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One day in March 2012, Adam Freier sat down to write a column for the Sydney Morning Herald. His Melbourne Rebels were on a losing streak and though he had 25 caps at hooker including a World Cup campaign for Australia, he was nearly 32 and staring at the end of a career at the coalface, 12 years in the front row of the scrum at the highest level. Describing a body breaking down, a struggling club, the agony of endless defeats, he imagined group therapy in front of “strangers in the local hall”.
“My name is Adam Freier, and I hate to lose.”
Fast-forward 14 years. In many ways he’s winning. A career in media, administration and business has taken him to Manhattan Beach, in the sunshine of Los Angeles county. He’s still in rugby, CEO of the California Legion. But in that role, he faces another very steep challenge indeed.
Formed last year by the merger of the San Diego Legion and RFC Los Angeles, on Saturday the new team will kick off season nine of Major League Rugby. It’s a time for new beginnings but many in American rugby are looking back in anger. The US men’s professional competition had a horrible offseason, losing Utah Warriors, NOLA Gold, Miami Sharks and Houston SaberCats to shrink to just six teams. It looked like the end but there have been leadership changes, strategy changes and a long-sought collective bargaining agreement with the poor bloody infantry, the players who make it work. Like Freier throughout his own playing career – which actually ended at 40, after years of club rugby in Sydney for Randwick – MLR isn’t stopping scrapping.
Seeking to spread the word, the Legion are taking their regular-season home games all around the state.
“Our mantra is to be brave, to be bold and to be first,” Freier said. “So the thing that we looked at, and this is no disrespect to what anyone else is doing in sport in America, and certainly in MLR, we wanted to do something different. As a business and as a sports team, we’ve got to be brave, we’ve got to be bold. And taking it to California was definitely that.”
Saturday brings Anthem Rugby Carolina to Championship Stadium in Irvine, Orange county. Next week, the three-time champion New England Free Jacks come to Torero Stadium in San Diego. After that, the Seattle Seawolves, sole MLR founders standing, come to UCLA. Then the show goes north, for Chicago Hounds at Saint Mary’s College in the East Bay Area and Old Glory DC at Heart Health Park, Sacramento. Hopefully there’ll be a home playoff too.
“There are some rugby competitions around the world that have the ability to adapt and change and do things differently, and some that can’t,” Freier said. “We have that ability, and we’ve just got such an awesome market. What we have to appreciate and understand is that for some of the fans, it hasn’t been easy. But we are going to reward them.
“Southern California is a hotbed of rugby talent and rugby fans. There are some incredible clubs: OMBAC, Aztecs [both San Diego], Belmont Shore [Long Beach], Santa Monica. There’s some really good foundations.
“And so we are in Orange County this weekend. It’s an incredible stadium. We’ve got Belmont Shore playing before us, against OMBAC. We’ve got the Mustangs [youth, San Diego], local clubs coming down and playing in the vicinity. What we want to turn this into long term is really a festival of rugby, getting as many games around us as possible. At the moment, we’ve got six. It’s going to be a celebration, telling the Orange County market we want everyone to be very supportive of their local club, Belmont Shore, and always of your area, whether you’re from San Diego or LA. I’ve had a full riot act about why those two cities don’t like one another, but hopefully when you’re playing rugby, you support your local club, then when you go to that next level, we all support the state.
“The San Diego Legion fanbase has really shown people how to be fanatics. On the other end, you’ve got LA fans that had a cocktail glass to support at one point, and then they had a bunch of letters in RFCLA, and it’s been really hard, and change is difficult. We are thinking about long-term success, long-term sustainability, but also not disrespecting those people in those places. I speak to five fans a day.”
There’s much to discuss. San Diego fans hold the regular-season crowd record (11,423 v Utah, 2023), some so passionate they have dressed as Roman legionaries, out-shouting New Englanders in tricorn hats and wigs. Some from San Diego were decidedly unhappy about the merger with LA, whose rugby folk did indeed once have a “cocktail glass” to follow, the LA Giltinis, named for a drink named for their owner, Aussie fitness magnate Adam Gilchrist. Champions in 2021, thrown out in 2022, the Giltinis years generated recrimination and legal settlements. For Freier, as Giltinis’ president, it was another bruising experience. After that he had a spell selling Americans Aussie beer, a brand part-owned by great fast bowler Brett Lee, before pitching back into rugby.
Describing his engagement with Legion fans, Freier said: “I had some beers with them the other day. They weren’t easy beers to have, I definitely was served a couple of spears. I think we underestimate how passionate people are about rugby in that part of the world.”
The rollout of the new project, Freier says, could have been done differently. But that’s all said and done and here Freier stands, contemplating a slightly insane workload, moving a season around a state with the fourth-biggest economy in the world as it prepares to host a soccer World Cup which has booked up nearly every decent grass field.
The Rugby World Cup is also coming to the US, in 2031. With its reduction in size, MLR has shifted to developmental mode, employing mostly US-qualified players. Alex Magleby, the Eagles flanker and coach turned Free Jacks co-founder and MLR co-president, said a six-team league may be about the right size for developing domestic players – but emphasized that growth remains the ambition.
Putting on his “old general manager and national team coach hat”, Magleby said: “To be successful long term, we need scale. That’s just math. You know, scale can come from global eyeballs, but as we know in the American media landscape, having lots of markets with passionate fans is significantly better from a rights perspective or an aggregation of sponsorship. So scale is still really important for this league.”
This year, Freier said, “alignment is key and the Eagles need to win. Look at the hockey teams’ performance at the Winter Olympics. Look at the Eagles women winning a bronze medal in the sevens in Paris [in 2024]. The most beautiful thing about this country is the patriotism, how much they love their national teams and that flag and who they are and what they represent. A strong Eagles team has to be our No 1 goal.
“We really care about the growth of rugby here in the States. I do believe this, I think California can play a major role in making sure that US rugby is a vibrant, colorful sport, successful in a World Cup and being a global brand.”
Freier was never your average hooker. (He prefers “high-class”.) Relatively undersized for the role, more unusually in an Australian sporting landscape where old divides linger he was from a well-known rugby league family, his dad, Laurie, a player for Eastern Suburbs and Manly-Warringah in the 1970s, coach of Easts and Western Suburbs thereafter. His son played union at school, Waverley College, and became a standout perhaps best compared to Brian Moore, late of the England and the Lions, another tough little bastard turned rugby writer and thinker. Offered the comparison, Freier was flattered but wary.
In that Sydney Morning Herald column, considering the pro rugby life, Freier reached for what may seem an unlikely image: “Michelangelo once said he could ‘see the angel in the marble’. Maybe that’s my ointment for losing. Being an optimist. He also said that ‘he carved till he set him free’, which means it’s going to require a resilient effort.”
Freier’s current job certainly requires that. Asked if he can sense the angel in the MLR marble, he said: “It’s so true. If I can quote it again, I will. That’s what keeps you working. What it might be.
“The owners of MLR, they are awesome. If you talk to them one-on-one, they’re all chipping away at the marble as well. They are real rugby people, good owners that really care, who love rugby. Everyone’s chipping away at that marble, and that’s why I’m here, mate. There’s a reason why I’m doing it. I genuinely see that there’s big upside, especially in California, fourth-biggest economy on the planet. You know, rugby here could be absolutely anything, and that’s why we all come back.”
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California Legion v Anthem RC kicks-off 6pm ET on Saturday, live on ESPN+
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Martin Pengelly writes about rugby in the US on Substack, at The National Maul
