In the early days of Major League Soccer’s restart last summer,
Jim Curtin, coach of the Philadelphia Union, told his players that he had lined
up a special guest for a video conference call.
اضافة اعلان
The Union players were in the league’s bubble at Walt Disney
World, outside of Orlando, Florida, and because of health and safety protocols
that limited large group gatherings, they had scattered to their hotel rooms
for the call. A familiar figure soon appeared on their screens. Kevin Durant,
one of the team’s new owners, had arrived to deliver a pep talk.
As Durant’s speech — a message about what it takes to succeed
and become a champion — morphed into a nothing-is-off-limits discussion, the
players asked him about his National Basketball Association (NBA) title runs
with Golden State, about his decision to join the Brooklyn Nets in free agency
and about his then-ongoing rehabilitation from Achilles tendon surgery.
“It hit with our players because they’ve all been injured at
certain times — how lonely that can be, and getting yourself back to the top,”
Curtin said. “The interesting thing is that I have guys from 15 different
countries in my group, and all of them were like, ‘That was amazing.’ I think
Kevin contributed to the team in a bigger way than he realized.”
When Durant agreed to purchase a 10 percent stake in the Union
last June — an investment worth more than $20 million — he joined a growing but
select club of basketball stars who have acquired interests in professional
soccer teams. LeBron James was ahead of the curve when, in 2011, he secured a
small stake in the English club Liverpool.
For a short spell, Carmelo Anthony owned Puerto Rico Football
Club (FC) of the now-defunct North American Soccer League, and the Women’s
National Basketball Association (WNBA) star Candace Parker recently bought a
piece of Angel City FC, an expansion team in the National Women’s Soccer
League.
Durant isn’t even the only soccer owner in the Nets’ locker
room. He gets daily reminders of the NBA’s rapid cross-pollination with Major
League Soccer (MLS): Steve Nash, the Nets’ coach, is a co-owner of the
Vancouver Whitecaps; Joe Tsai, the Nets’ owner, has a stake in Los Angeles FC;
and James Harden, one of Durant’s teammates, arrived in Brooklyn this season
with an ownership slice of the Houston Dynamo.
“I’m sure once we play those guys, me and James will have a nice
little wager on it,” Durant said in a telephone interview. “It’s cool to see
guys in our sport stepping over and doing something different.”
The involvement of top basketball players in North American
soccer comes at a time when athletes — particularly Black athletes — are
increasingly leveraging their wealth and their public profiles to upend the
traditional athlete-owner dynamic. Consider that the National Women’s Soccer
League ‘s (NWSL) ownership ranks now include not only Parker but also Serena
Williams and Naomi Osaka, tennis stars who understand their influence and are
seizing opportunities to wield it beyond the court.
“I think players are realizing now that they have the
opportunity to not just play for these teams and get paid by these owners,”
Parker said. “They have the opportunity to actually write the checks. This
generation has a different mindset.”
Parker said she became more serious about the idea of team
ownership in recent years as a player for the Los Angeles Sparks. She got to
know the owners, she said, and was intrigued by what happens behind the scenes
— and the profound effect of those decisions.
Durant said that he had thrown himself into the Union’s affairs.
He participates in the ownership group’s weekly conference calls. He has
chatted with the coaches about development and training. He has offered
opinions on everything from jersey design to community outreach. He has
conferred with the players about social justice issues, joining a call that
helped lead to the team’s role in a voter registration drive last year. And he
has shown a willingness to opine on dubious refereeing decisions, like any
other good Union fan.
After the Union parted with two of their best players in the
offseason — midfielder Brenden Aaronson now plays in Austria, and defender Mark
McKenzie left for Belgium — Durant may be the team’s most high-profile addition
in the last year.
Durant was not exactly a soccer aficionado growing up in Prince
George’s County, Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C. Tall for his age and
6-foot-10 by high school, he spent most of his time working on his jump shot.
But he would kick the soccer ball around with his friends, he said, and he
quickly identified a parallel between the sports.
“I swear one of the things he loves about it is that it’s
reliant on scoring a bucket,” said Rich Kleiman, Durant’s manager and business
partner.
Early in his NBA career, Durant took a couple of promotional
trips to Europe on behalf of Nike, one of his sponsors, and met some of the
company’s other global pitchmen. They happened to be soccer players. Durant’s
exposure continued to grow when he joined the Warriors and developed a
relationship with Nash, who was then working with the team as a player
development consultant. Nash, who has been a co-owner of the Whitecaps since
2008, is an avid soccer player whose brother Martin once played for Canada’s
national team.
“Steve is huge into soccer,” Durant said. “We’ve talked about
what it is to be an owner and how much traveling he does to stay up with the
team and how often he goes over there.”
Durant recalled a formative experience in 2019, when he saw a
news release announcing that Harden had joined the ownership group of the
Dynamo and the Houston Dash of the NWSL. “I got more and more interested when I
saw some of my peers get into this,” Durant said.
For athletes like Durant, Kleiman said, soccer franchises are “a
realistic entry point” for team ownership. Current players are not allowed to
acquire stakes in NBA or WNBA teams, and the valuations of NFL franchises and
top European soccer clubs can reach into the billions, putting significant
ownership stakes out of reach even for wealthy athletes. (There are exceptions,
of course: James purchased a minor stake in the Boston Red Sox last month from
the same partners who own Liverpool.)
Durant had talked with a different MLS team, D.C. United, about
investing in the team before those negotiations stalled. After The Athletic
reported on those discussions in October 2019, Jay Sugarman, the Union’s
majority owner, reached out.
“Sort of fortuitous timing,” Sugarman said. “We were looking for
different voices in our ownership group.”
By last June, the deal was official. Durant’s ownership stake
includes a marketing partnership with Thirty Five Ventures, the sports, media
and entertainment company that he co-founded with Kleiman. But it also has
given him a championship goal in another sport.
The Union finished with the best record in MLS in last year’s
shortened season but were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. They,
and Durant, want a better ending this year.
“We just want to keep building,” Durant said. “It’s a lot of
work to be done.”
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