As the best team in the American League races to a double-digit division lead, its architect sits in the owner’s box of a half-full second-division Spanish soccer stadium on the outskirts of Madrid. It is the first match of his first season running CD Leganés. The owner of the opposing team, Deportivo Alavés, sits to his left, the mayor of Leganés to his right. The game is televised, but the broadcasters are calling it from a studio in Barcelona, 400 miles away.
Jeff Luhnow’s Astros played in front of packed houses of 41,000 and drew close to a million people to celebrate their 2017 World Series title; on this August night, Leganés plays before some 7,000 scattered faithful. In January, Blue Crow Sports Group, which Luhnow started, bought Cancún FC, a soccer team in the Mexican second division, for a reported $6.76 million; in June, it added Leganés for a reported $39 million. Luhnow is a hands-on owner, obsessing over everything from roster construction to player development to logo design, hoping to bring the kind of change to his second sport that he brought to his first.
To most, Luhnow appears to have taken a hard fall, even if he doesn’t see it that way. At 55, he says he may return to baseball one day, “but right now I’m pretty busy.” He says he has received “more than one” request to run an MLB team (he declines to be more specific) but turned them down.
