By Ridge Mahoney, Special to SI.com, Soccer America

The new Quakes are also bringing in many former San Jose players into the fold, such as popular goalkeeper Joe Cannon. Tom Hauck /ALLSPORT

It's all a bit perplexing yet pleasing to Wolff, who says he rebuffed Rothenberg's efforts for about three decades before finally giving in. The tipping point might have been a setup, but he's not regretting it. He comes to Northern California about once a week to work in the A's offices and often passes into an alternate dimension, one of soccer.

"If you look around the office, everywhere but here, if the TV's on and it's not baseball, it's soccer," he says.

Beane jokes that when he's home, his wife wants to watch the baseball highlights on SportsCenter and he's lobbying for Fox Soccer Channel. Wolff may not yet be among the converted. He's on board in many ways, however.

"My kids were sort of raised with Alan Rothenberg's family. In fact I'm on the board of his bank, and for three decades he's been pestering me about soccer," says Wolff. "Finally, in this decade, I think it was the combination of Alan's interest and Phil Anschutz's people inviting me to a playoff game at Home Depot Center. He's a very low-key person but he was really animated watching soccer, and I thought, 'There must be something to this.'"

Anschutz bought into MLS after Rothenberg gave him two free tickets to the '94 World Cup final that ended up costing him hundreds of millions in soccer-related investments. Wolff's entry into the league came after a trip to the '06 World Cup in Germany with Beane and Crowley convinced him there indeed was something to this sport.

"We all went over to the World Cup," he recalls of seeing four games in about a week. "I just wanted to get a feel for it. I saw that the crowds were much more well-behaved than some of the press reports I read. Sometimes we got back at three in the morning because of the travel. I was following these young guys around.

"There were more people outside the stadium than inside. What I saw in Europe, and even locally the MLS games I've gone to, it's a beautiful sport. It's not a high-scoring sport, and we're a high-scoring country. But that's not the blockage. I think the sport needed a proper, professional organization around it, and I think they needed distribution."

The day before AEG moved the team to Houston in December '05, Wolff took a pair of phone calls. The first came from AEG president Tim Leiweke, yet another of Wolff's extensive contacts in the sports industry. The second call came from someone he'd never spoken to: MLS Commissioner Don Garber.

"I didn't follow the Earthquakes too closely, I was so busy with other things in San Jose, where I'm active," says Wolff, who among other properties in the South Bay owns the Fairmont Hotel. "I didn't know Don, but he said, 'We're moving the team. Would you be interested in considering taking the Earthquakes name?' They wanted to keep the team name, so I said, 'Yes. Tell me what you want us to do,' and he said he'd get back to me."

That phone call evolved into an option to buy the team, which he exercised last summer. Wolff first developed a plan to build a new stadium on the San Jose State University campus, adjacent to Spartan Stadium, but couldn't reach an agreement with the school.

Before that deal collapsed, though, Wolff and Garber held a press conference at the Coliseum prior to a Mexico friendly against Ecuador. No San Jose State officials were in attendance, an omen of what was to follow. The game and the spirited, sellout crowd it drew ratcheted up the A's enthusiasm another notch.

"It's a somewhat different market in the sense there's a huge Hispanic population that follows soccer," says Crowley. "We have that in baseball, too, but if you came to the Mexico game we had in Oakland, it was absolutely crazy. We don't have anything like that on the baseball side.

"But I think in many ways the businesses are similar and we do have an infrastructure that deals with sponsors and television and those elements of professional sports."

Wolff had already formulated another plan, one that needs San Jose City Council approval to re-zone an industrial tract for residential use and grant its rights to Wolff. By selling rights to a developer and funneling those monies into a non-profit charitable organization to avoid capital-gains tax, Wolff would generate the revenues to buy the city-owned land near the airport and build the soccer complex. Just the land could cost him $80 million.

Both soccer projects are slogging through the political process, but Wolff believes that by the end of the summer he'll have everything in order. That includes deciding on a design for the soccer stadium, which so far has been depicted only in rough schematics. He's also negotiating with the Sharks to bring them into the ownership team.

The A's stadium would cost an estimated $400 million. He plans to spend a lot less for the soccer team but wants to do it right in both cases.

"We think that sports today, and beyond, absolutely have to be in venues that are absolutely perfect, as perfect as you can get for that sport," he says. "The moment you try to have hockey and basketball, or football and soccer, you lose something. Occasionally for a huge game, you can use a huge venue, but our whole goal is the fan experience."

As for the failures of American pro soccer in general, and the NASL and MLS Quakes in particular, Wolff knows the past isn't pretty. Like many of his league brethren, he's a real-estate developer as well as a sports entrepreneur, and in both of those personas sees opportunity.

"The answer is yes, it did, obviously," he says if the sport's bleak track record until a few years ago affected his analysis. "The history is overwhelming. But we think the downside isn't too bad, and the upside is terrific."

This article originally appeared in the January 2008 issue of Soccer America magazine. Click here for a free three-month subscription.