When the opportunity to get involved in the ownership group of new Major League Soccer club Austin FC was presented to Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey, the only problem was whether he might get too involved.
“It was like: Absolutely, I’m in. How much can I get in? That became the challenge,” McConaughey said. “Because I wanted to be in more.”
Yes, hard to believe, McConaughey being overly enthusiastic. Right? And after he’d spent nearly 27 minutes Tuesday with journalists covering soccer, it was easy to reach this conclusion: If every MLS team had a McConaughey, the league might be pushing the established “top four” men’s leagues even harder than it is.
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With Austin FC set to begin its first MLS season Saturday at 6 p.m. at LAFC, McConaughey not only is an investor in the club but also its “Minister of Culture.” That’s how he’s listed on the club website among the seven people who have a stake in the club, which is the city’s first major league professional team. Austin has had big-time college sports for more than a century, but this is different.
“You’ve got 150 people moving here a day. With that many people, we’re one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation,” McConaughey said. “It used to be everyone that was here — most everyone — went to the University of Texas. Most people here now did not go to the University of Texas. They’re coming here looking for a team. They’re from different parts of the world.
“We’re a very multicultural place, and soccer is that game that invites all cultures, all diversities to the pitch in a common language. … So we’ve got the universal language, and we’ve already got the universal appetite. Plus, we already did great with the other common denominators that everyone loves, which are music and food. We just needed a third one.
“It’s the first time that Austin, the city of Austin, has a team that represents our city. It’s the first time that we can root for our city.” He actually said cit-ay. Not kidding.
McConaughey is taking a rational approach to expectations of an MLS expansion team. It’s hard to know what to expect in terms of results, because Atlanta United was an immediate smash upon entering the league in 2017 and won MLS Cup in it second season. LAFC finished third in points in its first season, 2018, and won the Supporters’ Shield the following year. But FC Cincinnati won only 10 games combined in its first two years after climbing from USL.
Austin FC is moving into a beautiful home, Q2 Stadium, built to hold 20,000. There were 15,000 season tickets sold for the inaugural season with a reported 15,000-person waitlist. But to get the new building ready, the club will play six road games in advance of the June 19 home opener against the San Jose Earthquakes.
“It’ll be nice to go out and get a few scars on the road before we come back,” McConaughey said. “We’re going to learn some things. We are young. How much success can we have in year one? We’ll see. But Austin FC is not something — we’ve not built it in a day, and we’re not going to be a fad. This is the beginning. The season is planted to grow a big, strong oak. A legend.” He managed to accent both syllables there.
McConaughey acknowledged that after his investing his initial money, and enthusiasm, it has been important “to sit back and let the pros do what they do.” That could be anyone from the architectural firm that designed the stadium to the sales and marketing team to sporting director Claudio Reyna, the U.S. Men’s National team legend who was instrumental to New York City FC’s early success.
“Now, here we go. We’re a week out,” McConaughey said. “We’ve been talking about this. We’ve been building this brick by brick. We’ve been getting our support person by person through the city. We understand it’s verde, it’s listos — but now it’s live. Woo-hoo! I just got some chills saying that.
“I’m starting to get looser now. I know we’re coming up on game day. I’m not getting tighter, I’m getting looser. I’m having an exhale, a moment of: OK, we did it. Now we come to the table to eat. Now we get on the pitch and we play. Let’s go learn. We know what we’re striving for. We know it’s a 100-year war. We know we’re not going to have an undefeated season. So how do we build? How do we learn? Now, the fun starts.”
McConaughey describes a soccer ball as “the greatest invitation in the world,” explaining that a child could be alone kicking a soccer ball on a piazza in Rome and if one wanders over, inevitably that ball is going to be kicked about by two people.
The sport has experienced monstrous growth in this country over the past 25 years, although MLS more has benefited from that than driven it. Adding another rapidly growing market, though, only can help the league to become an even more significant force in soccer’s advance here.
“You’ve got to have a long-term view. There are shortcuts. Every business has a shortcut. Every one of us in our personal life has shortcuts. Some of them are OK to have; some of them are OK to take,” McConaughey said. “Most of the time, especially when you want to build something … think long-term.
“The game of football is not going anywhere. Now MLS has established itself. We have a fresh newbie coming into town in MLS, to the game of football: Austin FC. We worked really hard to say: Make the long-term decision. Make the decision now that will pay us off, has a greater percentage to pay us back in success later. If you go into something with an ownership mentality, not a renter’s mentality — yeah, I’d like to dabble in this; maybe we’ll see how it goes — you’re not going to make the right decisions, not going to make the right cultural decisions.”