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Major League Soccer’s latest expansion team San Diego FC is set to name AS Monaco‘s director of football Carlos Aviña the club’s first sporting director, sources confirmed to ESPN.
The appointment of Aviña, a native of Mexico, is imminent with an announcement expected soon, sources said.
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The news of Aviña’s potential appointment was first reported by Fabrizio Romano.
San Diego was awarded an MLS expansion team in May 2023, with the team to begin play as the league’s 30th club in 2025.
San Diego FC CEO Tom Penn hinted at the arrival of key front office staff in February, telling ESPN: “We’ll hire a sporting director first, coach would be after that, I’d say likely sometime in Q2 [of 2024] you would hear more.”
The new face of San Diego will arrive with plenty of experience, working as Club America’s head of sports intelligence from 2017 to 2019 before being promoted to director of football development and player recruitment. He then joined Club Brugge in 2021, serving as sporting director.
Aviña has been with Monaco for the past 10 months, helping the team to third in the Ligue 1 table with 49 points from 27 games and a 14W-6L-7D.
Now, with San Diego, he will be tasked with building the team from scratch.
The team has made just three player signings ahead of their MLS debut, bringing on U.S. youth national team goalkeeper Duran Ferree and international arrivals Jeppe Tverskov and Marcus Ingvartsen.
Despite the club’s location, Penn has said that he’s not solely focused on making the first major signing a high-profile Mexican star.
“We don’t have that specific kind of goal, no,” he told ESPN in October 2023. “We want to find foundational players that are gonna be with us for the formative years of a club. We’re gonna work with the key leaders in football operations that will be identified to make those key decisions.”
Information from ESPN’s Cesar Hernandez contributed to this report.