Two football coaches are suing Chivas USA over alleged racism and discrimination, claiming they were fired from the team for not being of Latin origin, according to Courthouse News Service.
Daniel Calichman, 45, and Theothoros Chronopoulos, 40, are both former players of Major League Soccer and worked for over a year with the junior teams of Chivas, after which they were dismissed by the board in an apparent intention of the team to return to its "Mexican roots."
Among the many accusations exposed in the report, stands out one claim that the Chivas USA owner, Jorge Vergara, implements discriminatory employment practices similar to the ones used in Chivas of Guadalajara—the only club in the Mexican league that has never signed a player who wasn't Mexican.
The report, sponsored by Gregory Helmer of Helmer & Friedman in Culver City, said that "beyond skills and sporting merit considerations, as the rest of the teams in the MLS does, Chivas USA illegally makes decisions about its staff basing them in ethnic and national origin."
In November 2012, Vergara, head of Chivas USA, supposedly held a meeting with all the employees in which he announced that all those who didn't speak Spanish would be fired.
"He asked employees who could speak Spanish to raise their hands and then asked the ones who spoke English to do the same. After publicly identifying those who didn't speak Spanish, they were told that would not be considered to work at Chivas USA," says the complaint, as quoted by Courthouse News Service.
Chronoupolos and Calichman filed a complaint of discrimination and harassment by Chivas in the Department of Fair Employment and Housing. And the team reacted first with a suspension and then later dismissed them in March. These events led to the lawsuit from the coaches, ending with a request of financial compensation.
Recently, the club has announced its position in a statement, which says that it's a company that doesn't discriminate on any grounds among its employees, rejecting the allegations.
"We are against any kind of discrimination based on sex, age, marital status, profession, culture and language, ethnicity, social status, health, religion, or disabilities," according to the organization's website.
Chivas USA was founded in 2004 and started to compete a year later in the MLS and recruited many Latino immigrants who identified with the soccer club. The team currently has just over ten Mexican players on their first team and almost the same number of Americans, as well as other nationalities.