Football Partnerships

Since he closed up Revolution Studios, Joe Roth has kept his hand in the movie business — he’s got projects at Sony, Fox and Disney, where he’s producing Tim Burton’s upcoming “Alice in Wonderland.” But he’s spending most of his time with his new love, commuting up to Seattle, where he’s the majority owner of the Seattle Sounders FC, the new Major League Soccer expansion team that begins play next spring. A lifelong sports junkie — he spent years coaching his son’s soccer team, has courtside Lakers seats and knows more obscure baseball stats than Bill James — Roth has discovered that soccer is a great laboratory to test out both Internet community-based marketing and Hollywood-style glitz.

But when we had lunch the other day, Roth also made the tantalizing case that the new popularity of soccer in America has a lot in common with the groundswell of support for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Roth is not a neutral political observer. It was Roth, along with David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, who organized Obama’s first major Hollywood fundraiser early last year, back when Obama was 20 points behind Hillary Clinton in the polls. Roth sees soccer as appealing to the same fast-growing demographic groups that have been at the center of Obama’s campaign.

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