How do you feel about the health of soccer in the county right now?
Great question. I like to think that, in terms of global soccer and the global game, is on the rise. It’s easy to watch matches from around the world, easy for people to watch the best stars from around the world. It’s crazy to see that in the last ten years, you can go any part of the country and people are wearing Barcelona and Real Madrid shirts and jerseys. That’s awesome. That’s all going in the right direction. I think there’s things like the men’s national team fails to qualify, which I think robs US fans from having that moment in participating in that global conversation. Seeing the women’s team go out there and crushing it is awesome and inspiring. I think that for the regular everyday fan, awareness of soccer is growing, I think awareness of the MLS is growing, I just think it’s unfortunate that the U. S. Men’s National Team didn’t make the World Cup this cycle, that didn’t really help.
I think if you really dig into it, from a soccer nerd perspective and the business growth and evolution of the game, it’s pretty stagnant. To hear the reports come back from the Yedlin issue, the training and solidarity payments case, it’s not super inspiring. We haven’t heard a lot of resolution on the CAS case that we filed around Article 9 and promotion and relegation. You continuously hear about new leagues starting and trying to compete with other leagues. What is continuously frustrating to me is that there doesn’t appear to be any leadership from the USSF, saying like “hey, we realize that there’s a lot of instability in the US Soccer pyramid, so we’re want to and fix it. Here’s our ten year plan to fix it. Someone just has to step up and do that. It’s super frustrating that there’s no one at USSF that is capable of doing that. And there may not be anyone at the USSF who is interested in doing that. I find that to be really frustrating.
So, beyond that, from where I sit, as a board member in the NPSL and the chairman of a lower level club, one just got off the phone with someone in Connecticut who wants to start a team and just had coffee two days ago with someone who wants to start a women’s team in Brooklyn, there are people who wants to build these things around the country. I talk to a lot of them because I’ve written a lot of stuff about this. People seek me out on the internet and I’m happy to grab some coffee or talk on the phone for a half hour. And there’s a lot of people out there that want to do this because it’s a fun process and they want their community to have it and they just love the game. I wish there was also a real entrepreneurial take on it, where hey, if you start this club, you can build, invest, and win your way up, you can establish yourself and there’s business opportunities there. We’re just starting to scratch the surface of those things, but we haven’t really realized them yet.
That was a really long answer for a very simple question. Sorry about that.
There are some soccer fans that view club over league, how do you see that relationship, which is the priority for you? The strength of the league or the club? How are they connected? Which is more important?
Clubs, right? The leagues are the containers for the teams. The leagues should be set up and anchored in their spots and then the clubs should just move through the leagues as they evolve. That’s the way it works everywhere else in the world. Just in the US, you have these individuals that own these leagues, so the leagues are being entrepreneurial, as opposed to the clubs. And that’s the thing that’s broken. If the leagues could just decide, we’re a D4 league and we’re going to be a D4 league, this is where we belong. We want clubs to come in and we want clubs to go out. We want them to come in as amateur clubs and we want them to leave as professional clubs, that’s great, right? But not all leagues see it through the same lens.
As far as Stockade is concerned, you’re in your fourth season now, what is easier now versus four years ago?
I’d say that now the gameday operations run like a well-oiled machine. Stockade world headquarters is based in my garage and I load up a whole bunch of stuff into my car and I drive it to our rinky-dink stadium in Kingston. There’s always an army of 15-20 volunteers that know, once I park my car and open the hatchback, everyone unloads it, everyone sets up - we’re a well-oiled machine when it comes to gameday operations. That’s great, because when that works it allows us to do other things. Now we have time to think about food trucks, beer tents, an iron-on jersey station, let’s do our livestream in English and in Spanish, let’s try to be part of a tournament we weren’t a part of. It just frees us up to do those other things, which is awesome. So there’s that part, which is the off the field part.
There’s also the on the field part. When we started four years ago, people were like, who’s going to coach? Who’s going to play? No one’s going to come out and watch. No one’s going to care. Coaches were like, I’m not going to send you my players, I’ve never heard of you before. And now, four seasons in, we’ve won a conference championship and played in the U. S. Open Cup. Some of our players, every year, get picked up from our club and go play internationally. We have a reputation in the Northeast for being a good program - coaches want to send their college players to us. Talented players want to play on our team, because they see it as a doorway to play in a different league or even in a different country. That’s a huge luxury for a club like ours, where fans know what to expect when they come out, players know what to expect when they come, coaches know what to expect when they send us players, everything runs well and now we do four or five new things every year, which makes the fan experience more interesting.
