Three songs about a club that disappeared, a badge that survived, and a city still looking for something to believe in.
Los Angeles does not need another football club invented in a boardroom.
It has enough brands.
Enough launch decks.
Enough men in suits explaining what supporters are supposed to feel.
Football works differently.
A club becomes real when people start putting pieces of themselves into it.
A shirt.
A photograph.
A story from their dad.
A terrible away trip.
A player they loved.
A player they hated.
A song they sing badly after three beers.
That is culture.
And culture is what I am trying to build around the Los Angeles Aztecs.
So I made three songs.
L.A. AZTECS: FOR THE WHOLE CITY.
Created by me, Scott “Matchmaker” Michaels, for the Los Angeles Aztecs.
Not because football needs more marketing.
Football needs fewer marketing departments.
It needs things people actually care about.
ONLY IN L.A
The first song is about the city.
Not the version sold on postcards.
The real one.
Hollywood and East L.A.
Downtown and the Valley.
Beaches and traffic.
Money and poverty.
Movie stars and people working two jobs.
Families who have been in California for generations and families who arrived last Tuesday.
Los Angeles is contradiction piled on contradiction.
That is what makes it interesting.
And if the Aztecs are going to matter again, they cannot become a club for one neighbourhood, one income bracket or one convenient marketing demographic.
The name says Los Angeles.
So the ambition has to be Los Angeles.
The whole city.
Football has an ugly habit of discovering communities only after someone works out how much money can be extracted from them.
I want the Aztecs to travel in the opposite direction.
Find the people first.
Build with them.
Then worry about the corporate boxes.
That is ONLY IN L.A.
A song about the place before it is a song about the football club.
Because without the place, the club is just a badge on a PowerPoint presentation.
THE BADGE SURVIVED
Football likes permanence.
It talks about institutions, heritage and history as though clubs simply exist forever.
They do not.
Leagues collapse.
Owners lose interest.
Stadiums disappear.
Companies go bust.
Players leave.
Supporters grow old.
Sometimes the whole thing disappears.
The original Los Angeles Aztecs stopped playing decades ago.
Yet the name survived.
The photographs survived.
The shirts survived.
The stories survived.
George Best wore the badge.
Johan Cruyff wore the badge.
Thousands of people in Los Angeles once stood in stadiums watching that team.
Then the football stopped.
But the memory did not.
That fascinates me.
Because somewhere between business and football sits something much harder to kill.
Identity.
A company can disappear.
A league can fold.
A trademark can sit in a filing cabinet.
But if somebody still remembers the badge, something remains alive.
That is what THE BADGE SURVIVED is about.
The strange immortality football clubs can have.
And the dangerous idea that a story everyone thought was finished might only have been interrupted.
CITY OF DREAMS
The third song looks forward.
Los Angeles has always attracted dreamers.
Actors.
Musicians.
Immigrants.
Entrepreneurs.
Footballers.
People told somewhere else that they were not good enough.
Some dreams work.
Plenty fail spectacularly.
Los Angeles has never viewed that as a particularly good reason to stop trying.
CITY OF DREAMS is for the player nobody scouts.
The kid whose parents cannot afford thousands of dollars in academy fees.
The footballer working all day before training at night.
The supporter who is tired of being treated like a wallet with a scarf attached.
The outsider looking through the gates wondering why football has become so good at keeping people out.
I know something about closed doors.
You can spend years knocking on them.
Eventually you realise something.
You do not always need permission.
Sometimes you build another door.
That idea sits underneath everything I want the Aztecs to become.
Talent before connections.
Supporters before hospitality suites.
Opportunity before exclusivity.
A football club that can look across Los Angeles and say:
If you are good enough, come and prove it.
If you care enough, come and join us.
That is much more interesting to me than another football club whose first question is how much your parents can pay.
Football Clubs Need A Sound
There is something else football executives routinely misunderstand.
A football club is not the eleven players.
It is not the stadium.
It is not the crest.
It is certainly not the chief executive.
It is the accumulation of thousands of small emotional connections.
You see an old shirt and remember a match.
You hear a song and remember who you watched football with.
You recognise the colours from half a mile away.
You argue with a stranger because he insulted a centre-half who retired twenty years ago.
None of this makes much sense.
That is exactly why football works.
The strongest clubs become cultural objects.
They have their own language.
Their own mythology.
Their own villains.
Their own music.
And you cannot manufacture that in a strategy meeting.
Culture grows slowly and usually starts somewhere small.
One supporter.
One photograph.
One scarf.
One memory.
One song.
Then another.
Three Songs. Three Parts Of The Story.
ONLY IN L.A
The city.
THE BADGE SURVIVED
The history.
CITY OF DREAMS
The future.
That is the structure of the release.
Three songs.
One badge.
One city.
One football club trying to find its voice again.
I am not pretending songs create football clubs.
They do not.
Players do.
Supporters do.
Matches do.
Years do.
But songs can carry stories.
And before people support a football club, they usually have to feel something.
That is the job these songs are trying to do.
Give the Los Angeles Aztecs a little more noise.
A little more personality.
A little more soul.
The original club disappeared from the field.
The badge survived.
Now we see what happens next.
L.A. AZTECS: FOR THE WHOLE CITY
Created by Scott “Matchmaker” Michaels for the Los Angeles Aztecs.
Listen to the three-track release here
You can also find more of my music on Spotify and Apple Music.
And for more football, music, outsiders, forgotten stories and the people operating behind the curtain:
The badge survived.
Now it needs a noise.