UPDATE: Vancouver beat San Diego 3-1 and will face Inter Miami in the MLS Cup final next Saturday.
The MLS Playoffs are off to a hot start with tight games and major stars leading the last four teams standing. One of those clubs is the Vancouver Whitecaps with German standout Thomas Müller, who joined the team in August.
The Whitecaps are looking to pull off one of the rarer feats in sports: a title run while on the market. They face San Diego FC on Saturday night with an MLS Cup berth on the line after knocking out Los Angeles FC in the Western Conference semis.
In December, the Whitecaps owners, a group that includes majority holder Greg Kerfoot, executive chair Jeff Mallett, Steve Luczo and former NBA star Steve Nash, hired Goldman Sachs to sell the franchise. The sale was prompted by estate planning, according to a source familiar with the details.
Sportico looked back at 50 years of finals participants in the five biggest sports leagues—MLS has been around for 30 years—and could identify only a couple of instances where one of those teams had hired a bank to sell itself ahead of raising the trophy or finishing as runner-up.
In September 2002, the Walt Disney Co. hired Lehman Brothers and Sal Galatioto to sell the Anaheim Angels, who reclaimed their original Los Angeles Angels name in 2016, as well as the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, who dropped Mighty from their moniker in 2006. Disney had been looking to unload both money-losing teams for several years before hiring Lehman.
Disney wanted to rid itself of non-core assets as its stock hit an eight-year low. Other media companies, including News Corp. and AOL Time Warner, also had their sports teams on the market.
The Angels won the 2002 Wild Card to make the playoffs for the first time since 1986. The Angels topped the New York Yankees and Minnesota Twins to reach the World Series, and then won a dramatic seven-game Fall Classic over the San Francisco Giants for the lone title in franchise history.
The championship did not set off a feeding frenzy of buyer interest in the club, which lost $100 million during Disney’s ownership, including more than $10 million in its World Series year. In April 2004, Arte Moreno reached a deal to buy the team for $180 million. Forbes had valued the team at $195 million the prior year.
The Ducks made the Stanley Cup Finals in 2003, when they lost to the New Jersey Devils in seven games. Two years later, Broadcom co-founder Henry Samueli bought the team for $75 million.
In the Premier League, Chelsea was up for sale as it made a run to the FA Cup final against Liverpool in 2022. The process was triggered in March that year when Roman Abramovich announced he was selling the club in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Raine Group led the process that ended a week ahead of the FA Cup Final, when Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital reached a deal to pay £2.5 billion ($3.16 billion at the time) for the team. It was one of the fastest, most competitive and most bizarre major franchise sales in recent memory—one involving war, sanctions, frozen assets, government intervention and a surprise late bid.
The Whitecaps joined MLS for the 2011 season, and the team has struggled to find sustained success on and off the field. Before this season, the Whitecaps had won just one playoff round, in 2017. Local revenue in 2024 was less than $40 million, according to Sportico‘s numbers, the third-lowest total in MLS. The Whitecaps have struggled with ticket and sponsorship revenue.
BC Place is a 42-year-old multi-purpose venue—not the kind of building MLS wants its teams in—and the Whitecaps have a lousy lease. Buyers outside of Vancouver have been circling the team with hopes of relocation, but MLS and current ownership are intent on keeping the club in Vancouver.
“The existing situation in BC Place is not working,” MLS commissioner Don Garber told reporters during a visit to the city in November. “We have a suboptimal stadium situation. We’re trying to fix that. There’s a short-term fix that’s very specific. We want a better lease at BC Place and the club has made a very specific request about that.”
Local buyers have not shown up, but last weekend showed the potential appetite for soccer in Vancouver, as a sold-out crowd of 53,957 cheered the team’s victory, clinched 4-3 in penalty kicks. With two more wins, a new ownership group just might be able to say they got a team valued by Sportico at $470 million, which just won a championship—and you can’t really put a price on that.
