ZURICH \u2014 The stellar ownership group of Major League Soccer team LAFC sold its majority stake in struggling Swiss club Grasshopper after three straight seasons fighting relegation.<\/p>\n
The record 27-time Swiss champion from Zurich was sold to multi-club ownership operation Bridge Football Group, which also has teams in lower-tier divisions in Italy and the Netherlands. <\/p>\n
The sale was described by LAFC as a \u201cstrategic realignment of its international development network\u201d which will now focus on Austrian team Wacker Innsbruck, the club said in a statement late Monday. <\/p>\n
Grasshopper fans protested with an expletive banner at a home game in April urging a sale by LAFC, whose owners includes entertainment executives Peter Guber and Mark Shapiro, Will Ferrell and Magic Johnson.<\/p>\n
The club in FIFA\u2019s home city does not own its Letzigrund stadium, a storied track and field venue which is shared with FC Zurich. Grasshopper has struggled in the 12-team Swiss league since winning its last title 23 years ago, and its most recent Swiss Cup win was 13 years ago.<\/p>\n
LAFC bought Grasshopper in January 2024 from the Chinese owners of Wolverhampton, which was relegated from the English Premier League in May.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ZURICH \u2014 The stellar ownership group of Major League Soccer team LAFC sold its majority stake in struggling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94739,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[2019,41,17,2815],"class_list":["post-94738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-switzerland","tag-soccer","tag-swiss","tag-switzerland","tag-wires-bot"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116840120333677310","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94738\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}