- June 16, 2025
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If the past seven years were one long soccer game for Marcus Walfridson, he would have been tagged with a yellow card in the first minute.
This goes back to 2018. The Swedish-born Walfridson — the person most responsible for bringing pro soccer to Sarasota and Lakewood Ranch — had a 90-day, temporary visa to be in the United States. On day 80, he recalls, he received a text from U.S. Border Patrol, much like a referee hands a player a yellow card as a warning of a potential penalty in soccer. Walfridson had 10 days to clear out of the States.
Walfridson left. Then he came back. And similar to Malmö FF, widely considered Sweden’s most successful soccer team, Walfridson has since been a relentless attacker driving toward a singular goal: to build a community of sports fans of all ages in the region over soccer, or in his native tongue, ‘fotboll.’ He’s doing that through the Sarasota Paradise, which, as of March 18, plays its home games at Premier Sports Campus at Lakewood Ranch.
Despite losing that March 18 game 2-1 to FC Naples, the Paradise has been on an off-the-field winning streak of sorts.
For starters, the team learned earlier this year it had earned a promotion in the United Soccer League, from playing in pre-professional USL League Two to the professional USL League One. While USL League Two is a go-to spot for collegiate and aspiring pros, League One, the team says, is a “major step forward for the club,” and will pit the Paradise against some 17 other teams featuring “high-level competition, top-tier talent and clubs with dedicated professional infrastructure.” Sarasota Paradise will play its first USL League One games in 2026.
Justin Papadakis, deputy CEO and chief real estate officer for the USL — which is based in Tampa — says moving up the Paradise was an easy decision, given the surge in families in east Manatee County and the recent Premier Sports expansion. Other coming-soon teams in USL League One, according to its website, include squads from Boise, Idaho; Corpus Christi, Texas; and Fort Wayne, Indiana.
“We want to build a league in top markets, and there is nothing minor-league about Lakewood Ranch,” Papadakis says. “Premier Sports is one of the best sports destinations in the country, and Lakewood Ranch is a community on the rise, just like our league is a league on the rise.”
The one thing “Lakewood Ranch has been missing is a professional sports team,” continues Papadakis, adding USL League One games are on ESPN+, creating a “two-hour commercial” for the region.
Another big win for Sarasota Paradise? The March 18 game, the team’s first at Premier, easily set a team attendance record, with 2,248 fans in the 3,000-seat soccer-specific stadium. The team averaged about 500 fans a game while playing at Sarasota High School its first two seasons, maxing out at 1,038 for a game.
“I want to create an organization that can live forever — not only a soccer team,” Walfridson says, “but a brand that becomes synonymous with the community,”
With a penchant for wearing Sarasota Paradise scarves nearly every day, the always-hustling Walfridson, to the dozens of people he meets on the Sarasota-Manatee-Lakewood Ranch networking circuit, is the face of the Paradise. He simultaneously considers himself an introvert, someone just as comfortable sharing a beer with a buddy and talking about his other sports love: the NHL’s New York Rangers.
“The one thing I never want to experience is regret for not doing something,” Walfridson says, which motivates him to go to events and constantly carry the Paradise flag.
That flag, in the past seven years, has gotten a bit heavy. Since 2018, Walfridson has spent into the six figures of his own money on the team; passed up on other lucrative opportunities in the sport where he says he could have made up to $400,000 a year; negotiated deals and contracts with sponsors, players, partners, coaches and vendors; and notably, dealt with a stream of setbacks and doubt.
“I understand people thought we were crazy and idiots,” he says of the idea that Sarasota and Lakewood Ranch could support a pro sports team. “I got it.”
That, in turn, has partially driven his busy networking schedule. “We have to really educate the community as to what a professional soccer team is all about,” he says.
And there have been some believers along the way, too. In 2020, Walfridson, along with business partner Kenneth Bethune, who has experience in English soccer clubs, formed Audigr Group. Named for the Old Norse/Norwegian word for prosperity, Audigr is the parent entity for the Paradise.
The Papanicholas family, which owns Nicholas & Associates, a national construction management company with offices in Illinois and Tampa, were also early believers in the Paradise. The company started as a jersey sponsor for the team, and then, last August, purchased a minority stake in the club at a low/mid seven-figure valuation, Walfridson says.
Erin Silk, the president and CEO of the Economic Development Corp. of Sarasota County, was another early believer in the team. Walfridson and Silk connected in 2021. Silk was impressed with Walfridson’s optimism, even amid shrugs from some and rejections from others. “As soon as you meet Marcus, you know that if anyone was going to pull this off it would be him,” Silk says. “You just feel his positive vibes. I’ve really never heard him have a negative thing to say.”
Silk also lauds Walfridson’s ability to change directions quickly.
“Sometimes people get so focused on a task they get tunnel vision, but he didn’t do that,” Silk says. “He was really able to change and adapt.”
Walfridson, 44, has made a career of being able to change and adopt.
Ice hockey was his first love growing up — not soccer. He knew another Swede hockey player of a similar age, the legendary Henrik Lundqvist, who went on to lead the Swedish national team to a gold medal in the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics. Lundqvist, now 43, also played 15 years with Walfridson’s beloved New York Rangers.
Walfridson didn’t really start playing soccer until his teens and says he didn’t get good until he was 18 — late for soccer players. He ended up playing in Norway, quipping the flights were cheap, so it was easy to get there. He soon took coaching jobs and even some jobs outside sports to scratch together a living.
Coaching, leading and running teams in some ways came more naturally to Walfridson than playing. Some of that can be traced to his dad, an entrepreneur and a businessman. “When the other kids at school would say ‘I want to be a cop, I want to be a firefighter,’ things like that,” Walfridson says, “I said, ‘I want to be the boss.’”
Now as the boss of the Paradise, Walfridson can at least say if there’s a job or task to do, he has done it before at some level. He’s been a head coach, an assistant coach, a scout, run player development and more. “I’ve done everything you could think of in soccer,” he says.
That experience has led Walfridson to run Sarasota Paradise with two core principles: accountability and clarity.
“I’m very big on accountability,” he says. “If I tell you I’m going to do something, I do something. But I also expect that from everybody else.”
Clarity is key, too. “When you know the answer to something you can move on,” he says, “when you don’t know, you can’t move on.”
Those principles have also helped the Paradise build a culture of togetherness, which, says Seth Mahlmeister, a striker and one of the team’s top players, is essential in a short season. Mahlmeister joined the Paradise recently. He played college soccer at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he was named to the 2024 NCAA Division I Men’s Soccer Forwards to Watch National List. “When you’re with somebody for three-and-a-half months like we are,” Mahlmeister says, “you have to get along really well with each other.”
Mahlmeister, like the team has been doing, is working diligently to prove himself worthy of the next level of professional soccer. That might mean he, and other players, will move on to other teams, other leagues.
But the Paradise, says Walfridson, are here to stay — including 12 games left in the 2025 season, six at Premier Sports. For Walfridson and his team of supporters, that’s a big win. “This is a signal to the sports world and the business world,” says the EDC’s Silk, “that we can support a professional sports team.”
