Toca Football is a Costa Mesa, Ca.-based nine-year-old company that runs 14 soccer centers in the U.S. The funding will allow Toca Football to nearly double its current number of facilities and also to fund a new site in the U.K. CEO Yoshi Maruyama describes it as a themed, game-based, dining and entertainment venue that focuses on soccer training.Maruyama is an expert in creating destinations that people love. Maruyama was the global head for location-based entertainment at Dreamworks for six years before joining Toca, which was founded in 1994 by Eddie Lewis, an American soccer player. Maruyama spent 14 years as an SVP at Universal Parks & Resorts.He was actually brought to Toca in 2019, to help transform the company from a manufacturing firm that sold Major League Soccer teams a ball tossing machine, which Lewis had invented, to a services business.Given soccer's increasing popularity in America, the new model looks smart. Statista reports that the U.S.'s high school soccer program saw an unprecedented increase in participation in 2018/19, with over 850,000 players.Toca isn't just for children, even though it was designed for parents and kids. Maruyama says that there are many people who visit its centers during the day. The centers offer a curriculum that introduces soccer to children as young as six years old. In the afternoons, Toca can provide one-on-one training programs for soccer where Toca can use its touch coach. And in the evenings, Toca runs a leagues business for adults and children.Some of these centers are quite large, however. Tocas' newest site is in Naperville (Illinois), just outside of Chicago. It has built a 95,000-square foot facility with four full-size indoor soccer fields as well as individual training spaces. Maruyama says that the company was able to profit from a weak commercial real estate market in the past year.It's no surprise that investors see huge opportunities.Toca's latest round of funding comes from previous investors WestRiver Group and RNS TOCA Partners. D2 Futbol Investors joined them. Jared Smith, co-founder and former CEO of Qualtrics, was also part of the new group of investors.The company, which plans to expand in Asia quickly (China has been ordered by the country's leadership to be a first-class superpower in football by 2050), has raised $105 million total funding.
