As Major League Soccer continues its steady push into the American mainstream, foreign consumer brands are beginning to treat the league not as a niche play, but as a gateway into everyday U.S. life. Paris Baguette, a global bakery chain that has been rapidly expanding across the United States, has taken its latest step in that direction by signing an official partnership with Los Angeles Football Club, aligning itself with one of the league’s most visible and internationally minded franchises.
For Paris Baguette, the deal is less about logo placement than about embedding itself in the rhythms of American sports culture. The company already operates hundreds of stores across North America and is investing in local production capacity, signaling that the United States is no longer just an overseas growth market but a core pillar of its global strategy. Tying the brand to LAFC places it directly inside a fan base that reflects where American soccer is heading: younger, urban, multicultural, and increasingly global in outlook.
LAFC has become a focal point of that shift. Since its debut in 2018, the club has cultivated an image that blends on-field success with cultural relevance in Los Angeles, a city where sports, entertainment, and lifestyle branding often intersect. The arrival of internationally recognized players such as Hugo Lloris added credibility, but it was the recent signing of Son Heung-min that underscored the club’s broader ambitions. Son’s presence has drawn attention well beyond Southern California, tapping into a global fan base that follows him across leagues and continents.
Paris Baguette plans to lean into that momentum. Beginning next year, the company intends to introduce bakery products inspired by Son and his LAFC teammate Denis Bouanga, along with merchandise and in-store promotions tied to the club. Fan-facing programs, including youth events and ticket giveaways, are designed to connect matchday excitement with everyday consumption, turning a routine stop for coffee or bread into a small extension of the stadium experience.
Company executives describe sports as a way to reach American consumers not through advertising alone, but through shared habits and social moments. In that sense, the partnership reflects a broader shift in how global food brands approach the U.S. market. Rather than positioning themselves as exotic imports, they are increasingly seeking relevance through local culture, local production, and local communities, with sports serving as a unifying platform.
For LAFC, the collaboration fits into a strategy of pairing the club with brands that see soccer as part of a larger lifestyle ecosystem. Club leadership has framed the partnership as a natural overlap between food and sport, two experiences that bring people together in ways that feel communal rather than transactional. In a league still defining its identity within the crowded American sports landscape, those associations carry weight.
Paris Baguette’s move follows earlier high-profile sports partnerships in Europe with Paris Saint-Germain and in England with Tottenham Hotspur, but the U.S. context is different. Here, the challenge is not brand prestige but familiarity. By anchoring itself to MLS and a club like LAFC, the company is betting that soccer’s slow but persistent rise in the United States can help transform it from a recognizable name into a habitual one.
With plans to significantly expand its North American store network by the end of the decade and new production facilities under development in Texas, Paris Baguette is positioning itself for long-term competition in an intensely crowded food retail market. The LAFC partnership suggests that, for the company, success in America will depend as much on cultural fluency as on croissants.
