owe it to all of them, and we owe it to the investment that’s been made over the first nine years to create special moments, to create winning moments for the fans,” he said.

On that score, results have been mixed, though they’re improving, and thus far the team has at least kept up with his early season pledge to keep fighting.

Front office morale is surprisingly buoyant too, Rodriguez said.

“One of the things that surprised me has been the resiliency of the front office staff and of the team,” he said. “The front office staff … they love the club, they want to remain, and they want to fight the good fight.”

It’s an impression borne out by speaking to staff members who have endured multiple bosses in recent years (those who have stuck around, that is). They’re now tasked with preserving a sellable product for a buyer prepared to take on the existing playing assets and rebrand in a new stadium, with no guarantee of employment for them (or Rodriguez).

Rodriguez suggested there’s no option on the table that means moving out of L.A., despite the ambitious noises from Sacramento, where a new USL Pro (third division) team, Sacramento Republic FC, has drawn more than 17,000 fans to three of its games in its inaugural season, and from a Nevada consortium that has met with the league about a possible Las Vegas franchise.

Regardless of who takes over Chivas, the burgeoning Hispanic population in L.A., the rest of California and the entire country is a market the league must court to succeed. A new TV deal involves serious involvement from Univision, and, speaking at the time of the league takeover of Chivas USA, league commissioner Don Garber suggested that had the team launched now instead of 2005, it might have succeeded from the start.

Rodriguez, though, feels the Mexican soccer ideal put forward by the Chivas originals was too exclusive a vision.

“I think it’s too narrow to just pick one segment of a larger market segment and make it a go,” he said. “I also think that clubs in a lot of ways are almost like a public trust, so I think the most effective clubs are reflective of their broader community.”

Rodriguez points to Seattle and its “caffeinated” brand as an example of a club that has been most successful in that regard.

“You don’t have to talk about being authentic when you are authentic,” he said. “I don’t necessarily believe that saying a group would be made up of Mexican-American players or Irish-American players would work … The world has changed. And mankind is truly our brethren.”