Sporting Club Jacksonville
professional soccer club in Jacksonville, Florida, U.S.
Sporting Club Jacksonville, commonly known as Sporting JAX, and less commonly as the Ocean Blue, Rivermen, or the Whales is an American professional sports club based in Jacksonville, Florida that competes in the USL Championship.
Founded in 2022, the club's men's team began playing in 2026.
History
Founding
A USL Championship club in Jacksonville was announced on August 30, 2022, led by venture capitalist Ricky Caplin and former Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Tim Tebow. The group partnered with Florida Elite Soccer Academy, rebranding it as the Sporting JAX Soccer Academy, to form a full development pathway.
The club expanded its leadership team on November 30—coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the NFL awarding Jacksonville its franchise—by adding former Jacksonville Jaguars star Fred Taylor to the ownership group.
Sporting Club Jacksonville, branded as Sporting JAX, and sometimes nicknamed the Whales, was officially unveiled on December 12, 2023, along with its logo and team colors.
USL Championship era
Mark Warburton, best known for leading post-liquidation Glasgow Rangers FC to the Scottish Premiership in 2016, was named Sporting Director and Head of Soccer on March 20, 2025. He oversees both the men’s and women’s teams.
On November 4, 2025, Sporting JAX appointed former Dundee United manager Liam Fox as the first head coach in men's team history. The role marked his first coaching position outside Scotland.
“Sporting Club Jacksonville” enters the record as professional soccer club in Jacksonville, Florida, U.S. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sporting, Club and Jacksonville can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q123846321. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2022, 2026, 2023 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sporting Club Jacksonville” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.