NHL CEO, other Latino executives found Latinos in Sports platform [Video]

When the National Hockey League’s Arizona Coyotes sold its franchise to Utah last month, the league didn’t just lose an Arizona-based team — it also lost its only active Latino chief executive.

Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Xavier Gutierrez became the Arizona team’s CEO in 2019 after Alex Meruelo, a Cuban-American billionaire, bought the Coyotes a year earlier. Gutierrez had previously been a managing director at private equity firm Clearlake Capital Group and knew Meruelo for about a decade before becoming the NHL’s first-ever Latino CEO.

It took a Latino owner to hire a Latino CEO, Gutierrez explained in an interview, because Hispanics are not well-represented in leadership positions in professional sports.

There are 153 major professional sports franchises in the U.S. and Canada across the NHL, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer.

Gutierrez, who is technically still CEO of the Arizona …