The Owner Who Looked at 280 Clubs Before He Found the Right One

Marc Spiegel's path to owning Querétaro FC started with Atlanta United season tickets and ended in a deal he calls borderless. He joined Jon Nelson on SDH AM the morning of the 2026 MLS All-Star Game to explain how he got there.

Two nights before the 2026 MLS All-Star Game, Marc Spiegel sat at a dinner table in Charlotte with several Liga MX executives, listening to Charlotte FC and Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper talk about the stadium project taking shape a few miles from where they sat. Spiegel leaned over to his sporting director, who had traveled with him from Querétaro.

"That's the way people think about modern sports business today," he told him. "It's not just about what kind of shin guards we wear or how much we're out on the practice fields."

The next morning, hours before MLS All-Stars and Liga MX All-Stars met at Bank of America Stadium, Spiegel called into SDH AM from Charlotte to talk with Jon Nelson about the first year of a story that has no real precedent in Mexican soccer. In July 2025, Spiegel became the first American to hold majority ownership of a Liga MX club, closing on Querétaro FC, the Gallos Blancos, in a deal worth more than $120 million.

The Long List

Spiegel is not a lifelong soccer man. Growing up in Kentucky and later building his career in Atlanta, he played the game a little and followed it a little, but nothing more. What changed things was Atlanta United.

"My wife was pregnant when the games started at Grant Field, Bobby Dodd," Spiegel said. He and his wife bought tickets late in that first season, then held season tickets the year the club won MLS Cup. Names like Miguel Almirón, Josef Martínez, Michael Parkhurst, and Brad Guzan pulled him further in. But what actually hooked him, he said, was less the games themselves and more the business underneath them.

By 2017 and 2018 he was reading everything he could find on how soccer clubs actually operated as businesses. He had no way of knowing that a few years later, after the company he had built went public, he and his partners would decide to write their own chapter in the sport rather than just follow someone else's.

That search took over two years and covered more clubs than most fans could name. "We've looked at over 280 clubs," Spiegel said. "That's probably 20 leagues." England was the obvious starting point for an American investor, then Italy, then Spain. But the numbers kept ruling places out. Spiegel said he was not interested in clubs losing twenty, thirty, even fifty percent of their revenue every year just to compete. Mexico, and specifically Liga MX, looked different: profitable clubs, growing businesses, and a commercial footprint that stretches deep into the United States through its diaspora audience.

The final push came almost by accident, at a dinner with a well connected figure in Mexican soccer. "We just started talking," Spiegel said. "That night I called one of my partners and said, hey, let's get into this."

A year after closing the deal, he says the appeal has only grown. "We're more excited today than we were a year ago when we closed on it," Spiegel said. "The potential for this league is unparalleled in global soccer."

(L-R) Mikel Arriola Peñalosa, Executive President of Liga MX, American businessman Marc Spiegel and Mayor of Queretaro, Felipe Macias pose whit team jerseys at a press conference where announced Marc Spiegel as the new owner of the Gallos Blancos del Queretaro of the Liga MX at Corregidora Stadium. on July 17, 2025 in Queretaro, Mexico. (Photo by Jose Carrera/ Eyepix Group)

Wearing the Wrong Color

Not everything in year one has gone smoothly, and Spiegel is direct about the one decision he got wrong. Querétaro's identity is built around the Gallos Blancos, the white roosters, and Spiegel figured the home crowd would want to see the team actually wear white at Estadio Corregidora.

It did not land the way he hoped. "That was not normal," he said. "My social media was fun to read after that. But I own it, and we're back to wearing blue and black at home."

He frames the misstep as part of a larger lesson about coming into a new soccer culture as an American owner. The instinct in U.S. sports, he said, is to trust that American approaches to business, fan experience, and commercial operations transfer everywhere. Querétaro taught him otherwise. "It was paramount for us to not try to force our ways," Spiegel said. "We really needed to embrace and adapt to the local market, our city, our state, and the league."

Professional Owners

That mindset extended to how Spiegel built out the ownership group itself. Since closing the deal, Innovatio Capital has brought in additional partners, most recently Bertram Capital, whose involvement Spiegel says was less about capital and more about shared philosophy. He described treating the club as a full time operation rather than a side project, splitting his time between Atlanta and Querétaro on what he called a six in the morning to midnight schedule, not a nine to five.

He is also not shy about pushing the league itself. At that same Charlotte dinner, Spiegel argued for moving Liga MX's calendar back roughly a month, aligning the season's rhythm with the international transfer window rather than fighting against it. "I think we need to move the schedule back a month," he said, pointing to lost December dates when fans have time off, and to the awkward math of buying a player in August only to watch him lose half a season acclimating to altitude at clubs like Querétaro, which sits more than six thousand feet above sea level.

Whether the league adopts it or not, Spiegel says the door for that kind of input has stayed open. He expects at least one or two more ownership changes across Liga MX in the next year, part of a broader wave of clubs professionalizing their business operations, and he sees new voices, including his own, as part of what pushes the league forward rather than something to be managed around.

Asked what advice he would give another American considering an investment like his, Spiegel did not hesitate. "Think twice," he said, before explaining what he actually meant: get past the instinct to chase a famous league just because it is famous, and instead look honestly at where the fundamentals and the upside actually line up. For him, that meant setting aside England and Italy and finding it instead in a Mexican city three hours from the capital.

Spiegel does not describe the arrangement in terms of an outsider taking something over. He talks about it as something closer to a partnership between two countries that were never as separate as the map suggests. His first job, at fourteen, was at a Mexican restaurant. Two of his three partners speak fluent Spanish. During a recent visit to Querétaro, he found himself watching an NFL game on a Sunday at a Buffalo Wild Wings while the city opened its second Costco.

"We talk about what we did as a borderless transaction," Spiegel said, "and we truly believe that."