Sporting KC
Illig Family Selling Majority Stake in Sporting KC
In a big Friday news drop, Forbes announced that the Illig family is selling their majority stake in Sporting KC. According to Forbes the sale was to one of the club’s existing limiting partners at an enterprise value of $700 million. Later this evening, Sam McDowell confirmed that the Illig’s stake was sold to Peter Mallouk through the team, who in a statement said “Peter Mallouk is now the majority shareholder of the club.” The sale is believed to be the highest paid for a majority stake in an MLS team.
The sale will see the Illig’s sell 71% of the team to Mallouk, reducing their stake in the team to just 10%. It will give Mallouk 80% ownership in the team.
According to Forbes, while the Illig’s will only retain a 10% ownership stake, they will still maintain their positions as governor and alternate governor of the team and McDowell confirmed through the team that they will still run the club’s day-to-day operations and represent the team on the league’s board of governors.
Mallouk, who is the president and CEO of wealth advisory firm, Creative Planning joined Sporting’s ownership group in 2022 as a minority owner. He is also a minority owner in the Kansas City Royals. According to Bloomberg he is ranked the 317th richest person in the world and has a net worth of $11 billion.
Cliff Illig along with Cerner partner, Neal Patterson, Pat Curran, Greg Maday, and Robb Heineman, under OnGoal LLC bought the then Kansas City Wizards from Lamar Hunt in 2006. The group rebranded the team to Sporting KC ahead of the opening of Sporting Park and the 2011 MLS season. Since then the group has won an MLS Cup and three US Open Cups with three of those finals being played at the stadium.
In 2021, the group added KC Chiefs quarterback, Patrick Mahomes to the ownership group.
Sporting’s ownership page on the team’s site currently redirects to an “ope” Page Not Found.
The question for many fans will become “what does this mean?” Short term probably not a lot, things will continue on as they do. Long term is something that will certainly be discussed as the transition plays out.
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Thank God! I really hope the press conference to announce Wicky as coach is the last time I will ever have to suffer through Mike Illig reading a prepared statement.
Yeah, I’ve seen more enthusiastic hostage videos. But if the Illigs still have their day to day roles then probably not. Maybe that’s temporary as the transition unfolds.
Kvetching aside, this is almost certainly great news for all of us. Congratulations to Chad for his early scoop profile of Mallouk a few weeks ago. Everything he wrote makes me feel really good about this and I hope that’s right.
Yeah, I got really lucky on that. And I piddle around with that, I’m glad I got it out before the news was official.
When the Reddit poster put out that information and then deleted it, we dug around and it sounded like it was either a done deal (which it turns out it was) or was about to be done. But we couldn’t get any sources on the record.
Does this mean they will actually spend some money?
100%, yes.
“What you’re going to see next season is a big, big financial commitment,” Peter Mallouk said, “to do whatever it takes to build upon what we’re building upon this season.”
https://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/sam-mcdowell/article314360536.html
I’m not educated on how these things work, but could this have been a reason behind signing and/or coach selection delays?
A deal this big must have been in the works for quite some time.
Not to mention, if David Lee knew this was in works, it might have influenced his decision to come here. We were all a little curious why he thought he’d get open purse strings from the Illigs, but Mallouk is a whole different story.
I’m hoping the Illig’s overseeing day to day operations is a short term thing while they transition. Many of the complaints people have had are about those small things and it would be nice to have an owner who is interested in shaking that up. Hopefully the purse strings are cutting loose.
I suspect Mallouk will want to stay in the background but will hopefully hire people he trusts over just letting the Illigs continue to go to all the meetings and whatnot.
Exciting times! There are bigger fish to fry, but I really hope this means we can finally get a name that isn’t dumb and meaningless. I’ve always found it annoying, but on top of that this team could really use a rebrand to differentiate it from the Current.
That doesn’t seem likely.
And I’m failing to see how Sporting and the Current names, logos, colors, etc. are such that a rebrand is needed to differentiate.
I don’t mean so much that Current and SKC are easy to mix up. I mean that all the energy in Kansas City Soccer has been with the Current for the past few years as SKC squandered. The best way to put to focus back on the men’s team is to improve play, but a rebrand would help.
The question is, is the short term boost in focus worth pushing out a branding that they’ve done a good job of building over the last 15 years (last couple less so b/c of results)?
Now if you want to talk about maybe a redesign of the shield or something I could see that sort of thing happening in the near future. But a full rebrand? No, I just can’t see it.
I agree that on a year-by-year basis the branding has been handled well. But I think the core identity / name / crest are so weak that it renders the rest pretty moot. Our colors might as well be beige and light beige.
I don’t mind hoops or argyle being carried over, but there needs to be something more grabbing on a core level for this team to be cool. Everything beneath that just feels like a distracting band-aid.
The thing is I could see people responding to a rebrand the same way, as a distracting band-aid as you put it.
Except the colors and badge are also unique. You see that color combination on the screen, you know it’s SKC. There are way too many overlapping teams in MLS, we’re not one of them. And the badge has enough detail to be distinct while still passing the “kid doodle on a notebook” test.
Interesting question. I have to agree with Mike that it’s unlikely. But I’d be interested in a return to Kansas City Wizards if it toned down the Wizard of Oz stuff and went in a more adult direction. I never liked the first iteration because it seemed childish to me as well as being irrelevant to half the fan base. But Wizards in a more Lord of the Rings, hard fantasy way has a lot of promise. It’d be the rare rebrand that would have more credibility than just renaming the team yet again, but would still bring with it the potential to gain a lot of attention the way the original rebrand did. I mean, look how popular their last retro kit was.
There are definitely things you could do to update that branding to MLS 2026 standards (Wizards KC?). Although the tricky thing would be making it less “childish” when a lot of people are fond of the goofier 96 branding. Needling that thread would be tricky.
Personally the name I want is Cavalry Kansas City.
Oof, really? I’m not feeling either of those at all.
I’m not particularly fond of the ‘sporting’ moniker for clubs, but the ‘Wizards’ probably need to be left in antiquity. The league has been shifting more towards the international naming convention for a while now. I actually like the ‘96 tag on clubs. It gives a sense the’ve been there for a while. Sporting will probably be here to stay however.