Chivas owner Jorge Vergara rides wave of popularity, criticism to success

GUADALAJARA — The first thing you notice about Jorge Vergara are his socks. He's not wearing any.

"One day when I was 11 or 12, I thought, 'Why do you wear socks?,' " he says. He couldn't come up with a suitable answer, so he hasn't worn them since.

That kind of logic hasn't always played well in the button-down Mexican business world. But it's not the only sector of Mexican society the iconoclastic Vergara is shaking up. In the seven years since he bought the financially troubled Chivas de Guadalajara soccer team, Vergara has been hailed and hated, loved and loathed -- often at the same time by the same people.

To understand why any of this matters outside Chivas' home state of Jalisco, though, you have to know a little bit about Chivas, which is less a soccer team than it is a 103-year-old national institution.

The most popular sports franchise in Mexico, Chivas is the only soccer team in the elite first division that has never used a non-Mexican player. And its huge fan base extends north of the border, one reason why Chivas is playing a friendly on Saturday against FC Barcelona in San Francisco.

The face of the Chivas franchise is Vergara, a graying, bilingual, motorcycle-riding 54-year-old who made his millions peddling nutritional supplements and whose passion, critics say, clouds his judgment. But critics can't question the team's success under Vergara, including winning a record 11th national championship, becoming profitable again, and in December his team will move into a modern 45,500-seat artificial-turf stadium shaped like a volcano with a cloud on top. Last week Chivas opened play in the second of the Mexican first division's two annual seasons, heavily favored to win another title.

If all that makes Vergara sound a little like the Dallas Cowboys' Jerry Jones or the New York Yankees' George Steinbrenner, you're not the first to reach that conclusion.

Still, like Jones and Steinbrenner, Vergara is as controversial as his team has been successful. Consider:

* After Chivas opened the current season with a pair of losses, Vergara turned to his Twitter account to rip the team.

"I'm frustrated and we can't keep on going like this," he wrote. "I can't say what we're going to do, but we need to find a solution immediately."

* Chivas has had nine coaches in seven years under Vergara, including three in a 17-day stretch this spring.