"Let me ask you this, if an engaged owner is one factor making a team more organic, what if Dieter Mateschitz started to attend RBNY games? Would RBNY therefore become more organic? Is there a difference on the organic scale if he attends every game, or only half of them?"
Would our team be more organic if our owner was actively engaged with the team including attending matches? Yes of course. I know you are trying to make it sound silly with third question but I think its silly that you don't think the owner's knowledge and involvement with the team he owns is a factor in how authentic its identity is.
If the team was called the Red Bulls but were the only team with that name and the owner was actually very interested in the team, it would still be worse than not being a marketing gimmick, but it would be a degree more organic than the current situation.
"And what do you mean by a "local identity"?"
Portland Timbers, Seattle Sounders, San Jose Earthquakes etc are all names based on features or qualities of the area they play in and in these three cases also draw on the existing soccer history and culture in the area. That's an identity that is easy for locals to connect with. Even generic names like D.C. United are more closely connected to the city than a name that is a soda brand and attached to multiple other teams including 3 soccer teams.
"I read somewhere that when Celtic won the 1967 European Cup, something like 10 of the 11 starters were born either in Glasgow or within a few miles of Glasgow. Now, that team had a local identity and maybe you could say that team was organic. But that was almost 50 years ago, and the soccer world today is nothing like it was then."
Sure the world has changed and is more globalized. But I don't think you could have given a better example of the degrees to which clubs represent an identity or community than Celtic. Maybe the players aren't glaswegian anymore but that's a club that is still very firmly associated with a certain community after more than 100 years.