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Sporting Club Jacksonville hires Mark Warburton as head of soccer
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- Sporting Club Jacksonville hires Mark Warburton as head of soccer
(This story has been updated to add new information.)
From England to the First Coast.
Sporting Club Jacksonville named Mark Warburton, former manager of clubs in England and Scotland, as head of soccer and sporting director in a Thursday press conference inside the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront, the next step toward the club's planned kickoff later this year.
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Warburton will supervise the development of both the men's team, which targets a 2026 kickoff in the second-level USL Championship, and the women's team, which has scheduled an August launch in the first-level USL Super League, in addition to Sporting Jax's developmental squads in the USL W-League and USL League Two.
In the role, which corresponds in some respects to a general manager in sports like baseball and football, Warburton is expected to take the lead in the coach selection process over the coming months.
"We've said from the start that we want to bring the highest level of professional soccer to Jacksonville," Sporting Jax president and chief executive officer Steve Livingstone said. "I think that's evidence of it, going out and getting someone of Mark's caliber to come in and kind of lead the charge."
The hiring represents a prominent addition on the soccer side for Sporting Jax, which numbers Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and former Jacksonville Jaguars running back Fred Taylor among its ownership group.
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Warburton brings extensive experience to Jacksonville, including a two-year stint in charge of Glasgow Rangers in Scotland, as well as managerial tenures at Brentford, Nottingham Forest and Queens Park Rangers in England.
"It's a brand-new franchise," Warburton said. "It's a blank sheet of paper, which can be daunting, because it's blank, but at the same time, it gives the opportunity to lay some foundations down and work with some really good people in preparing for a significant goal."
MARK WARBURTON FILE
Ricky Caplin presents head of soccer Mark Warburton with a Sporting Club Jacksonville scarf on March 20, 2025.
At first, Livingstone couldn't believe what he was about to do.
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"I think the first time it was mentioned to me, I was like, 'You've got to be out of your mind,'" said Livingstone, a lifelong supporter of Rangers' Glasgow archrival, Celtic. "I mean, I am not going to hire a Rangers manager.
"But getting to know Mark, getting to know a little bit more about his previous experience before Rangers, he's a great guy, incredibly talented, incredibly experienced, so really, for me, it was a no-brainer at the end."
Warburton has worked at clubs with significant resources and not-so-significant resources, particularly at Rangers in the mid-2010s, where financial issues under previous ownership had driven the proud Scottish club to the brink of extinction.
"First day of training, [assistant coach] David Weir and I had nine players, literally nine players, and we got one up from the academy and made the 10 play five-a-side," he said. "It really was [a blank slate] in that respect."
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While Warburton's 2015-17 spell in charge of the 55-time Scottish champions was the most high-profile coaching position for the 62-year-old, who worked in the financial industry before turning his attention to the soccer field full-time, it's far from the only one.
As assistant manager alongside David Moyes in 2022-23, he helped guide West Ham United of London to victory in the UEFA Europa Conference League, the club's first major international trophy for 58 years.
Warburton is also noted for his work in starting the NextGen Series in the early 2010s, a Europe-wide competition for players in the Under-19 age bracket for major European clubs, and his development of the youth system at Watford in England during the mid-2000s.
"That for me was a real benchmark we can build from," he said. "If you have the right values, the right staff, you can have such a positive impact."
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ROAD TO KICKOFF
Sporting Club Jacksonville head of soccer and sporting director Mark Warburton speaks during his introductory press conference on March 20, 2025. [Clayton Freeman/Florida Times-Union]
Warburton's hiring is the latest move on what has been a years-long march toward kickoff.
Sporting Jax, still known at the time as JAXUSL, received franchise approval from the United Soccer League in August 2022 (men's team) and May 2023 (women's team). The latter, upon kickoff, would be the first top-flight professional women's sports team in Northeast Florida history.
While the men's team is currently set to begin at the second level of the United States Soccer Federation's pyramid, there's no guarantee that Jacksonville would remain there permanently.
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USL owners earlier this week voted to implement a promotion and relegation system , similar to that used in most soccer leagues worldwide, by which top-finishing teams move up to a higher division and those at the bottom drop to a lower division. That system would encompass the USL Championship, the level holding Sporting Jax at the start; USL League One, the third division; and a USL top division still awaiting formal launch.
The USL has not announced a firm timetable for installing promotion and relegation, but Livingstone estimated that a date of 2027 or 2028 appears most likely.
"It's something that we're all excited about, something that we know we need to do to differentiate us from other leagues," he said. "It's a major step forward for us, and we'll work out the details as we go along."
Still to come, however, is the final determination of a venue for the men's team in 2026. At present, Livingstone said multiple sites remain under consideration, although he said that the club has "probably a location that we favor more than the others." He declined to elaborate on stadium specifics, aside from the target capacity of 15,000.
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For the women's team, in the short term, Sporting Jax reached an agreement in December with the University of North Florida to kick off the USL Super League season this August at Hodges Stadium.
Then, in the coming months for both the women's and men's teams, Sporting Jax faces the tasks of assembling coaching staffs and rosters ahead of kickoff.
"The potential of this project is obvious and the impact it can have for the club and the community in Northeast Florida is very evident," Warburton said. "I'm very excited to be here today."
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Mark Warburton: Sporting Club Jacksonville hires head of soccer
