A week into Major League Soccer’s 10-team launch in 1996, Mark Abbott’s work included procuring a Ferrari on short notice for the league’s most famous goalkeeper.
By the end of his three-decade MLS front office run, he was known for his work in expanding the league to 30 teams.
Abbott, the National Soccer Hall of Fame’s 2025 Builder inductee, had by the time he left MLS after the 2022 season served as vice president, chief operating officer, president and deputy commissioner.
It was a career Abbott had never imagined when he entered the workforce armed with a UC Berkeley School of Law degree. Soccer would be a left-behind love of his youth as he toiled in the mergers & acquisitions world of corporate transactional law.
Then fate intervened and he became the very first MLS employee, in 1993.
His first task: write the business plan that would entice wealthy men to own teams and convince sponsors to buy into pro soccer — a dozen years after the NASL’s collapse.
In 1993, Alan Rothenberg was a senior partner at the law firm Latham & Watkins, as well as U.S. Soccer’s president and the head of the World Cup 1994 Organizing Committee.
MARK ABBOTT: I had been randomly assigned to work for Alan on something nothing to do with soccer — a litigation in federal court.
One day, I was in another partner’s office when Alan was on speakerphone. Alan asked this partner, Paul Tosetti, “Do you know anyone who could help me write the business plan for the new professional soccer league?” We didn’t yet call it Major League Soccer, but it was the league that U.S. Soccer had promised FIFA it would launch after the 1994 World Cup.
I ran out the door, down four flights of stairs, and into Alan’s office. I said, “I’ll do it.”
He looked at me and asked, “You’ll do what?” I said, “I was in Paul’s office and heard you were looking for someone to write the business plan. I’ll write it.”
He asked, “Have you ever written a business plan before?” I said, “No.”
Then he asked, “Are you a soccer person?” I said, “I played as a kid. My dad started the program.”
I got to know Alan pretty well on this other project, and for whatever reason, he had confidence that I can do this. So I took what started out as a three-month leave of absence in June of 1993 – and ended up staying for 30 years.
Abbott started his work as the architect of the proposed league in a fire closet.
MARK ABBOTT: The World Cup Organizing Committee’s office was in a famous building in Century City, Los Angeles. Alan had talked to the owners into getting some free office space. And so you’d take the elevator to like the 44th floor, and then you would take this hydraulic elevator up to the 46th floor, which had no windows and was literally the attic of the building. My office and Ivan Gazidis’ was in a fire closet.
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