Los Angeles FC has had the same brand chief for eleven years: Rich Orosco. For three of those years, Sportico ranked the club as the most valuable in Major League Soccer. That changed this February, when Inter Miami took the top spot instead, built around Lionel Messi’s 2023 signing. LAFC’s own valuation grew too, just not as fast.
Orosco is LAFC’s chief brand officer. The phrase he uses to describe the club, including in his own Instagram bio, has stayed the same for years: street by street, block by block, one by one. He used a version of it when he accepted LAFC’s branding award at the Globe Soccer Awards this winter: “Keep an eye on LAFC,” followed by an invitation to come see a match in Los Angeles.
Orosco is also known outside soccer circles for something unrelated to any of it. He’s married to actress Julie Benz, who played Rita on “Dexter” and Darla on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel.” The two have been together since the mid-2000s and married in 2012.
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Role | Chief brand officer, LAFC |
| Spouse | Julie Benz, married May 5, 2012 |
| Education | BBA, Marketing and International Business, University of Texas at Austin, 1995 |
| Recognition | 2018 MLS Marketing Executive of the Year; Adweek’s 2019 LA Brand Stars |
| Based in | Los Angeles, California |
No verified net worth figure exists for Orosco. Estimates online range from $4 million to $20 million, a five-fold spread that suggests none of them rest on solid ground, and no outlet has published sourcing for any of the numbers. Unlike his wife’s acting career, his pay as a private company executive isn’t public record.
Table of Contents
His career before LAFC
Orosco spent his first two decades in television and sports marketing, not soccer. He ran advertising and promotion at CBS Paramount Television from 2000 to 2006. Entertainment Tonight was already the top-rated show in its category when he took on its marketing. The Insider, which he also worked on, was the newer show at the network, competing against Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood for the same syndication slots. He moved to Warner Bros. in 2006, where he worked on the launch of TMZ and handled marketing for Two and a Half Men and The George Lopez Show. By his own account, TMZ and the syndicated run of Two and a Half Men each became the top-launching show in its category in 2007.
He became general manager of the Los Angeles Matadors in 2010, part of a new global boxing league called the World Series of Boxing. The sport’s international governing body funded the league, which tried to build a team-based format for American audiences. His role there ended in April 2012. The following year, he co-founded a menswear brand, Exley NB, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. That ended in 2017.
His own professional record lists one more thing from that period: the LAFC Youth Leadership Program, starting in January 2013. That’s more than a year before Major League Soccer awarded Los Angeles its expansion franchise, and two years before Orosco joined the club’s staff directly, in March 2015. The LA Galaxy had been the only Major League Soccer team in Los Angeles since 1996; LAFC wouldn’t play its first match until 2018.
A youth program built for his father
The Youth Leadership Program trains at-risk high school students to run soccer programs in their own neighborhoods, in partnership with the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Unified School District. Orosco has served as board chair of the Bresee Foundation, one of the program’s partners, since 2015. According to a tribute later posted by the foundation, he created the program in honor of his father.
The ranking Rich Orosco’s brand just lost
Sportico put LAFC’s valuation at $1.28 billion in its early 2025 rankings, the third year in a row the club topped the league; Forbes independently reported the same streak in its own coverage that year. Sportico’s newest rankings, released this February, put Inter Miami on top instead, at $1.45 billion, with LAFC second at $1.4 billion.
Other parts of the club’s brand kept expanding around the same time:
- HYBE, the label behind BTS and Seventeen, sponsored LAFC’s first home playoff game in October 2025, its first partnership with any MLS team. “Music and sport have the power to transcend borders and language,” HYBE chairman Bang Si-Hyuk said of the deal.
- Sia and Cypress Hill released a club anthem with LAFC last July.
- Pacsun launched its sixth LAFC apparel collection earlier this year, timed to a season opener at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
- LAFC’s branding won Best Club Branding at the Globe Soccer Awards this winter.
The Instagram bio has not been updated to reflect any of it. On July 15, Orosco spoke at the Global Game Summit in Newark about how sports brands build relevance beyond the game itself.
His marriage to Julie Benz
Orosco proposed to Benz in June 2011, in the backyard of the home they shared, with a diamond ring and a surprise engagement party built around a mariachi band. The couple married the following year, on May 5, Cinco de Mayo, a date they chose to honor his heritage. The wedding took place at the John Sowden House in Los Feliz, known for a facade that resembles a Mayan temple. Benz marked their 13th anniversary on Instagram in May 2025, tagging her husband’s LAFC account and writing that he was still the best decision she had ever made. The two were photographed together again this March, at an event at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, nearly fourteen years after their Cinco de Mayo wedding.
