New Timbers owner has a passion to match the fans’

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, Jun 24, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

In Soccer City, the news that new Portland Timbers lead owner Abe Alizadeh actually likes the game came as a relief, at least to the few hundred fanatics who make up the Timbers Army.

Alizadeh, 46, was born in Ramhormoz, Iran, a southern town of 100,000. “In Iran, your alley is your soccer field. Put a couple of stones on either end, or your shoes as goal posts, that’s your soccer,” he says. “There’s not much to it.”

Pass him the ball, and despite the pinstripe suit and polished dress shoes, he shows an eagerness to control it. Toss it toward his head, and his whole body becomes alert. He bends at the waist and nuts it back firmly and accurately.

As a youth he played on the left wing, an attacking position. “The goalies could not catch my crosses,” he says proudly.

At age 22 he was offered a soccer scholarship to California State University, Sacramento, but turned it down and went to Chico State, also in California, on his parents’ advice. The immigrant dream was to get educated, not kick a ball around.

From his base in Roseville, Calif., Alizadeh runs the family’s substantial real estate investments and fast food franchises. In March, his Portland Baseball Investment Group bought the Timbers and the Portland Beavers, an opportunity that arose because of the vacuum left by the collapse of Portland Family Entertainment.

He’s attended one Timbers game this season and one Beavers game. Perhaps a better measure of his interest in soccer is that he has large-screen televisions in both his offices permanently tuned to Fox’s Soccer Channel.

Soccer is a global game, and the lingua franca is marketing. One of the perks of being in the sports business is getting to see the World Cup, and Alizadeh hopes his contacts at Coca-Cola will come through with tickets for Germany 2006.

Alizadeh still has quite a heavy Iranian accent. “I came here as young boy, 16 and a half, so I almost grew up here,” he says. He has eight siblings, seven of whom live in California.

“Certainly, I did not grow up with baseball, I grew up with soccer,” he says, sitting in an empty PGE Park one gray afternoon recently. Out on the field, groundskeepers are pressure washing the turf in preparation for the next Beavers game.

“But I always wanted to get into sports and entertainment activity, and I let the league know of my interest a long time ago. So when this opportunity came up, I really couldn’t pass on it.”

The Timbers almost didn’t have a team at the start of the 2004 season, yet they ended up winning their division in style, only to flame out spectacularly in the first round of the playoffs to the hated rivals, the Seattle Sounders.

Alizadeh says he went into the deal to buy the teams in April with his eyes open: “I was aware of the company’s fiscal condition and its operational challenges, and in terms of Portland community.” He’s referring to the $23 million debt the sports franchises were saddled with by the last owners, and the fact that attendance could be better, given all the soccer-playing children in the city.

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