Since MLS’ founding in 1996, more than 50 people have bought control stakes in its teams. None have come to the league with a soccer portfolio quite like billionaire Mohamed Mansour.
Mansour is the majority owner of San Diego FC, which makes its MLS debut Sunday as the league’s 30th club. He also owns Right to Dream, a network of youth academies on three different continents, most with an accompanying professional team.
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San Diego FC is by far the largest—and most expensive—piece of the academy-and-club strategy. Mansour’s group paid an MLS-record $500 million expansion fee to launch the club, and is spending millions more to build its fourth academy on tribal land east of the city. That facility will train and educate kids from both the U.S. and Mexico, with the hope of supplying talent to the MLS club a few years down the line.
“It is a different approach, what we’ve done,” Mansour said in an interview. “And it came gradually. It came with Right to Dream being the sphere that got us interested from the beginning. It’s a beautiful sport, it brings people together, and we feel very fortunate to have been a part of it. We’re here for the long term.”
While a few other MLS clubs are part of soccer empires—primarily City Football Group in New York and Red Bull in New Jersey—Mansour’s stands out for multiple reasons. For one, it’s an academy-first structure. Secondly, San Diego FC will sit at the top of the organization’s pyramid, the preferred landing spot for young athletes in the Right to Dream programs worldwide.
“There are players being transferred from [Right to Dream] into teams in Europe and then starring in the World Cup—it’s really impressive,” Charles Altchek, an MLS EVP and president of MLS Next Pro, said in an interview. “Bringing that experience to San Diego, bringing that experience to MLS, will be really positive for them, and bring new ideas and new innovation to what we’re doing.”
The Mansour Group
Mansour, 77, is chairman of the Mansour Group, a diverse conglomerate founded by his father in 1952. The group’s portfolio has grown to include consumer goods, real estate, banking, automotive, machinery and healthcare. The Mansour Group has more than 60,000 employees and annual revenue exceeding $7.5 billion. In addition to overseeing the whole business, Mansour is chairman of Man Capital, the family office, and is worth $3.3 billion, according to Forbes.
While his ties to soccer run deep—his uncle was a goalie on Egypt’s 1934 World Cup team—it’s a relatively new piece of his portfolio. Mantrac, the Mansour Group’s multinational Caterpillar dealer, has operations in Ghana, and in 2013 a Caterpillar board member suggested to Mansour that he might be interested in sponsoring a soccer academy that had been operating in the African nation since 1999.
“So my son Loutfy went [to Right to Dream] and said, ‘Dad, that’s an amazing project,’” Mansour said. “Then I went and met the founder, Tom Vernon, and fell in love. It gave young men and women an opportunity in life, in a place where it was very difficult for them to find one.”
Right to Dream expanded to Denmark in 2016, building both an academy and acquiring a Danish senior club, FC Nordsjælland. In 2021, Mansour Group took control of the business for €100 million (about $121 million), an initial investment that allowed Right to Dream to expand to Egypt, building an academy in West Cairo and acquiring a startup Egyptian club (FC Masar), which has both men’s and women’s teams.
Two years later, the group ran the strategy again, but on a much larger scale, joining forces with the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, to bring an MLS club, and academy, to San Diego.
MLS Academies
Soccer academies have been a mainstay in Europe for decades, with some—like Barcelona’s La Masia—becoming notable assets for the sport’s biggest clubs. In MLS they are a newer development. While some U.S. clubs experimented with their own youth structures in the league’s early years, it wasn’t until 2007 that MLS mandated an academy from each franchise.
The league’s youth efforts were supercharged again in 2020 when MLS took over the development structure administered by U.S. Soccer, joining every MLS academy and more than 100 other elite academies under the MLS Next banner. This year MLS Next encompasses more than 150 academies, 753 teams and more than 16,000 players across the U.S. and Canada.
This season about one-third of MLS players, nearly 300 in total, came through the clubs’ academies, according to the league. That number jumps to 75% for the players who are 21 or younger. And while those academies are all fully funded for their participants, clubs vary in their investment and reliance on their youth development. Some teams prefer to prioritize young, homegrown talent, while others rely more heavily on experience and players brought in from overseas. Geography also plays a significant role, with clubs in urban areas like New York, Los Angeles and Miami having access to different kids than some of their peers.
“While most of our teams are providing for some resident opportunities, some of our clubs have full residency programs—like the Philadelphia Union or Real Salt Lake—where regardless of where that player is coming from, they have the opportunity to move to Philadelphia or Salt Lake and stay there full time,” Altchek said. “San Diego is doing this as well, moving kids to San Diego full time to focus on their studies and their soccer potential.”
Player Sales
In addition to building out the senior team’s rosters, academies also serve a second business purpose, bringing in revenue whenever players are sold to team outside MLS. That money is kept by the team, and depending on the talent, can be a significant contribution to teams’ income. In 2018, for example, the Vancouver Whitecaps sold homegrown winger Alphonso Davies to Bayern Munich in a $22 million deal. In 2022, FC Dallas sold academy product Ricardo Pepi to FC Augsburg for a reported $20 million, plus an additional 10% of any future transfers involving Pepi. (Sportico estimated FC Dallas revenue in 2022, outside of player sales, to be about $51 million).
Since 2020, Davies and Pepi are two of six MLS academy alums who have been sold overseas for reported fees of more than $10 million, according to MLS. Another dozen have been sold for over $5 million, including U.S. national team captain Tyler Adams, and USMNT winger Kevin Paredes.
This year the league also launched an internal transfer market, allowing teams to strike cash deals with MLS counterparts. The Union recently sold academy prospect Jack McGlynn to the Houston Dynamo for $2.1 million up front, plus a reported 50% sell-on clause and performance bonuses worth up to $1.3 million.
San Diego Structure
Both of the wholly owned clubs in Right to Dream’s portfolio—FC Nordsjælland in Denmark and FC Masar in Egypt—operate as not-for-dividend entities, meaning any profits from player sales or sponsorships are invested directly back into the club and its academy. The structure is different in San Diego. While Mansour is the controlling owner of the group, there are minority partners, and decisions on capital allocations and dividends will be made by the board. (Mansour declined to comment on the overall economics of Right to Dream, or the full scale of his soccer investments to date).
While San Diego FC will be the top of Right to Dream’s professional pyramid, it will likely take time for talent to come from the California location—students typically enter the development academies at age 10 or 12—but it could happen immediately from other academies and pro teams in the portfolio.
San Jose Earthquakes forward Ousseni Bouda spent four years at Right to Dream’s Ghana academy, played at Stanford, and is now a member of the Burkina Faso national team. Earlier this month FC Masar’s women’s team sold defender Shadia Nankya to the NWSL’s Washington Spirit. In a LinkedIn post celebrating the move, Right to Dream called the sale “confirmation of what we’ve always known: Talent has never been the question. Opportunity has.”
Geographical Outlier
San Diego FC may have a geographical advantage as well. While the MLS club academies all feature young players from the U.S. or Canada, San Diego’s proximity to Mexico will allow Right to Dream to incorporate, within FIFA regulations, young players from south of the border.
Mansour, who was Egypt’s minister of transportation under Hosni Mubarak from 2005 to 2009 and knighted in the U.K. last year, said his goal is for San Diego to feature talent homegrown from North America, plus Right to Dream talent from Europe and Africa. In the same way that South Korean star Park Ji-sung expanded Manchester United’s popularity in Asia two decades ago, Mansour said Right to Dream graduates could grow MLS’ footprint in places like Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa, and added that he “definitely” believes the network will be a competitive advantage for his club as it makes its MLS debut.
One thing Mansour does share with his fellow MLS owners: a belief that the league could eventually be among the best in the world. While MLS has struggled to match its competitive aspirations, the U.S. has the largest sports economy in the world. And the league’s lack of relegation and relatively fixed costs have kept valuations higher than almost any other soccer league in the world.
“I am a firm believer in the United States,” Mansour said. “This is the largest sports country in the world, and eventually, soccer will be a main player here. That’s why we’re thinking about it long-term. This is the tip of the iceberg.”
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