Surack hopes to ‘move the needle’ on Indy Eleven’s battle with city
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The founder of the Indy Eleven soccer team is hopeful that adding a billionaire to the franchise’s ownership ranks will bolster his case for Major League Soccer—and get plans for a $1.5 billion stadium district back on track.
Fort Wayne businessman Chuck Surack, who made $1.5 billion by selling a roughly 75% stake in his company Sweetwater Sound in 2021, was announced Wednesday as a co-owner and a financier for the team.
His addition comes as majority owner Ersal Ozdemir wages a fight with Mayor Joe Hogsett’s administration about Indianapolis securing an MLS club, which the mayor is looking to do with a separate ownership group. Longtime soccer executive Tom Glick is leading that effort on the city’s behalf.
Surack founded and led Sweetwater for more than three decades before selling a portion of the company to a private equity firm in 2021. He continues to serve as its chairman.
He still has a 25% ownership stake in the company, along with holdings that include a helicopter manufacturing company in Michigan, another $100 million in aviation assets and a $110 million real estate development now under construction in Fort Wayne.
He declined to share details of his planned investment in the Indy Eleven—including whether he intends to become the majority owner of the franchise—but described the dollar figure as “a significant amount” for his family.
Surack also said he is still in conversations with Ozdemir about what role his investment will play in advancing the franchise, including whether it could go toward franchise fees, team operations or components of the Eleven Park project.
For the Eleven Park development alone, the addition of Surack could give the group access to millions more in capital and new lines of credit.
“That’s still being worked out,” he told IBJ. “But what I would say is even bigger is … I think anything good for Indianapolis is good for the state of Indiana, whether that’s Fort Wayne or Evansville or Indianapolis. So I’m just doing everything I can to pour in to good things in our state.”
Surack joins a stable of Indiana businesspeople and families with deep pockets, including the Ricker and Traylor families, Jeff Laborsky of The Heritage Group and Fred Merritt with LFM Investments. The Salin and Hageman families, Don Gottwald and Brian Bauer also own a stake in the Indy Eleven and Eleven Park.
Sources said Surack is now by far the wealthiest of the team’s co-owners—and the first billionaire in those ranks. Keystone has also touted his billionaire status, although his exact net worth remains unknown.
In most cases, the addition of such a wealthy individual might position the United Soccer League Championship team to make the jump to MLS. However, the Hogsett administration itself has opted to forego further negotiations with Keystone Group on Eleven Park and its aspirations for the league in favor of pursuing the procurement of another ownership group to secure a top-tier franchise.
Historically, Ozdemir’s group has been waved off by MLS because he hasn’t been able to substantiate claims he had access to resources that could support a franchise. One source said Ozdemir has long sought to bring the Simon family into the ownership group, including in the early days of the Indy Eleven, but his efforts were spurned.
But the source said Ozdemir is hopeful that the addition of Surack—and continued interest from other wealthy businesspeople—could goad some attention from the league, even as it continues to be enticed by Hogsett.
Earlier this week, Ozdemir told IBJ he is “happy to be a minority owner” in his team if it means securing an MLS franchise, but he added that he needs to have a relationship with the other owners and he would like them to be locally based.
“I’ve always said that this is [about] more than me, that this is about the city and what’s best for the city,” Ozdemir said. “So … if there are people that want to come to us and help us to basically accelerate our MLS [efforts], I’m 100% happy to be a minority owner. I have some amazing, well-known Indiana families as part of this ownership group and we have significant resources, but the MLS franchise [fee] continues to get worse every year.”
In the early days of Major League Soccer, a franchise cost about $7.5 million, but by 2012, the figure jumped to $40 million. In San Diego, officials paid a franchise fee of $500 million for an MLS expansion team set to begin play in 2025.
And operating an MLS team can cost millions of dollars a year. In 2022, the maximum operating revenue for an MLS team was $8 million.
The minimum annual salary for an MLS player is about $71,000, while the minimum player salary for the next-highest league, USL Championship, is $27,000. The Indy Eleven soccer team plays in the USL Championship league.
Jeff Berding, co-CEO of MLS team FC Cincinnati, said comparing the owners of USL Championship league teams with owners of MLS teams is “largely a difference between millionaires and billionaires.”
FC Cincinnati, which is majority owned by American Financial Group CEO Carl Lindner III, started as a USL team but moved up to MLS in 2019.
For his part, Surack said he “would love to move the needle” on the city’s interest in the Indy Eleven by joining as a co-owner, but said he wasn’t sure if the mayor would be willing to change his mind.
A city source affirmed as much, telling IBJ that because negotiations on Eleven Park ended in March and the city is pursuing a different path for MLS, Wednesday’s news changed nothing about the prospect of the Hogsett administration returning to the table with Indy Eleven and Ozdemir.
Even so, Surack said he would still like to see development continue on the Eleven Park site rather than the alternative site that has been put forth by the city, which would include the demolition of the Indianapolis Downtown Heliport. Surack has been opposed to plans to decommission the property in recent years, even buying an adjacent parcel in hopes of thwarting the effort.
“Maybe there’s something I don’t understand, but tell me why this new site that [Hogsett] picked would be a better one,” Surack said. “He also hasn’t come out and said who [the new] investors are. I think I think it’s a little disingenuous on both levels.”