Football is music.
A beat builds.
A crowd rises.
Then something happens that is almost impossible to explain afterwards.
A goal.
A chorus.
Twenty thousand strangers suddenly feeling exactly the same thing.
That is why football and music have always understood each other.
And there may be no better city for the two to meet than Los Angeles.
THE AZTECS WERE ALREADY THERE
The Los Angeles Aztecs were never just eleven men and a ball.
Look at the people around the club.
Elton John became part-owner.
Rod Stewart was around the Aztecs.
Leif Garrett supported them.
George Best played here.
Johan Cruyff played here.
Football mixed naturally with music, celebrity and the strange energy of 1970s Los Angeles.
Nobody sat in a boardroom and called it a content strategy.
It simply happened.
The Sunset Strip was alive.
Music mattered.
Football was trying to establish itself in America.
And the Aztecs somehow found themselves sitting between the two.
Nearly fifty years later, that feels less like an accident and more like unfinished business.
MUSIC AND FOOTBALL MAKE US FEEL
Strip away the emotion and neither makes much sense.
Music is organised noise.
Football is twenty-two people chasing a ball.
Yet both can make a grown man cry.
That is the bit spreadsheets struggle with.
Feeling.
You remember where you were when you first heard a certain song.
You remember where you were when your team scored that goal.
Three notes can send you back twenty years.
So can an old football shirt.
A chorus can turn thousands of strangers into one voice.
So can a football terrace.
Nobody needs to explain why their favourite song matters.
It just does.
Football is the same.
Rhythm.
Timing.
Movement.
Improvisation.
Individual expression inside a structure.
The greatest footballers don’t simply run faster.
They see things.
Cruyff saw them.
Best saw them.
They created space where nobody else could see it.
They made difficult things look inevitable.
That is not very different from a great musician.
At its best, football stops being merely sport.
It becomes art.
AND THIS IS LOS ANGELES
There are places where you could build a football club around football alone.
Los Angeles isn’t one of them.
This city has always been a collision.
Hollywood.
The Sunset Strip.
East LA.
Hip-hop.
Rock.
Latin music.
Film.
Fashion.
Immigration.
Reinvention.
People come here and make things.
Sometimes brilliant things.
Sometimes ridiculous things.
Often both.
The Aztecs should belong to that Los Angeles.
Not a sanitised version created by a branding agency.
Not celebrities holding scarves because someone paid them to.
Something real.
A football club with its own sound.
WHAT DOES THAT MEAN NOW?
It doesn’t mean recreating 1976.
I don’t want a museum.
I want the next chapter.
Artist-designed shirts.
DJs and live music around matches.
Local musicians.
Independent labels.
Record collaborations.
Limited collectibles.
Football cards.
Block parties.
Food.
Art.
Matchday playlists people recognise after three notes.
Things supporters want to wear.
Things they want to collect.
Things they keep.
But there is one rule.
The football remains the main event.
Everything else should make arriving at an Aztecs game feel unmistakably like Los Angeles.
That is the difference between entertainment bolted onto football and actual culture.
Culture can’t be ordered from an agency.
It has to grow.
THEN ELTON. NOW CRISTIAN.
That is why our latest investor caught my attention.
Cristian Rojas — better known as Rojas On The Beat — is a multi-platinum music producer, DJ and record executive.
He is also a lifelong soccer supporter, sports-card collector and someone who has already invested in football clubs.
Cristian recently backed the Los Angeles Aztecs through our Wefunder campaign.
He explained why:
“As a lifelong soccer fan and someone who has invested in several football clubs, I’m excited about the vision of bringing the Los Angeles Aztecs back and being involved from the early stages. I love the idea of combining the history of the club with the future of soccer in the U.S. Excited to see where the journey goes!”
That interested me.
Not because we can now say a multi-platinum producer invested in the Aztecs.
Nice headline.
Wrong story.
The interesting thing is what it represents.
Nearly fifty years ago, Elton John saw something in this club.
Today another generation from music is beginning to see something too.
Different era.
Different sound.
Same connection.
CLUBS NEED A SOUL
Football has become incredibly good at monetising supporters.
Sometimes it forgets why supporters came in the first place.
They wanted to feel something.
Music understands this better than most industries.
Nobody loves a record because of its monetisation strategy.
Nobody sings a chorus because the artist delivered excellent quarterly recurring revenue.
You sing because something got inside you.
Football clubs should remember that.
A badge matters because of the memories attached to it.
A stadium matters because of what happened there.
A shirt matters because somebody wore it when you were ten.
A song matters because thousands of people sang it together.
That is culture.
And culture is incredibly difficult to fake.
The Los Angeles Aztecs have an advantage.
Some of ours already exists.
Elton John.
Rod Stewart.
Leif Garrett.
George Best.
Johan Cruyff.
Los Angeles.
Football and music colliding before anybody felt the need to call it sports entertainment.
Our job isn’t to imitate it.
Our job is to continue it.
MAKE PEOPLE FEEL SOMETHING
We are not rebuilding 1976.
We are taking what made it special and starting the next record.
The players will change.
The music will change.
Los Angeles will keep changing.
The job remains the same.
Make people feel something.
Football can be sport.
Music can be entertainment.
But at their best, both become something more.
Art.
If that sounds like your kind of football club, come early.
We’re only on the first track.