S1: The RSL Story. Ep 3: The Midas Touch
For Real Salt Lake fans, December of 2013 was one of the most heartbreaking in the club’s history.
On Dec. 7, they watched their beloved Claret and Cobalt lose the Major League Soccer Championship to Kansas City in the longest shootout in league history. And then days later, they lost the head coach who’d led the team from the “lovable loser” expansion franchise to champions in 2009 to perennial contenders.
Jason Kreis’s exit wasn’t completely unexpected, but it wasn’t any less heartbreaking to long-time fan. But maybe more importantly, it signaled a shift in the club that would transform not just the team on the field, but everything associated with it.
“That was kind of the starting point for the disintegration of the golden era of RSL,” said Athletic reporter Chris Kamrani, who covered the team for the Salt Lake Tribune from 2013-2020. “
His first year as a professional soccer beat writers was the year real-estate magnate Dell Loy Hansen became the team’s sole owner. He’d become part-owner in 2009 because founder Dave Checketts and his partners needed cash to bring stability to the franchise.
But in December of 2012, when Checketts sold the team to Hansen, he gave him one piece of advice – re-sign head coach Jason Kreis as soon as possible.
Instead, just a few games into the 2013 season, Hansen had a much different conversation with Kreis – one that sealed his fate with the club.
And even though he didn’t know what was to come, Kamrani said a sit-down interview with Hansen revealed how the billionaire saw his role overseeing what he referred to as “a state trust.”
In that interview, Kamrani watched as Hansen detailed his vision for the club.
“And immediately you got the sense …of how he wanted to present himself as the full owner,” Kamrani recalled. “I think for a long time he looked at himself as kind of the secondary owner to Dave because Dave brought the team in, Dave basically made this thing happen from scratch. But Dell Loy footed a lot of the bill. You know, Dell Loy was the guy that basically helped RSL stay afloat financially for a long time. And (2013) this was kind of the perfect first dream season for him with the final just a couple days away. …And he had something to prove.”
Hansen thought he could expand Utah’s soccer imprint, and in many ways he did. But his failures turned out to be fatal for his leadership of the club.
“He felt like he could do it better in his way, which is what most really rich successful people think they can do,” Kamrani said. “But as, as we’ve seen, the history of professional sports is littered with owners who thought they could do it their own way and failed to do so.”
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