Dragons FC folds; the bid for a USL team is dropped

Not only was the bid for the USL pulled, but Swinmurn, who founded Zappos.com and is part of an investment group with a minority stake in the Golden State Warriors, also decided the Dragons would shutter as well. After three seasons as the San Jose Earthquakes PDL-affiliate team, Swinmurn announced in a podcast on his website, nickswinmurn.com, that he was abandoning the USL bid and, at the same time, folding the Dragons.

“A couple days ago, we withdrew our (USL) bid, which was disappointing,” Swinmurn said on his podcast. “It’s expensive. The expansion fee (for a USL) team is $5 million and that doesn’t [include] operating costs. Doesn’t make sense to continue.”

And the Dragons?

“It’s an amateur team in the fourth division,” Swinmurn said. “It’s not a business we can really grow. … It doesn’t have much upside. It would be an expensive hobby.”

Swinmurn thanked the fans who showed up for Dragons games, but he thought it would be more.

“We felt there wasn’t enough passion in [Burlingame],” Swinmurn said.

The Dragons compiled a record of 22-13-7 over their three-year run. They came flying out of the box to start, winning the Southwest Division title in 2015 with a 10-3-1 mark to qualify for the playoffs, advancing to the Western Conference semifinals. They went back to the conference semifinals again in 2016, finishing with a 7-5-2 record in the Central Pacific Division, finishing in second place. This past season, the Dragons failed to make the playoffs, going 5-5-4 and finishing in fifth place in the Southwest Conference.

Swinmurn said he worked diligently with the city of Burlingame to get a small, 5,200-seat stadium built on Anza Boulevard in Burlingame, just south of Broadway, for a prospective USL team.

But Swinmurn and the city just couldn’t get it done and getting a USL team was essentially the only way the Dragons could survive.

“The city (of Burlingame) was great,” Swinmurn said. “They were trying really hard to make it happen.”

There was still a chance both a USL team and the Dragons could exist and Swinmurn started looking outside the Peninsula for a stadium site.

“We ID’d some sites in San Francisco, but not far enough along to mention them,” Swinmurn said.

He said in the podcast he thought about a small, “pop-up” stadium on Pier 32, but that never really gained any traction.

There was also a plan to use AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, as a home stadium, but that idea ran into problems because both the USL season and the MLB seasons run concurrently. In addition, the Giants already had a long list of other scheduled events going on as well.

“We had some pretty excited investors who said, ‘If you could play in AT&T Park, we’re in,’” Swinmurn said. “[The Giants] tried their hardest. … But they couldn’t fit more than a handful of games (onto their park schedule).”

In the end, the numbers simply didn’t work out for a franchise fee and to build a soccer-specific stadium for a new soccer team.

“The Bay Area is crazy to buy land and build a stadium,” Swinmurn said. “It’s too much.

“We had to pull the plug.”