That is the majority of this board. Makes my head spin...
But where am I supposed to park my car?
Riverside or Tower City.
But you could use the exercise...
Because the expectations that Blitzer buying into the franchise would be a huge game changer, when that is questionable.
If I start now I should be there in time for opening day..
Not much.
What Real Salt Lake should expect from David Blitzer, a new owner with stakes in Crystal Palace, the 76ers and more
By Sam Stejskal Jan 12, 202211
Though he has a stake in more than 10 professional sports teams in seven different countries, there isn’t a ton known about what David Blitzer is like as an owner.
Along with his business partner Josh Harris, Blitzer is co-managing partner of the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils and one of the biggest shareholders in the Premier League’s Crystal Palace. He also has stakes in German Bundesliga club FC Augsburg, Dutch team ADO Den Haag, Belgian side Waasland-Beveren, Spanish outfit AD Alcorcon and Portuguese club Estoril through Bolt Football Holdings, a company he co-owns with Jahm Najafi and Jeff Moorad. He is also reportedly in talks to buy a significant share of the MLB’s Cleveland Guardians.
Last week, Blitzer officially added an MLS team to that list. Teaming with Utah Jazz owner and Salt Lake City-area native Ryan Smith and investment firm Arctos Sports Partners, Blitzer bought RSL from former owner Dell Loy Hansen, who put the team up for sale in August 2020 after The Athletic reported on his history of racist and sexist behavior at the club. According to reports, Blitzer, Smith and Arctos are paying just under $400 million in the deal, which includes RSL, Rio Tinto Stadium, the Real Monarchs MLS Next Pro side and the club’s training facility and academy.
The exact split of their respective shares isn’t known, but sources confirmed that Blitzer, who hasn’t given many interviews in his years as a team owner, will have final say on important club decisions. It’s believed that is the first time the New Jersey native has been confirmed as the final decision maker at any of his various teams.
How will he use that power? Only time will tell, of course, but his own comments, the league’s expectations and accounts from sources who have experience working at other teams in Blitzer’s sports portfolio paint a picture of an engaged, reasonable, composed and solidly ambitious owner.
“I’m a big believer in empowering excellent people to do their jobs really, really well. And we have excellent people here and that makes things a whole lot easier,” Blitzer said in the introductory news conference he held with Smith and MLS commissioner Don Garber last Thursday. “I invest in businesses for a living, and for my entire career, it’s always been about finding incredible people and letting them do their jobs. That doesn’t mean that you don’t get involved in particularly major decisions. So I think on key decisions, of course Ryan and I are going to be talking amongst ourselves and with our partners and with our management team on those. But on that gritty day-to-day, I let the management teams do their jobs.”
Sources who have experience working under Blitzer at some of his other teams described the 52-year-old private equity executive in similar terms. The sources were granted anonymity because they were not authorized by the organizations to speak publicly about Blitzer; one who formerly worked for one of the teams was allowed to speak anonymously so as to protect future employment prospects.
Broadly, they characterized Blitzer as the type of owner who is engaged but not overbearing, the sort who provides the necessary resources for his teams to succeed, then mostly stays out of the way and lets the people he hired do their thing. They also described Blitzer as a decent guy. They said he takes a genuine interest in the employees he interacts with and isn’t shy about going out of his way to offer them positive feedback or well-wishes, two characteristics that could easily help facilitate a positive workplace culture. That alone should mark a significant improvement from Hansen, who oversaw and contributed to an environment at RSL that was remarkably toxic.
“In terms of ownership, you don’t want them meddling, but you want them to care. And that’s really kind of the impression I got from him,” said one source who recently worked on the sporting side of one of the teams that Blitzer has a stake in. “He was never asking us to go out and acquire this or that player. It was, ‘What can I do to help empower you to make the team better?’ Or when the team wasn’t doing well, it was, ‘What is going on that is making things go wrong and how do I help fix it?’ On (biweekly) ownership calls, he was always asking insightful questions. He was definitely the most educated of the owners. I wouldn’t say he was intimately educated, but you could definitely tell that he made an effort.”
The league is certainly high on its new investors, with Garber going as far as to call the joining of Blitzer and Smith “a dream partnership” for RSL and MLS.
The relationship between Garber and Blitzer actually dates all the way back to 2011, when Blitzer, who had spent the previous decade living in London, first contacted the commissioner about potentially buying into the league. He became a relatively avid soccer fan during his years in England, regularly attending Chelsea matches at Stamford Bridge, which was less than half a mile from his home. He said at the introductory news conference for him and Smith last Thursday that he looked into “a variety of opportunities” over the years to become an MLS owner, but none of them felt quite right until RSL.
Partnering with Smith, who has deep local ties and looked into buying RSL independent of Blitzer shortly after Hansen first put the team up for sale, helped push Blitzer to pull the trigger on this transaction. It’s also clear that he believes in Salt Lake as a market, telling reporters last week that he feels it’s no longer “a hidden jewel — it’s just a jewel.”
Naturally, there’s a good amount of interest in just how much Blitzer, who the New York Post reported in June 2020 as having a net worth of $1.3 billion, will spend on the RSL first team. Salt Lake usually ranked in the bottom-third of MLS in payroll under Hansen and previous owner/club founder Dave Checketts. In contrast, the 76ers and Devils have typically placed in the top-10 of their respective leagues in payroll during Blitzer’s time as co-owner with Harris.
Crystal Palace, which is fronted more by Steve Parish than Blitzer or Harris, is usually in the middle of the Premier League in overall spending. The club did have the third-largest net transfer spend in the league in the 2021 summer window, however. Notably, FC Augsburg just shelled out a reported club record transfer fee that could rise as high as $20 million to FC Dallas for U.S. men’s national team striker Ricardo Pepi.
One of the sources who still works for one of Blitzer’s organizations said that he is “very knowledgeable” about soccer, but typically approaches his teams “from the perspective of a billionaire who is making an investment in a sports team, as opposed to a sports fan who happens to have some money.” The source who used to work for one of his organizations mostly echoed that stance on Blitzer’s spending.
“He doesn’t want to spend unnecessary money just to spend money,” said the source. “I think he’ll probably build out the front office, he’ll understand that that will probably take some capital. And when the time comes, I wouldn’t be surprised if RSL was more in the middle of the pack in spending. I don’t think they’ll spend like Toronto or Miami, that kind of money, but I think they could be in the middle to upper-middle class.”
While they didn’t think RSL will be at the top of the league in spending, that same source does feel that Blitzer will likely join the group of aggressive MLS owners pushing for the league to loosen its roster restrictions.
“He’s an investor, first and foremost,” said the source. “He wants to get the most ROI possible. And the way to do that is to increase the value of the league, and to increase the value of the league you need to increase the value of the player. And I think he’ll see that it’s harder to do that when you have 17 different salary cap rules that nobody can understand. So he, I think, will be a huge proponent of making a push in that kind of way.”
That source added that they largely view the fact that Blitzer will be running RSL without the involvement of Harris, who is the managing partner of both the 76ers and Devils, as a positive. Three different sources described Blitzer as markedly easier to work with than Harris. The 76ers have been relatively successful in recent seasons under the pair, but have fallen short repeatedly in the postseason. The Devils, meanwhile, have made the playoffs just once during the eight full seasons the duo has owned the team.
“There were times when it felt like David wanted to make changes, but couldn’t because ultimately some of those things aren’t really in his hands,” said the source who used to work for one of Blitzer’s teams. “Ultimately, a lot of the big moves with the Sixers and Devils fall to Josh.”
It’s notable that RSL is the seventh soccer club that Blitzer has invested in worldwide, creating the potential for a robust, cross-continent multi-club model. And while it’d be a significant undertaking to recreate a Red Bull or City Football Group-esque ecosystem, Blitzer could coordinate his various clubs to create a broad scouting network, reduce costs, share expertise and even facilitate player transfers.
He doesn’t need to look far for examples of the kinds of advantages multi-club ownership can provide to MLS teams. The New York Red Bulls and New York City FC have both tapped extensively into the scouting networks of their respective parent organizations, CF Montreal has used sister club Bologna to help complete deals for impactful players and Chicago just this offseason offloaded unproductive designated player Ignacio Aliseda to Swiss club FC Lugano, which was recently bought by Fire owner Joe Mansueto. That move freed up a valuable DP spot for the Fire while keeping Aliseda under contract with the Mansueto family of clubs, giving the broader organization time to recoup the sizable investment it made into the 21-year-old when the Fire acquired him ahead of the 2020 MLS season.
There’s also room for Blitzer and Smith to combine the powers of RSL and the Jazz in ways that will be mutually beneficial for both teams. They could also do something similar with an NWSL team, which both have said they plan to bring back to Utah. Hansen previously owned the Utah Royals in NWSL, but he sold the team in December 2020 to Angie and Chris Long, who moved the squad to Kansas City.
“David is very good at using the resources he already has and identifying how they can be leveraged to improve individual organizations,” said the source that used to work for one of his teams. “He has a really good knack at identifying that type of thing.”
It remains to be seen how exactly RSL will fare under the leadership of Blitzer and his minority partner Smith. There do seem to be plenty of reasons to be optimistic about their prospects, however, particularly with the potential for Blitzer to leverage his significant experience in professional sports, deep pockets, professional demeanor and growing portfolio of teams to become an effective managing partner in MLS. At worst, the pair should be a significant step up from Hansen. At best, the new bosses could help RSL return to the envied status the club maintained in the early part of last decade.