Major League Soccer will integrate its 30th club at the start of the 2025 season, when expansion club San Diego FC joins the Western Conference.
But the newest addition to the league will provide a model for on-field success, development and business, unlike the other 29 teams.
San Diego FC, who will play their home games at the 35,000-capacity Snapdragon Stadium in the heart of the city, is owned by the Right to Dream academy and brings to MLS the ambition to be the “Ajax of North America”. , said Tom Penn, CEO of the club.
The Right to Dream academy was founded in Ghana in 1999 by Tom Vernon, a former Manchester United scout. Taking a holistic approach to developing young players both on and off the pitch, the academy has produced several top footballers – including West Ham’s Mohammed Kudus, Southampton’s Kamaldeen Sulemana and Brentford’s Mikkel Damsgaard – while providing a pathway to further education for its students.
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In 2019, Right to Dream expanded to Denmark with the purchase of top club FC Nordsjaelland. Now that they have bought the rights to an expansion club for $500 million, they are bringing their model to the US.
“We are going to collaborate with [universities], and that’s what we’re already doing,” says Vernon, shortly before stepping away from his longtime role as CEO of Right to Dream to take on an advisory board position. “Many of the best colleges in America have Right to Dream kids. Three girls from West Africa entered Ivy League schools this year. We have great long-term relationships.
“At Right to Dream we consciously admit kids who we think are good enough to play in the Ivy League, and then kids who are good enough to play in the Champions League – two different profiles. Our contribution to the development of the communities in which we are located is to unlock that super-super-talent as well as that super-smart child.
“We’re inspired by the LeBron James-Maverick Carter dynamic, where you have the guy who plays in front of the whole world every week, and his best friend from high school is a super smart businessman, and they do that too. social investments together, such as I Promise School, and commercial investments that create opportunities and jobs. That is the idea in our schools. You may be on your way to the Ivy League, but the guy or girl next to you may be on your way to the Champions League. Our curricula are all about how to use your fame, wealth, power, education, influence and network to pass it on to the next generation. We think there are already so many precedents in America that this works well.”
In 2021, the Mansour Group, an Egyptian conglomerate owned by Mohamed Mansour, the seventh richest person in Africa, invested $120 million for a controlling stake in Right to Dream. Mansour, a British citizen, is a senior treasurer and donor to the Conservative party. He was unexpectedly knighted on the recommendation of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak after giving the Conservatives £5 million, at the time the party’s biggest donation since 2001.
Since Mansour’s involvement with Right to Dream, the academy has expanded to Egypt, where it owns another club and runs an academy. The Mansour Group also financed the San Diego project.
“There was a pre-Mansour plan and a post-Masour plan,” says Vernon of how investments from the billionaire businessman have changed the scope of Right to Dream’s ambitions. “All pre-Mansour plans were in the ‘dream’ part of our brand. When we started talking to the Mansours, the first thing they said when they visited Ghana was, “We have to do this in Egypt.” That was the very first thing. We talked a little about Britain, but we talked about America from the beginning.”
In addition to the necessary infrastructure to run an MLS team, San Diego FC will also build a $150 million academy that, with FIFA rules allowing clubs in neighboring countries to recruit within a 30-mile radius, will reach Tijuana in its search for talent.
“It was super important to us that it be a place where we could really make an impact with the academy,” says Vernon. “I had never been to San Diego before. When I heard about an opportunity there, my thoughts went to country clubs, lots of golf, lots of upper middle class wealth. San Diego is a rich city, but at the same time you have the whole border baby phenomenon and we are within 30 miles of the border, so we can recruit in Tijuana as well.”
And as far as Vernon is concerned, Right to Dream’s transition to American football is a natural progression.
“We are one of the shining figures in Europe and Africa when it comes to the student-athlete concept in top football,” he says. “But we stole that idea from America. We thought with such a big investment we’d go somewhere where everyone already gets it – you say, ‘Hey, we want to be a progressive student-athlete concept in the US.’ Everyone says, ‘Well, of course you would want to be. That’s what we do here.’
“Americans just get it. That is in relation to what Right to Dream stands for. That is student-athlete, but also when you start talking about the American Dream – and there are many interpretations of that and whether it is alive in America in 2023. This idea that no matter where you come from, if you work hard enough and are passionate enough about your abilities, you will get opportunities – that’s what we believe in too. Hopefully we’re not too idealistic about it, but we think there is a real value match.
‘Our struggle in England would be the story: ‘Well, we’ve been doing it this way for 100 years, why would we want too much change?’ I imagine Right to Dream will be in England at some point, but we wanted to prove the concept to a slightly more receptive market by deciding to go to California.
In Denmark, FC Nordsjaelland has set several records regarding the opportunities given to young players in the first team. For example, in April 2021 they set an all-time national record by fielding a squad with an average age of just 20 years and 20 days – 13 of the 16 players in that matchday squad were graduates of the Right to Dream academies in Denmark or Ghana . They have also achieved impressive results considering their dependence on youth. Last season they finished second in the Danish Championship, qualifying for the Europa Conference League. And although they were knocked out of that competition in the group stages this season, they first recorded a 6-1 victory over Turkish giants Fenerbahçe.
The blueprint for San Diego FC is to find the same balance between talent development and success on the pitch, but faster.
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“What we have achieved at FCN, from a field perspective, is the model,” says Vernon. “That has a few core components. One of them is our playing style, which is respected in Scandinavia and many parts of Europe as a great playing style to really develop players, but also to really entertain.
“The second thing, which we are most known for, is giving opportunities to young players. We managed to do that, sometimes winning with eight or nine under-22 academy players, starting with our top 11. That was the result of twenty years of FCN building a great academy and Right to Dream Ghana is building a great academy and then brings them together, so obviously you can’t do this kind of thing overnight.
“It won’t happen overnight in America. But with the depth of our talent, we think we can accelerate that process as much as possible and then complement it with the fact that we have three other great academies so that kids will come and play in San Diego at 18. ”
Vernon is hopeful that San Diego FC can fill the space in the hearts and minds of sports fans in the city that has been vacant since the Chargers left for Los Angeles in 2017, and he believes the Right to Dream model is a perfect fit to create a deeper connection between the club and its community.
“There’s a big void there,” he says. “We have already seen from ticket sales that the demand is so high. You have a very nice mix of a Latino-Mexican audience that knows global football very well, and an emerging football fandom there and some very large youth clubs with thousands of children playing who wanted this on their doorstep. It is the right market for professional football as an entertainment product, but also with the holistic values underneath and a deeper love affair with the city and the academy.
“The vision for us is that the city understands that the kids who come through Right to Dream Ghana or Egypt, when they make their debut for San Diego FC, the fans can sing ‘He’s one of our own’ as often as they do about a kid comes along who was born in San Diego.