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BC billionaire Tom Gaglardi shares his level of interest in buying Vancouver Whitecaps

Rob Williams
Rob Williams
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Mar 6 2025, 12:42 am
BC billionaire Tom Gaglardi shares his level of interest in buying Vancouver Whitecaps
Soobum Im/Imagn Images

The Vancouver Whitecaps need a new owner, preferably one from B.C. with deep pockets and an interest in sports.

There aren’t many billionaires that check all those boxes, but Tom Gaglardi certainly is one.

The Kamloops-born executive owns three hockey teams, the NHL’s Dallas Stars, the AHL’s Texas Stars, and the WHL’s Kamloops Blazers. Prior to buying the Stars in 2011, he famously tried to buy the Vancouver Canucks in a deal that went awry with Francesco Aquilini.

The Gaglardi family is worth $3.9 billion and owns Northland Properties, which includes the Sandman hotel chain.

But is Tom interested in the Whitecaps?

“I don’t know. I’ve kind of gotten into soccer in the last five years, maybe, but the league I tend to watch is Premier League,” Gaglardi said in a CHEK television interview with Don Taylor and Rick Dhaliwal today.

Gaglardi said he didn’t think he had the “emotional bandwidth” to own another sports team, but he did seem to care about the future of the club.

“I’ll pay attention to what’s going on. We want to make sure that the team ends up in good hands and has a good owner because it’s an important part of Vancouver,” he said. “I just don’t know that I have the bandwidth to do anymore in sports than the teams that I have. And they occupy a tremendous amount of bandwidth. That’s always been a hurdle for me.”

Another hurdle is the price tag.

Greg Kerfoot and the current Whitecaps ownership group bought the MLS club for $30 million in 2009. That’s pocket change by today’s standards, as the most recent MLS expansion team, San Diego FC, paid $500 million for a franchise. There are even four MLS teams now valued at over a billion dollars.

That narrows the list of people who have enough wealth to buy the club.

“We’re looking for somebody who is ambitious, is passionate, who’s committed, and who wants to lead the club into the next decade in Vancouver,” Whitecaps CEO and sporting director Axel Schuster said in December.

If not Gaglardi, then who? He was one of a shortlist of candidates we came up with recently who had ties to BC and could afford to buy the team.

Aquilini is another name that naturally comes to mind, but he’s reportedly not interested in incorporating the Whitecaps into Canucks Sports and Entertainment.

How about Ryan Beedie? Along with Gaglardi, the Burnaby native nearly bought the Canucks back in 2004. Beedie is the president of a private real estate development and investment company and has a reported net worth of $1.8 billion. Unlike Gaglardi, he never pivoted to owning another major pro sports franchise — so maybe there’s some emotional bandwidth up for grabs.

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