The Whitecaps are for sale. What does it mean?

Here’s something to contemplate: In the four-part Netflix profile of David Beckham, they take great pains to highlight how Major League Soccer was so bush league when the English superstar signed on with the L.A. Galaxy in 2007.

Terrible pitches, weird, ill-fitting stadiums, a slew of part-time players.

In 17 years, the league has come a long, long way. Now it has soccer-specific stadiums, global superstars like Lionel Messi, billionaire owners, and surging franchise values.

The Vancouver Whitecaps officially joined MLS in March 2009, just two years after Beckham announced his shock move to the U.S. Even in 2011, when the Caps actually kicked off, the league was one where Empire Field didn’t look out of place.

It was a mid-tier league, with mid-tier ambitions. They had a very specific type of fan in mind, and for a while, it all made sense.

But quickly the league the Caps joined started to turn into something else, and what it is today is a whole new beast. Look at Beckham’s Inter Miami, for instance. It has been playing games for four years and is already worth $1 billion. They have their own stadium on the way, which will only boost the team’s value.

The Caps, on the other hand, are worth just $420 million, according to Forbes. That’s 28th out of 29 teams. Only Colorado is deemed to be worth less.

When the Whitecaps joined MLS, their expansion fee was $40 million — already 10 times what Toronto FC paid four years before Vancouver. San Diego FC joined MLS next year and paid a $500-million expansion fee to do so.

Fair to say that when Whitecaps owners Greg Kerfoot, Steve Luczo, Jeff Mallett and Steve Nash close the deal to sell the team — as they’ve made clear is their intention — they are going to pull in at least that much.

On the surface, that’s a pretty good return on their initial investment.

So who could buy the team?

The Caps own no assets as they lease both B.C. Place and their training facility at UBC, so their revenue growth opportunities are limited. It’s a franchise that’s in stasis. The lease at B.C. Place is up, so the decks are clear for the next owner to do whatever they want.

They could obviously re-up with B.C. Place, they could look into another facility in Metro Vancouver — of course, if the Whitecaps had managed to build their own stadium all those years ago, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now — or the new owner could look at these other two challenges and simply pack everything up and move to some city with MLS aspirations in the U.S.

Could you find a local owner? Maybe. But the list is not long, and certainly shorter than when the price for the team was $40 million.

The priority, Whitecaps CEO Axel Schuster insists, is to find an owner who will keep the team in Vancouver. There are lots of things to commend the team remaining in Vancouver: a strong history of soccer, they were top-10 in average attendance in MLS in 2024, even without the Lionel Messi-less Inter Miami fixture, a new lease being negotiated at B.C. Place that he insists will present better revenue splits for the Whitecaps, and the fact the city is hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Schuster is confident that the club — with the help of Goldman Sachs that’s hired to lead a global search for a new owner — will find someone who wants to keep the team in Vancouver.

“In general, I have a strong belief that we can create a great pitch, that we have a lot of good arguments, and a lot of good things to say about this club, and that you will find somebody in Canada who wants to be connected with soccer,” he said.

That’s all fine and good, but Vancouver sports fans are understandably wary of their professional teams getting owners from afar who come in saying nice things and then take the team away within a year. Schuster acknowledged the bitter legacy left behind by Michael Heisley’s dishonest purchase of the Vancouver Grizzlies, while countering with another truth about the modern NBA.

“Everyone thinks that was the biggest mistake, and that they even think about bringing the team back,” he noted.

Being in Vancouver for the 2026 season has plenty of appeal even if the team won’t be in the stadium for a long stretch due to the needs of FIFA. Still, it will be a good year to be a professional soccer team here.

It’s the years after that will matter.

Will the Whitecaps stay? It’s hard to figure either way. And that’s a hard truth to swallow.

pjohnston@postmedia.com