LAFC ownership group now up to 30 members

Los Angeles Football Club already had the largest ownership group in MLS in terms of actual number of owners, and they’ve extended that lead, bringing their total to 30 with some recent additions.

Eagle-eyed supporters noticed new names on the team’s website. From my count, there are three newcomers: Goodwin Gaw, Mitch Lasky and Marc Merrill.

Gaw is a California-born businessman, who belongs to a prominent business family in Hong Kong. His business interests are mainly focused in the real estate realm, both in the United States and abroad, and he is the head of Gaw Capital Partners. Among his holdings is the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

Lasky is a venture capitalist, currently a general partner at Silicon Valley firm Benchmark. The Los Angeles native was previously a working attorney, before moving into video game production, previously working at such companies as Activision and Electronic Arts. At Benchmark he focuses on digital gaming and other online ventures, and is on the board of a number of companies.

Merrill is a co-founder of Riot Games, the company that makes League of Legends, alongside current LAFC co-managing partner Brandon Beck. The duo are currently creating another game, and Merrill is also widely involved in a number of non-profit activities.

We’ve long known there were additions to LAFC’s ownership group, as Lasky has listed “Owner @LAFC” on his twitter bio for several months at this point, and further newcomers had been whispered for months. Now, it’s apparently official, and with all three of these men listed as simply “owners” there appears to be no changes to LAFC’s internal leadership structure among the group, with Beck, Larry Berg and Bennett Rosenthal at the top of the pack, and Peter Guber, Tom Penn, Henry Nguyen, Ruben Gnanalingam and Vincent Tan in higher positions of authority than the remaining 22 members.

Of course, with more wealthy people jumping on board comes raised expectations:

We’ll let you know if the team provides any additional information on these additions to the ownership.

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