🇺🇸🇲🇽 Queretaro's sale shows the American ownership wave is coming to Latin America
With Necaxa's TV show putting Liga MX's opportunity on display, more foreign owners will arrive in the region.
The first words were simple.
“Hola. ¿Cómo estás?” Marc Spiegel intoned into the microphone, greeted with people replying, “Good!” “Thank you!” and “Welcome!”
The next words were going to need to be more complex.
Spiegel, an Atlanta resident and Louisville native, was about to explain why the Innovatio Capital group he founded had just purchased Queretaro and what fans could expect from the new group.
The enthusiasm from Gallos Blancos fans and even media members is understandable. Since acquiring the team in 2019, Grupo Caliente always had treated the club, based around 125 miles north west of the capital in one of Mexico’s fastest-growing cities, as an afterthought. For Innovatio, Spiegel assured fans Thursday, Queretaro will be their first thought, with the idea to build a team that competes in Liga MX not just makes up the numbers.
“What we aspire is to build a modern football club. We know there’s a lot of work ahead of us,” Spiegel said (in English) at Thursday’s introductory news conference, seated between FMF Commissioner Mikel Arriola and mayor Felipe Macias. “75 years just was celebrated. We want to capitalize on that and make the 75th year of this club one of the best - if not the best - ever.”
What he said was important, but so too was what he wore: A lapel pin of an intertwined U.S. flag and Mexico flag, similar to what diplomats often wear.
Not only did Spiegel wear the lapel pin. Arriola did too.
It’s a show of the international nature of the deal, with an American group going one country south into the Mexican market - even in a time when political cooperation is not at its highest.
Better keep the pins.
While Queretaro is the second Liga MX team to be acquired by an American investment group in the last five years1, there are more to come.
Americans buying up soccer teams in Europe has been well-documented in the mainstream press, the business papers, and even chronicled in shows like Welcome to Wrexham.
As more and more owners publicly and privately cope with the challenges that often come with owning a club in a market like England, France or Spain, more investors will be looking to a relatively untapped market with an intense soccer fan base already built-in.
“We’ve searched for over two years around the world for a team to buy,” Spiegel said Thursday. “That was in Europe, in South America, in Asia, in Australia, also several clubs here in Mexico.
“We couldn’t be more excited to be here in Queretaro. We really feel like Liga MX is where we want to be for the future. We think that Liga MX right now - and again we looked at over 20 leagues around the world - is the league with the most growth potential.”
The wave may swell sooner rather than later. Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds, of Wrexham fame, joined up with Eva Longoria and next month launch their FX series on life at Necaxa.
Necaxa’s group, led by Al Tylis and Sam Porter but highlighted by celebrities or famous athletes like Longoria, Justin Verlander, Kate Upton, Mesut Ozil and more, are the pioneers of this frontier.
The group long felt Mexican soccer was undervalued and provided an opportunity to make a significant return on investment by leveraging strengths most European markets simply don’t have.
While Arriola was wearing the US-Mexico pin, the truth is Liga MX hasn’t done much to encourage more outside investors like the Necaxa group to consider their league. In fact, with an offer on the table from an outside investment group that eclipsed more than $1 billion, club presidents holding out led to a top federation official resigning.
League and federation officials may not need to do all that much encouragement, though.
The reported price of $120 million for Queretaro has puzzled plenty of local reporters, especially with La Liga side Espanyol reportedly being sold for around $152 million this week (also to an American investment group).
Yet, compare that with what it costs to land an MLS expansion team. Charlotte FC paid $325 million just to get into the league, while San Diego FC laid out $500 million. For half that money, you can pick up a team in Liga MX, a league that still is one of the most-watched soccer properties in the U.S. and one that sees its clubs continue to best MLS on the field in the Concacaf Champions Cup.
“The economic value of this transaction is a reflection of the interest new partners have in entering the league,” Arriola said. “Today’s Liga MX is better appreciated in the world because we’re talking about foreign investment.”
There are opportunities as well. Puebla is a long-rumored target. Even more immediate, Grupo Orlegi announced this week that Atlas is up for sale, with a trio of US-based groups helping them through the process of finding a buyer.
It’s one of the more intriguing clubs available, the first in one of Mexico’s three biggest cities to be sold in the post-pandemic market. It has a long history, and with rumblings a group could snap up Atlas and move it, any US-based investor arriving with a commitment to keep the team in Guadalajara would be met with just as many - if not more - folks saying ‘gracias’ and ‘bienvenido’ than Spiegel was for taking Gallos Blancos out of the hands of an apathetic owner.
While many clubs in Latin America are beloved, fans in plenty of cities feel neglected or even pushed away by their clubs. The fandom is different than in a place like Wrexham, where the club sits at the center of a community. The challenge for investors arriving in Latin America is to understand their unique market and see how they can bring fans back.
Finding success on the field, and getting local prospects into the first team and sold on to a bigger club, is an obvious way to achieve not only return on investment but to endear the new bosses to the local match-going fans. While it will take more than that, to find long-term success, plenty of fans in the region are much more open to the idea of a foreign group running a team, with many disenchanted with the current state of the league and the current voices that run it.
It’s not only clubs in Mexico that will be more attractive to global sports investors weighing up whether to make a move in Europe or elsewhere. The NX Football group added to its Latin American profile earlier this year by acquiring Bogota club La Equidad.
Other groups have jumped into the complicated market of Brazil, a place where no one doubts the appetite for soccer but where the topsy-turvy nature of not just the Brasileiro but the state leagues and international competition mean it’s not for a weak-stomached or shallow-pocketed investor. Even so, John Textor has celebrated winning the Copa Libertadores there even as his Eagle Football Group copes with headaches in Lyon and London.
The City Football Group already has a presence in Uruguay, as does LAFC & Bayern Munich’s joint venture Red & Gold Football.
Argentina is another intriguing frontier, with political changes being pushed by Javier Milei’s government potentially opening up clubs in the country to outside investment. For now, Foster Gillett dipping his toes in with Juan Sebastian Veron and Estudiantes is the only example, but more could follow if the legal landscape changes.
One of the biggest positives for those markets is that, unlike Liga MX, the TV rights already are unified. The federated approach makes it much easier for investors to come into a league and know what to expect as its return for media rights. Without teams owned by major TV networks like in Mexico, it’s also easier to pull off original content like the Necaxa show and to get buy-in or assistance from other clubs.
What no other country has, though, is those flags.
Liga MX will continue to appeal to American investors in part because it is so popular where they live and work: In the United States.
The TV ratings Liga MX puts up in the U.S. are still huge, and with events like Leagues Cup, the All-Star Game and the potential for regular season matches to take place in the U.S., the number of touchstones fans have with Liga MX clubs far outpaces anything teams in other markets can even start to approach.
Sports investors already are seeing Liga MX logos on bumper stickers in their morning commute, on the bottom line watching other sports teams they own and on jerseys in the cities they live in.
More and more will bet they can navigate not only an introductory news conference - in English or Spanish - and not just win over local fans but also to get a great return from their investments.
Necaxa hosts Queretaro tonight at 9 p.m. ET, with the match being broadcast on TUDN
FC Juarez, owned by MountainStar Sports, came onto the scene a decade ago. While their ownership is US-based, it feels much more regional, with long-time El Paso/Juarez businesswoman Alejandra de la Vega-Foster at the helm. It’s a good case study, but doesn’t quite fit in the mold of ‘outside investment group comes into Liga MX without previous ties’ we’re now seeing.