The Sounders architect

Ten years ago, somewhere between Chicago and Seattle, two men in an airplane unknowingly planted the seeds for what would grow into the biggest success story in American soccer.

Adrian Hanauer, now a minority owner and the general manager of Seattle Sounders FC, was at the time an entrepreneu

r and business man with no ties to the game beyond playing in local adult leagues. Hanauer spotted Brad Kimura, the general manager of the Sounders, then a part of the United Soccer Leagues, and made an introduction. Hanauer, the son of German immigrants, grew up a big fan of the Sounders in the 1970s. So while the current version of the team wasn’t as big a deal as the teams he remembers from the North American Soccer League, Hanauer was still interested when Kimura said the club was looking for investors to help keep the team afloat.

OK, let’s be honest, investors is probably the wrong term when it comes to minor league soccer. No one makes money investing in minor league soccer. What Kimura needed was more along the lines of philanthropists; people who were willing to give a little to keep soccer alive in Seattle. And for Hanauer, who grew up going to Sounders youth camps and idolizing the stars of those teams, this seemed like the right way to share a bit of his and his family’s good fortune. Hanauer’s parents founded Pacific Coast Feather after moving to Seattle, and Hanauer himself had started a few local businesses, including a chain of framing stores as well as Mad Pizza, and invested in others, aQuantive in particular, that would turn out to be very profitable down the road.

“I talked to my family and we agreed it was something we believed in for the community, so we put some money in,” Hanauer said.

And of course, it didn’t take long for Hanauer the business man to meddle in the life of Hanauer the soccer fan.

“Once I started putting money in, I wanted to understand where the money was going and how to make it better — the business piece interested me a lot — so I started spending time in the offices,” Hanauer said.

After the 2001 season, Kimura got out of soccer, and the owners asked Hanauer to run the team. Or as he puts it, “I was kind of the sucker left holding the bag.”

That “sucker” didn’t take long to realize that minor league soccer wouldn’t work in a major league city, and began looking into bringing a Major League Soccer franchise to Seattle.

“Ultimately once I got in for a couple of years, that was the objective, but it took a while obviously to come to fruition,” he said.

Hanauer tried to bring a team to Seattle in 2004, but that fell through and the league instead expanded to Salt Lake City. Even though Seattle didn’t get a team at the time, MLS commissioner Don Garber was impressed after dealing with Hanauer.

“I was impressed with his vision and recognized very early on that Adrian should be a part of an ownership group when MLS did expand to Seattle,” Garber said in an e-mail.

In 2007 Garber introduced Hanauer to Hollywood producer Joe Roth, and the beginnings of an ownership group were formed. Paul Allen and actor/comedian Drew Carey would eventually jump on board, and in November of 2007, it was announced that Seattle would join the league in 2009.

“He kept soccer alive here and look where it is today,” Kimura said. “That one night on a plane went a long way.”

And while the money of Roth, the majority owner, as well as Allen and Carey helped bring MLS to Seattle, anyone involved in soccer in the area will tell you that none of it would have happened without Hanauer.

“He deserves an unbelievable amount of credit for his role in continuing the Seattle Sounders,” said Alan Hinton, a former player and coach who was largely responsible for resurrecting the Sounders in the 1990s. “He was really the glue that kept the original Sounders going, that bridge … What he did is he forged a very, very good relationship with (then Seahawks CEO) Tod Leiweke and Paul Allen. It’s an absolutely brilliant business model, no question about it, and Adrian was the one who realized it. Adrian is a very smart man, and he’s not afraid to take risks.”

Brian Schmetzer, who worked for Hanauer as the coach of the USL Sounders, and is now an assistant for the current team, calls Hanauer, “The one that single handedly kept that USL team alive.

“He has walked the walk and talked the talk. Adrian kept it alive, then he had the vision and the dream to make the jump to MLS, and he did it, he made it happen.”

Garber calls the launch of Sounders FC, “arguably the best launch of a professional sports team in a long, long time,” and describes Hanauer as part of a “new breed” of owners, someone who grew up a fan of the sport and, after becoming financially successful, turned his attention to growing the game he loves.

“We have a special ownership group in Seattle, and Adrian is a major reason behind the club’s success,” Garber said. “… Adrian is the hometown guy and I believe that is a key ingredient in their success.”

Yet as good as things have been in Seattle — the record crowds, the European-like game-day atmosphere, the winning records — Hanauer isn’t one to rest on his laurels. This is, after all, a guy who got cut from the Mercer Island High School soccer team as a sophomore, yet now runs the biggest soccer team in America; a guy who took up tournament poker in his late 30s and accumulated roughly a quarter million in winnings in a few years of part-time playing before turning his full attention to running a soccer team; a guy who has had the business savvy to invest early in companies like aQuantive, which Microsoft eventually bought for $6 billion — “For me that was the game changer that allowed me to invest in an MLS team” — a guy who, most impressively of all, made soccer work in a country that has a long and rich history of rejecting professional soccer.

So sure, Hanauer is proud of what he has built in Seattle, but he is by no means done striving for bigger things.

“We would like the Sounders to be in the same ballpark as the top sports franchises in the country,” he said. “We’d like the stadium to be filled with 65,000 fans every game, we would like to be even more involved in the community, to be more top of mind, to have the brand resonate with everyone in the community, and then to help push along the national footprint … We want to really help drive MLS to be one of the top soccer leagues in the world.”

Notice Hanauer used the word community twice there. That’s important to him, and it’s a big part of the reason he has made Sounders FC so successful. Hanauer originally invested in the USL Sounders because he didn’t want the Seattle soccer community to lose its team, and once he was able to bring MLS soccer here, he found ways to connect with the community, to make fans part of the game-day experience, and that has all helped Sounders FC draw 36,000-plus fans per game and build the team into a true rarity in this country: a profitable professional soccer franchise.

“I said it from day one that it was really key to keep Adrian as such an important part of the ownership group,” said goalkeeper Kasey Keller, one of the team’s key early signings. “Joe is huge, and obviously what Drew does and what Paul has given us with the stadium was massive as well, but pro ownership is about community, and to have that partnership with Adrian and to have him here every day and be a part of it and show that he cares — you can ask anybody in Dallas what Mark Cuban does for that team, having that passion — to have that is massive.

“Adrian took something that was 4,000 people and turned it into one of the top pro sports franchises, any sport, in the country. Big credit goes out to him.”

Aside from taking Sounders FC and the entire league to higher levels than few believe are possible, Hanauer has a more personal, yet perhaps equally challenging goal he wants to conquer next. At the age of 45, he’s just now taking up golf. But despite his incredibly late start at one of earth’s most frustrating endeavors, he is convinced he will get good at it. Hanauer is a good athlete, and more importantly, a smart, competitive, determined man, so despite any warnings you want to give, he’s ready to master golf.

“I’m so competitive that I’ve decided that I’m going to get good at it,” he said. “So now I’m going to figure out a way to get good at it.”

And really, if Hanauer could take an investment into a minor league soccer team and turn it into the model franchise in American soccer, should anyone bet against him being able to conquer a new challenge. Even one as formidable as golf.

Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com.