The San Jose Earthquakes kick off their season next week and will do so with a new team president. Current COO Jared Shawlee has been promoted to the top spot of the MLS club. The team is expected to officially announce the news on Wednesday.
The president’s chair has sat empty since Tom Fox left after the 2019 season. The former Aston Villa CEO, who also held executive positions at Arsenal, PepsiCo, Nike and the NBA, ran the club for two-and-a-half years. Shawlee has been in charge of the Earthquakes’ business operations since Fox’s departure and led the search for new general manager Chris Leitch, who was hired in November. The soccer operations, led by Leitch, will also report to Shawlee.
Shawlee says there has been a mountain of interest from tech companies in the team since it announced a 10-year, $20 million-plus stadium naming rights deal with San Jose-based PayPal in April, on the heels of a jersey sponsorship from cloud communications firm Intermedia.
On Tuesday, the Quakes revealed a new partnership with streaming platform Roku, and Shawlee expects at least five more deals to be announced in the coming weeks, largely in the tech space, which will include integrations at the stadium as well as more traditional sponsorships. “We are going to officially be able to say that tech and soccer have come together here at the Earthquakes,” Shawlee said in a phone interview.
At $510 million, San Jose ranked No. 16 in Sportico’s roundup of MLS team valuations last year. The club has struggled on the pitch with only three winning seasons in the past 14 years. Shawlee says the GM search was about “identifying a new philosophy for our soccer operation,” and finding someone with a deep knowledge of the player pool in the U.S. and Canada with an eye on developing young academy talent.
Shawlee grew up and went to high school in San Jose. He rooted for the Clash, who were an original MLS franchise and played in the first game in league history in 1996 (the club changed its name to Earthquakes for the 2000 season). Shawlee says his first MLS game was the Clash vs. the MetroStars for his 14th birthday party during that first season.
He received his degree in 2005 from Cal Poly, where his senior thesis was “Eliminating Pricing Arbitrage in the Secondary Ticket Market.” Shawlee says he did the “classic send 100 resumes around”—all in sports—and landed an internship with the Oakland A’s, where he later was made an account executive.
A’s owner John Fisher, along with former minority owner Lew Wolff, bought the rights to launch a new MLS team in San Jose after the original franchise moved to Houston in 2005. Shawlee jumped at the chance to switch sports and joined in 2007, as one of the organization’s earliest employees ahead of its first season in 2008. He was made COO at the end of 2016, picking up an MBA from Notre Dame in between.
Shawlee says he is excited for the 2022 launch of MLS NEXT Pro, which will serve as a bridge between MLS clubs’ academies and first teams; the San Jose Earthquakes II are among the 21 original squads. Another focus is making sure the Bay Area is a host location for the 2026 World Cup. Those decisions are expected in the second quarter of this year.
The 27th MLS season begins Feb. 26 and will feature the addition of Charlotte FC, which brings the league to 28 teams. St. Louis FC will start play next season, and Las Vegas is expected to land the next expansion club, behind a bid from Wes Edens and Naseef Sawiris.