It’s a bummer that local soccer lover Andrew Vassiliadis stayed away from San Diego FC’s first home match and has chosen to not be at Snapdragon Stadium Saturday night, when the unbeaten Major League Soccer expansion club returns for its second home game. Vassiliadis did much to cultivate fan support for professional men’s soccer here as a co-founder and majority owner of San Diego Loyal SC, a United Soccer League Championship club that played four seasons at the University of San Diego. Though the pandemic nixed Loyal’s first season just two matches after it began, the San Diego native created the USL’s best gameday environment, as ranked by many of the league’s well-traveled players. Vassiliadis deserves a slice of the credit for San Diego FC inheriting thousands of fans who were accustomed to attending professional men’s matches. The Point Loma resident, among many others, is worthy of a soccer chant for the stadium-record crowd of 34,056 that attended San Diego FC’s home opener two weeks ago and the large turnout that’s expected for Saturday’s game against the unbeaten Columbus Crew. At no small personal expense, the man tilled a large swath of local soccer soil. “San Diego deserved soccer at the (country’s) highest level,” Vassiliadis said, “and now we have it.” The painful rub for Vassiliadis is that his own MLS dream didn’t pan out. When he launched the Loyal, Vassiliadis envisioned having a stake in an MLS franchise if the league decided to put a team in San Diego. When that outcome didn’t materialize following talks with San Diego FC’s leadership, Vassilaidis was left with a dash of bitter to go with the sweet of seeing several of his former employees land jobs with SDFC and knowing that former Loyal fans now have an MLS team to support. “While I may find it hard to root for the organization at times,” Vassiliadis said of San Diego FC, “I really have found myself rooting for the people that I care about and their success because that means their club is being successful.” Vassiliadis said he was thrilled to see video highlights of former Loyal fans celebrating in Carson at the club’s first match, much as they did at Loyal games while standing behind the east goal at Torero Stadium. The Loyal’s supporters group, The Locals, now cheers at SDFC matches. “Those people are die-hard fans for the sport that they love and, more importantly, for the city that they love,” he said. “That’s where I can hang my hat. That’s where I can feel good if I do tune in, is just watching them enjoy everything that’s going on.” If Vassiliadis is inclined to take a victory lap for improving the odds that America’s top men’s league chose to put a club here, I won’t be the one to offer a counterargument. At the USD campus atop a bluff in northwest Mission Valley, he succeeded at building a fan-friendly scene that drew 4,000 to 6,000 fans per match despite the second-tier USL being unfamiliar to most soccer fans. It wasn’t unusual to see him chatting up fans before and after matches. He quipped that attempts to persuade ardent soccer fans to give the Loyal a chance was like having to survive a “knife fight.” Skepticism ran deep. “I was always fighting the (perception) that this is lower-division soccer, this is semi-professional — I heard that a lot,” he said. “So, that was a slog. And that is no longer there. “This,” he said of MLS, “is Division 1 soccer at the highest level (in the country).” Confident that San Diego’s robust youth leagues and top-five-in-the-U.S ratings for broadcasts of U.S. women’s and men’s national team matches and Premier League games would translate into a fertile market for USL and MLS soccer, Vassiliadis took the financial leap of creating the Loyal. He ponied up big bucks for Landon Donovan, the former MLS star, to serve as a coach and executive. Going into Loyal’s first season, soccer insiders reported that the start-up’s initial financial exposure would exceed $10 million. That was before the pandemic wiped out almost all of the club’s projected first-year revenues. “I take tremendous pride in knowing that without San Diego Loyal,” Vassiliadis said, “MLS doesn’t happen in San Diego.” New chapter San Diego FC isn’t the only local club that’s part of a best-in-country professional soccer league. Sunday in Los Angeles, the San Diego Wave FC will launch their fourth season in the National Women’s Soccer League. Wisely, Wave ownership has enlisted Vassiliadis to try to replicate some of Loyal’s success in community relations and fan engagement. Vassiliadis will also try to further efforts to secure a training facility. Vassiliadis — whose late father, a soccer-loving Greek immigrant, built a local real-estate company — bought a 4% stake in the Wave after hearing from the team’s new owners, Lauren Leichtman and Arthur Levine, as well as their son, Zachary. The Levine Leichtman family was approved as Wave owners in October. “My journey in soccer is not over,” said Vassiliadis, who played the sport for Francis Parker School and the Crusaders youth club and is a longtime fan of Manchester United in England and Juventus in Italy. “We have a great opportunity to be the community club that the Wave deserve to be.” The pairing of Vassiliadis and the Wave appears to be timely. Vassiliadis, who has a 10-month-old daughter, knows the local landscape and is comfortable with the public spotlight. The club is trying to reconnect with fans after a tumultuous stretch in which its only head coach since its inception, Casey Stoney, was fired in June; its top box-office attraction, Alex Morgan, retired in August after announcing she was pregnant; its co-founder and president, Jill Ellis, moved on soon after the season; and young stars Naomi Girma and Jaedyn Shaw were traded in the offseason.