The Town FC will field an MLS Next Pro soccer team this year thanks to a first-of-its-kind affiliation with the MLS’s San Jose Earthquakes.
As part of a multi-year agreement, the Quakes reserve team, the San Jose Earthquakes II, will be rebranded as The Town FC and play most of their games in the East Bay at St. Mary’s Stadium in Moraga in the third division pro league.
The Town FC will take over the front office duties and handle the club’s business and commercial operations. The Earthquakes will remain in charge of the soccer players and technical team, including providing and paying the coaches and players.
“I think this affiliation model is a really, really powerful way for local communities in a regional market that an MLS team already exists to find their starting point,” noted Benno Nagel, one of The Town FC’s founders. “I think we’re really excited to be the first and will be the first of many.”
Affiliate teams are common between major league and lower-level teams in baseball, basketball, and hockey in America. In soccer, MLS had several affiliate teams playing in the second-division United Soccer League Championship before it created its own third-division pro league, MLS Next Pro, for their reserve sides to play competitive matches in 2022.
The affiliate arrangement is seen as a win-win for both organizations.
The San Jose Earthquakes hope an affiliated club will strengthen their connection with the greater SF Bay Area community, especially in the East Bay, with their parent club. They also hope a club being an affiliate instead of just a reserve team, will lead to a better game day environment and a more competitive atmosphere on the field, which MLS commissioner Don Garber has pointed out is needed for its reserve teams.
“We see this arrangement as beneficial to our overall player development strategy and
a great way to grow the sport in Moraga and Northern California,” said San Jose Earthquakes President Jared Shawlee in the press announcement. “I’m looking forward to seeing head coach Dan DeGeer and his staff build on last year’s playoff success while playing at a great home venue.”
As for the Town FC, which announced its arrival in 2022, the organization’s founding members felt the East Bay needed a club to develop a complete pathway for local youth to become professional players and build interest in the sport. The affiliation allows them to immediately put an East Bay team onto the pitch without all the initial startup costs of a whole new sports organization.
It’s not the first club Nagel has helped launch from scratch. He was also instrumental in turning the Oakland Roots, the second-division USL Championship side, from a dream into a reality. He was the president of that club before being ousted from the team’s board in 2020.
Nagel lost a lawsuit to be reinstated to the Roots board the following year. “I have no regrets with anything, just lessons, and you take them and you move forward,” he said about his time with the Roots.
When MLS Next Pro was created, Nagel felt the Town FC could join the league, and this idea led to talks with San Jose Earthquakes President Jared Shawlee.
“When the league first was announced we talked about what the opportunities were throughout the Bay Area and just in general with the league. As we moved forward, it became more of an interesting conversation about how we might partner specifically in the East Bay.”
Nagel noted the Quakes have traditionally had a solid fan base in the East Bay, and the affiliation will allow local fans to reconnect with the Earthquakes. “I think for us, the ability to partner with an MLS organization is a really amazing thing for us to do,” he added. “To have an MLS club, at that level, recognize our group, and to see value in our group and what we’re trying to build out with our concept and our just overall kind of philosophy. I thought that was pretty special.”
The genesis of the club’s name, The Town FC, came not only from the popular nickname for Oakland but the use of Town in many professional soccer teams around the world. “The idea with ‘The Town’ is really just centered on this idea of community,” Nagel explained.
With The Town FC name, Nagel believes the brand will be able to connect the whole East Bay. “We see opportunity to build a much bigger tent,” Nagel noted. “And at the end of the day, it is an East Bay club. We do want to target the East Bay market, it’s not an Oakland only club.” He added he would have loved to have the club play in The Town itself. However, the East Bay only has three pro-soccer-compliant stadiums: St. Mary’s, UC Berkeley, and Cal State East Bay. None of them are located in Oakland.
Nagel feels that Moraga and its central location in the East Bay will be an easier commute for many fans living there, especially from the Tri-Valley area. “We felt that St. Mary’s College is just a tremendous venue, a really beautiful campus, ” he continued. “Kind of a gem of the East Bay, not a lot of people know about.”
Last August, The Town FC hosted Quakes II at St. Mary’s for an MLS Next Pro game, a test case to determine the location’s viability to attract fans. Although having less than two weeks, the club sold over two thousand tickets for the match and packed the stands in Moraga.
“I felt that the thesis behind The Town FC was really smart,” explained Min Park, a venture capital investor, and partner at RNR Capital, who initially was interested in being a season ticket member but then joined the club’s board of directors after an invite from his friend and co-founder and board member Eric Toda.
“The best part about small business is your idea of what it could be, right?” said Park, who has used his background in finance to grow the investment group for The Town FC. “You know it’s going to be a lot of work. You know, it’s going to be a lot of startup headaches and struggles, but you can create something new, and that’s pretty amazing.”
Although a big Bay Area sports fan, Park only became interested in soccer recently despite his father, who grew up in Korea, being a soccer fanatic. Now a father himself, Park hopes to build a deeper connection with the East Bay community through soccer and feels America is truly embracing the sport. However, he understands how difficult it is for soccer to succeed financially in this country.
From an immigrant background, Park watched his parents struggle for a long time to make ends meet. He feels the current investment model in developing lower division soccer clubs, raising and spending millions of dollars, is not sustainable in the long term.
“I think that obviously, soccer clubs have to be sustainable and somewhat profitable in order to keep being run,” Park said. “I think the worst thing to do is to start a team, and run it for five years, and then have to close cause you can’t fulfill your obligation.”
Park felt that the affiliate opportunity between the Town FC and San Jose Earthquakes was an opportunity the organization could not pass up.
“I thought it was an interesting way to approach it as a small business,” he explained. “How do work with other businesses like the Earthquakes and find mutual partnerships that really benefit each other? You only get to that level of partnership if it works for both sides. We approached it that way so that we could have this team last forever.”
Nagel echoed that the financial concerns of starting a lower-league team were a major reason for The Town FC to enter the affiliation agreement.
“You look at the financials of these [soccer] clubs, I mean, it is kind of jaw-dropping to see the types of losses that they’re sustaining,” added Nagel. “We wanted to build something where it wasn’t relying on capital calls from our ownership group to keep our doors open. We felt that was the best way to position us for that long-term plan.”
As for what fans are to expect on The Town FC match days, Nagel hopes the games will continue to draw a diverse group of fans from across the whole East Bay who attended the team’s test game last year. He noted that St. Mary’s stadium has a grandstand along one side of the pitch, while the other has a grass berm with a grove of Redwood trees behind, where families can bring a blanket and watch games.
“We’re just focused on operating the first games and making sure that we’ve got quality food options there. We’re even looking at ways that we can innovate the food experience,” he added. The food experience could possibly feature Michelin-starred restaurants or prominent Bay Area chefs, for example.
However, he noted that the most important piece of the game-day equation is exciting soccer, which he expects the Quakes players, who made the MLS Next Pro playoffs in 2023, will deliver.
“They’ve got a really, really talented academy pipeline that’s coming up and pushing into that second team,” said Nagel. “And they’ve got a number of young guys if you look to Cruz Medina or Emmanuel Ochoa, some of those guys are going to play a lot of minutes for us.” He noted that several Quakes academy players also have deep roots in the East Bay.
The Town FC will play 11 of its 14 home games in Moraga this season, with the other three at PayPal Park. Its first-ever game will be on the road on Sunday, March 17, when they face LA Galaxy II. The club’s initial home game will occur at PayPal Park on April 20th, and its first home match at St. Mary’s will take place on Friday, May 3rd.
