The MLS Commissioner sat down with Rich Kleiman from “Boardroom” to discuss his transition from working in the NFL to soccer, the growth of the sport in the United States, Lionel Messi’s impact on the league and much more.
Video Transcript
Robert Kraft and Lamar Hunt, who founded MLS, I was at an owners’ meeting after making a presentation, and Robert said to me, what do you know about soccer?
I said, absolutely nothing.
He said you’d be a great commissioner.
What’s up everybody and welcome to another boardroom Talks today we are in New York City, New York in the offices of Major League Soccer, and today I have the honor of speaking to the man in charge, the commissioner, Mr. Don Garber.
Don, welcome to the boardroom, Rich.
Great to be here.
Thanks for our friendship and, uh, all the great things we do together.
This is gonna be fun.
This is gonna be a lot of fun.
I, I wanted to have this conversation with you for a while because I’m truly curious.
Um, as you know, we invested in the league years ago.
We’ve spoke throughout the last few years, and I’ve always tried to learn more and more about what it is that you’ve built and what you’re continuing to build.
You came from the NFL.
I heard that there’s an amazing story about how you were, um, presented this job.
First I’d love to hear that story but also would love to hear a bit about that experience working for the NFL and then kind of what learnings you took from that entering into this challenge.
Sure, you know, I, uh, almost out of college I had a couple of years at a PR advertising agency but almost out of college I went to go work for the NFL in their marketing group.
It was called NFL Properties, uh, then it was filled with a bunch of Ivy League.
Guys who worked at Colgate Palmolive or Nestle or Nabisco, you know, and I guess they thought that selling the NFL was like, you know, selling Ritz crackers or something like that, and I came out of a background of, of agency sports marketing which in the 80s was pretty new and I worked uh at NFL properties selling sponsorships and doing fun deals and I was the guy that kind of did the things that were a little off.
The beaten track.
I, I have the, uh, the honor of taking Hank Williams off the, uh, the Monday Night Football, uh, opening and then we did a different artist with a different record label all year and I thought it was the coolest thing I’ve ever done.
And then after one year they canceled it and went back to Hank Williams and back to country music, but I was that guy, uh, Rich.
I started the NFL experience which is the.
The now an industry standard in pro sports and all their youth programs and uh taking the helmets off the players crazy stuff like the NFL quarterback challenge, you know, Dan Marino throwing a ball at a target on a golf cart that was zooming across the field in Disney World and those kind of ideas which were about uh uh promoting.
Uh, the NFL to a different audience led me to launch their international business.
The league didn’t really have a business other than selling their media rights.
We had a league in Europe.
We opened up, I opened up 8 offices and did all sorts of fun, cool stuff to extend the NFL brand outside the US and I reported into Robert Kraft and Lamar Hunt, who founded MLS.
I was at an owners’ meeting after making a presentation, and Robert said to me.
What do you know about soccer?
I said, absolutely nothing.
He said, you’d be a great commissioner and that was 26 years ago and.
Going into that role, you worked for two commissioners at the NFL, right?
I saw you worked under Pete Rozell at some points and Paul Tagliabo.
What were commissioner kind of, um, inspirations that you got from the two of them that you knew of?
Like what did that role look like to you based on your experience?
Yeah, what a great question, Rich.
I mean, Pete Rozelle, um, was like a monarch, you know, he had an office on almost on his own floor and.
And this, uh, assistant who had been with him for 40 years and you couldn’t get past her without, you know, permission you almost couldn’t get on the floor if you didn’t have permission to see Pete and, uh, nobody ever really called him by his name and the afternoons he’d go out and meet people just like you’ve seen in all the great documentaries, but he wasn’t an accessible guy at least to a young 20 something.
Uh, Paul Taglibo, uh, came in and, and Paul was just really smart, really accessible, really inclusive, and as I moved up the ranks, Paul had large, uh, executive staff meetings, and we get, we got to see what was going on all across the NFL enterprise, you know, Paul’s an attorney, he’s super thoughtful, very engaged with the owners, open to ideas, and you know, you learn, I believe, Rich, you, you learn, and you can learn in school the technical aspects of business.
But the best way and and we’ve talked about our mutual backgrounds is to just do it and absorb through experience those who’ve been successful and then learn what not to do from people who really you don’t admire and don’t respect.
For me it’s probably fifty-fifty.
There’s a lot of what I do, which is something that I knew I never wanted to do when I was around somebody in business that you know I thought wasn’t um.
Managing their relationship or their business properly, uh, Paul gave me some advice, you know, in my, my exit meeting nobody leaves the NFL.
You’re a young guy and you’re in the sports marketing business.
You got fired or you are still there, right?
And, uh, he was intrigued as to why I would leave to go work for a fledgling soccer league and soccer league, you know, uh, was not something that that most people in the sports industry back.
Then really had any uh thoughts to aspire to where we would be where it is today and Paul said to be a good commissioner you need to keep the owners who hate you away from the ones who are undecided, right?
And I think about that all the time, you know, owners really are the center they’re the yoke of the egg, right?
They are the center of the universe and, uh, and you gotta manage them and let them manage you and be open to ideas and.
Understand that they come from different backgrounds, they have different political leanings they come from cities that have uh a different demographic and managing them, uh, is the I think the key to being a successful sports league commissioner.
And you, you said fledgling, um, you know, I do remember the early days of MLS just being such a big sports fan.
What were you actually walking into?
What was the league at that point?
You know, I, I, I think it speaks to others that.
You know, if you don’t take risk and have some courage and get discouraged, you’re never gonna get out of wherever you are and achieve something that might be even unimaginable.
I never thought I’d be a commissioner, so when I had the opportunity to come into MLS, I didn’t do a whole lot of due diligence.
Uh, they had 10 teams and I had heard they just expanded, so, uh, they had one stadium that Lamar Hunt built for $30 million and.
In Columbus we now have 26 and have invested $6 billion in stadiums.
Um, it came out of the 1994 World Cup.
A bunch of American players like Alexi Lala came home.
There were a bunch of players that performed in the World Cup, including the World Cup final in LA in ’94 that had been signed in the league, and I said, man, that’s the coolest thing ever.
I can run a league.
I’d be around Phil Lauch, Robert Kraft Kraft, Lamar Hunt, you know, what’s the downside?
And it hit pretty hard the realization that sports running and launching a sports league is really hard.
You need to have the right investment you need to have the right product offering we’re in a very competitive environment in our sport, but the entire entertainment business is is certainly quite crowded and cluttered.
You need to have good staff.
You need to be able to engage in thoughtful, short, medium and long term strategy, but you also need to be able to put the lights on and put them off every day.
I just had a meeting earlier today and I said if you’re not a player coach you’re not gonna be successful in MLS.
There’s no big throne here.
There’s no huge office with doors behind it, you know, we all work hard.
I’ve been traveling 100 days a year for 26 years and, uh, sweat and blood, uh, and building a sport and a league that uh really isn’t wasn’t then what it is today.
Because it was really pretty challenging and I’m being polite because I know this will live longer than I do.
Um, well, so let’s do that.
Let’s jump now 26 years ahead, um, because what you have done is remarkable, um, but still comes with challenges I’m sure every day.
One of the more unique things you’ve done and that the league did was one of the first to do a deal, if not the first, with the streaming service, the Apple deal, which got incredible press, um, the numbers were very staggering and impressive.
What was the process in your mind in approaching that uh what was the expectation for you in that deal?
um and how would you kind of assess that for yourself right now from a league standpoint?
You know, we are, uh, an emerging sport, uh, an emerging sport so much so that back when I came.
The World Cup wasn’t sold by FIFA, the governing body for the World Cup in the English language in 2002 when the World Cup was in Korea and Japan, and here we are, you know, decades later, and it’s the most valuable soccer market from a media perspective in the world, but we’re competing against all the European, South American, Mexican leagues selling their broadcast and media rights here.
All the leagues, both the established leagues and.
Volleyball leagues and pickleball leagues and just about every other sport that obviously the US uh media sports market is just filled with with product and we also were managing through local television as you know, as a longtime sports fan in America teams in the major leagues have local broadcasters and our group, the, the strategy that we were working on the just doing research and following ratings.
Talking to our fans, 80% of them were watching streamers streaming soccer soccer through streaming product, seeing where the dis fractionalization and the disruption that was going on in the cable.
Uh, and broadcast media space, we said we have to be with the streamer we have to have a global offering so somebody in Miami could watch a game the same way somebody in Madrid or somebody in Buffalo or in Boston is watching it the same way in Barcelona on any device, an Apple device, an Android device, a computer screen.
And this idea of no blackouts accessible globally was super important to us and what do you do?
You go out, you meet with Netflix, you meet with Amazon both by the way, at that time in Amazon’s case, not globally distributed, uh, with one, you know, one click, and Apple is, uh, thinking a lot about the, uh, offerings that they would have to their global consumer base and uh.
Went and did a deal with the biggest uh technology company in the world and launched a subscription service launched channels for all of our teams as you know the Philadelphia Union have their own content that content sits on a global offering still have some linear with Fox and and Univision.
I think that makes sense for us, but it’s an exciting partnership with a company that really, really likes to break glass.
Um, yeah, I was always, as I told you, um.
Very excited encouraged by the deal.
I mean, I think the idea that you could grow with them as well, right, because what Apple can unlock year to year and what you guys can create and iterate off of is more unique than probably any other cable provider streaming service just based on the hardware that Apple has.
And the brand that Apple has, I know that there were some changes this year, um, which I’m also excited about one of them being the Sunday night game that you no longer have to have the MLS package right to have just have to have Apple TV.
So the changes that were made was that because you guys were happy with where you were but saw that there was more upside and more that you needed to do to have all of this start to really come to fruition for you and how have.
I would say the teams in the league within the league reacted to the deal so far.
So you know I’ve been around the sports industry for a long time.
I remember when ESPN was launched and every time a major league would go on cable, it was like the world is ending, you’re no longer distributed.
You have to pay to get a game, right?
And I’m sure you remember that also, Rich and.
You know, times, uh, the media business, sports industry goes through cycles.
There was a cycle when baseball was brought in and you watching, uh, hearing those games on radio and then network television comes on and the NFL powers that cable comes on and every sports product and league is powering that and here we’re going through a new transformation with streaming.
Uh, partnerships and with that you’re, you’re dealing with a closer direct relationship with the consumer.
You could understand who they are, what they want to they want to see a particular team, a particular player?
You’re now in a digital environment so we had a messy stream on TikTok with millions and millions of.
Live streams going on, not something you can do if you had a different partnership so we’re constantly balancing the the schedule and the access for our fans are we trying to get more people to watch our games we’re trying to get those people watching our games watch more and become more engaged and.
This idea of a super fan, uh, versus going out and having a broad reach and all leagues are dealing with this all clubs are dealing with this all the time and we’re right back in the middle of it right so I don’t know that we have the answer yet, uh, but we have uh a commitment with a great partner to work together to figure it out.
And the Sunday night game is um a nice new edition, right?
This will be marketed differently and it’s available to more people.
It is and it goes to the fact that we have a partner in Apple.
So we can decide to change our schedule without having to worry about is that time slot available with another broadcaster because they might have another programming there before the Apple deal 60 different start times a year, 60 think about that what fan knows where our games are and when they’re gonna be able to be played.
Now if we wanna have a Sunday game, global Sunday game, we just change our schedule, work with Apple, work with different offerings, and then you can innovate and you know it’s they’re an innovative company and we’re leaning in to the fact that we have a partner that’s gonna push us.
Mentioned Messi um over the last few years obviously that’s been an incredibly exciting um addition to the league I think there’s nobody that’s a passive sports fan or a very engaged sports fan that didn’t know about it.
Um, and it’s been successful, um, I would imagine it’s been successful for you guys, uh, what.
Was the impact for you guys?
like where is the impact?
like where have you been able to see that the impact allows you to kind of like launch from, um, and, and what goes from there, right?
Like how does this start to become a bit of a scalable thing for the league and with that I, I, I ask about like what he not what he gets paid but the structure in which he got paid, is that a future for the league because I know that there’s 3 exceptions there’s more exceptions in MLS for.
Um, the salary cap in any other league, so what have you guys seen that this greatest impact has been, and then how does this potentially allow you to scale in bringing in other stars of that caliber?
You know, it starts with, uh, the impact has been enormous, um.
The attendance has been enormous.
The media coverage has been, you know, off the charts.
The, uh, the television viewership and increase in subscribers has been beyond our expectations, uh, but I think it’s the ubiquity factor, Rich, that, you know, even I didn’t realize the power, the influence, the awareness that, uh, that people have that Leo has around the world.
Uh, I see pink messy jer jerseys wherever I go.
Hopefully they’re all Adidas messy jerseys as opposed to knockoffs made somewhere, but, um, we in America have so many great sports stars, you know, they’re basketball stars and hockey stars and.
Baseball stars, uh, but there’s one Messi if you’re gonna ask everybody, maybe not Cristiano Ronaldo, but you ask every coach, every player in the world who the best player ever to play the game is, it’s Messi, and we’re living with him.
So he scores a couple has a great couple of great assists this weekend, uh, prior to that, you know, he played in a, uh, CONCACA of a FIFA tournament.
He scores a goal and it’s less than 10 degrees and he’s out there playing in freezing weather.
You and I wouldn’t have been out there playing, right?
Uh, so he’s a remarkable guy.
He, uh, he loves our league.
His family loves being here.
He’s got a bunch of sons who are pretty elite youth players, so the impact from a commercial perspective has been beyond our expectations.
And it’s the unique structure of Major League soccer and our desire to take risk, evolve our system that allowed us to sign him, you know, we were competing against Saudi Arabia.
We were competing against his home club in Barcelona where he, he went as a 15 or 16 year old.
We were able to structure a deal where he gets a share of certain incremental revenues.
We were able to figure out a way that.
Uh, it works for him, uh, and long term we hope that it continues to keep him involved with us and frankly, you know, he’s doing pretty well.
I hope he resigns and stays with Major League Soccer for some time.
And have you felt that there’s potentially been more conversation around stars?
There is no star like Messi, but stars from around the world that see this kind of track now?
Yeah, it’s a good question, um, and it’s not uh from my perspective.
You know, there is only one Messi, but when we signed David Beckham, there was only one David Beckham, right?
And he really was the guy that brought Major League Soccer to the world.
So I don’t know what it’ll look like years from now.
I would assume that whoever is occupying that space is a guy that one or two of our teams is gonna try to go after and then come up with unique structure, uh, but I think it’s the awareness of Major League soccer with those players now who are way younger.
The average age of our international signings this year is 24 years old.
And we’re buying these players competing against the best clubs in the world, you know, we signed a young kid from the Ivory Coast in Atlanta who scored two goals in his first game, and it was north of a $20 million signing.
Uh, you’re seeing our teams going out and saying, hey, maybe it’s not messy that will help me in my market, but maybe it’s a great young player who’s played in England or Germany or Spain or played in Belgium or the Netherlands or played in Mexico and all of that, uh, opportunity.
I really believe has been driven by the fact that Messi has made MLS his league of choice.
He ain’t gone anywhere, but he chose Major League Soccer, so certainly that might make sense for other players.
You mentioned Atlanta, and I know this past weekend they had 65,000 people at the stadium.
Um, what, like why does Atlanta work so well, and what is a market that works so well?
Like what does it make for a market to be able to impact the way that they do?
You know, listen, if I knew the answer to that, I probably wouldn’t be commissioner, you know, I’d be having a company and I’d be, you know, sought after as much as, uh, as Rich Kleinman is, uh, but no, seriously, uh, Atlanta was a coming storm.
It happened at a time when MLS was growing.
It had come after the World Cup in 2014.
That team joins in in 2017.
Arthur Blank is a visionary sports industrialist, and, and I didn’t think Atlanta would be a great MLS market, and he said, Hey buddy, I’m telling you it’s gonna be big opening game which they played before Mercedes-Benz was built.
At, uh, Georgia Tech had 45 50,000 people.
I remember walking in and saying, man, you know, Arthur, you got it done and you know 65, you know, the team has been around since 2017 and they’ve had some struggles after they won a couple of years in and you know, 65,000 people for any sporting event and the place was rocking in a 3-2 game, you know, we had the president of US soccer there you had a lot of big sponsors there.
Arthur is there cheering away and.
You know, I think it speaks to that if you do it right in our business and you spend a lot of your time on this, then the dots get connected and fans will embrace it.
You can’t buy it.
You have to earn it.
You’ve gotta be creative.
You have to have some take some risk and have some courage and year after year Atlanta has done it right.
You know, I was at the LA Galaxy game right after the Atlanta game, and they had packed stadium.
They have people in the berm, you know, outstanding room only and an unbelievable opening for them, but for our newest team in San Diego that will open up with 30+,000, our 30th team and that team has done a lot of good things and have signed a top young Mexican player.
So our business, I think is pretty linear.
Some of it is luck.
But you gotta do the work, you know, you’ve got to be smart marketing people.
You gotta have smart entertainment people, smart sporting people, be focused, manage to bottom bottom line.
And hoping that hope the stars align the stars align you, it’s, you know, a lot of people have talked recently about the NBA ratings, um, and then people like to compare everything to the NFL, right?
So I think one of the things that you hear about the NBA is that with the amount of games and the amount of access to games that a little bit of the stakes behind some of these regular season games have become less important to a fan, um, whereas in the NFL there’s so much scarcity each game has so much meaning.
And I think that for me, you know, obviously when the Philadelphia Union made the finals and the semifinals, there was no difference in terms of how I engaged in watching that than if I was watching KD play with the Suns in the playoffs or watching the New York Giants or watching my Saint John’s Red Redmond Red Storm, um, and I think it’s because I understood what the stakes were.
And I wonder sometimes, and I, as like a bit of more of a layman fan right throughout the year you guys have the North American Cup, you have the US Cup, there’s the Canadian Cup, and sometimes I wonder if the storytelling.
At times to the more passive fan can get confusing as opposed to seeing the MLS Cup as the ultimate and having everything kind of targeted towards that.
Will you first just kind of break down what goes on throughout the season outside of the Governor’s shield and um and the MLS Cup and then your thoughts on just how that plays into the storytelling and if you think for for some reason that it could be.
Confusing a more passive fan on just exactly what’s at stake when it comes to winning it all, but it’s a.
It’s a conundrum and uh the soccer business or the football business.
It’s so complicated, you know, there’s a global governing body.
There are regional governing bodies.
We have our own federation, and each of the governing bodies, FIFA and CONCACAP or UEFA have their own competitions, and those competitions are there to create alternative properties for a wide variety of folks to benefit whether they’re players or whether they’re clubs.
And it’s crowded.
uh, all of us in the, uh, in the league business, uh, believe it is one of the biggest challenges in the sport of soccer or football.
Uh, next week I’m going to speak at the European Leagues Association annual meeting, and it’s the subject every year, Rich, and, uh, I don’t know how that gets, uh, resolved in a way that, uh, does most importantly protect.
The safety and health of our players who are asked to and in many ways want to play in more and more games uh because of the appeal of winning for your country or winning for your region, what do you qualify for if you win one of those tournaments and all of that creates a lot of global buzz in a world where the the world is shrinking.
So I think back in the day when you had all these tournaments you would scratch your head and say boy this makes no sense but now in Miami and Seattle who’ve won the CONCACAF Champions League last year are playing in the Club World Cup here in the United States against Chelsea and against Real Madrid, that creates a global competition in a way that all the stakeholders are benefiting by.
And then the onus falls on all of us to effectively market and communicate it so I think the challenge is probably less the structure and more that we all need to be aligned with the global narrative, your expertise, right?
I mean, everybody has to be thinking about where do we all fit and how do you tell the story?
Simple idea you win a tournament, you get a patch on your jersey.
You’re you become on your when you see the uh the lineups.
You know, it says, you know, Brandon Aronson, who used to play for Philadelphia, has a logo that might be the MLS logo because he played there and he’s playing in the Champions League and it could create for global football.
Remember 100+ leagues playing the global sport.
The NBA is a global sport.
They only have one league, so I think we need to connect the dots, but I ain’t king.
I’m not sure the dots will get connected.
Does the league benefit, um.
From having their teams compete in those different federations, uh, we do when we win financial benefit, uh, players get paid, uh, prize money for MLS in particular, Miami will open up the Club World Cup against an Egyptian team, and that’s gonna be seen by, you know, maybe a billion people.
Miami, a little MLS team has a. Um, you know, Messi playing for them, but you know it that that exposure is good for us.
Uh, on the other hand, you just gotta be smart in how you manage the schedule.
I heard a stat prior to talking to you about how Atlanta’s season tickets subscribers and then their football team, both these enormous numbers and there was only about a 3% overlap.
What does an MLS fan look like?
What is the MLS fan?
The MLS fan is unique.
It’s distinct.
It’s separate from all the other major leagues here.
It’s the youngest fan base.
It’s the most diverse fan base has highest percentage of Hispanic, uh, fans and followers.
It’s the most digitally native, so those qualities are the qualities that give us our brand identity.
It’s why Doce is doing our, you know, league kickoff, uh, ad.
So we, we, we have a point of difference and a point of differentiation, and the best stat is the 3% crossover between season ticket holders in Atlanta and in uh.
At Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta United, we see the same thing in Seattle where we have 40,000 fans, very few of them are Seahawks fan.
We see the same thing in Charlotte where Charlotte’s getting 30-40,000 fans a game and very few of them are Panthers fan that that gives the community an opportunity to support, get more people downtown.
Have more people wearing, you know, the Panther uniform is the same color as the, uh, the Charlotte, uh FC uniform, but it does give you brand differentiation.
Is the upside in more and more of what the MLS fan looks like or is the upside potentially even more so trying to tap into that other fan?
Uh, you know, that, that’s the, the, that’s the zillion dollar question, you know, where is.
The market going how is America changing demographically as audiences age up or age out?
What are they associated with?
What are their acclivities?
What do they care about?
What are their passions?
What are their buying and purchasing habits?
So the idea that the vast majority of MLS fans were cable nevers.
So moving to a streaming service was not traumatic.
My guess is if you were more established league and you had an older fan base, a full streaming service would have more impact on, uh, your fan base just based on where they are in their relationship with how they consume media.
So we’re trying to carve our own path and so is everybody else too, Rich, all the, you know, the women’s leagues are now exploding and they’re going after their own audiences and.
I have, uh, learned that there is an insatiable appetite, uh, on the sponsorship commercial media and fan side of sports in our country and I don’t, I think we’re still forging new ground.
I think we got a long way to go it’s pretty cool.
30 teams in your 30th year, um, I heard it was a coincidence, not planned, um.
How crazy is it to see that you have 30 teams now from when you started, uh, and what’s your kind of thought or vision on like how much further you could go?
It is crazy, uh, you know, I, uh, seeing San Diego playing in LA and seeing their owner who, you know, is a very successful business guy from Egypt and a Native American tribe, uh, which is really pretty cool and remarkable and the, uh, San Diego’s training ground will be on, uh, the, the tribal land.
Um, I, I mean for me it’s just remarkable.
I, I came in, we went to 10 teams and so that’s 20 new teams, new cities, new owners, new stadiums, new fans.
Everyone required a meeting with a governor and a mayor and getting sponsors and fans to embrace it.
Uh, MLS is still the youngest of the men’s major leagues, and I do think there’s possible growth.
Um, I never thought we’d get to 20.
And I never thought we get to 30, so can we go to 32 team?
Probably I’ll have to figure out how that makes sense.
And does it amaze you seeing the evaluations of these teams?
I saw that they just came out and, and does that have, and this question gets asked I think across all leagues, um, like just how much further that can can go in the current kind of structure.
Yeah well.
You know, uh, there’s, there’s a, a.
There are only a handful of of uh major league teams available and a lot of really wealthy passionate people in our country and around the world who care about sports in their community, uh, so I think there will continue to be an increase in in asset value for teams.
Evidenced by, you know, 5 years ago there wasn’t even a uh financial instrument, the, the, the, uh, private equity funds and the credit funds we’re not thinking about sports as an alternative investment.
You know you can buy stocks and bonds and how you can invest in in sports vehicles because they generally go up so I do think that they’ll continue, uh, the NFL valuations have exploded in the last 12 months and, uh, I, I think as more and more people are focused on things that make them happy that they care about that allow them to have a way to express their passion and even their local identity, look at what happened with the Eagles and.
What, what just the entire city exploded.
I mean the Eagles have been around a while and uh more people came out to that, you know, parade than ever before, so I think interest in in sports will grow.
I think technology will provide more financial commercial opportunities for teams and leagues to monetize new technologies, whatever that might be and if that happens, it’s uh more growth.
And you mentioned the club World Cup and then obviously the World Cup and that’s kind of been like the talking point for a while just that.
That North Star of that’s coming that’s coming, do you think you’re prepared and prepared from like a marketing standpoint, the storytelling standpoint and an alignment standpoint, um, with the MLS?
Well, on the last side of the alignment, yes, so the league and the clubs and uh and and all the all of the uh different people in our uh stakeholders in our ecosystem all are thinking about and have plans for.
Uh, for 2026 in particular, um, I don’t think that, uh, our market has fully, uh, embraced or even yet understands what it’s gonna be, you know, I’ve, I’ve attended a lot of World Cups in different parts of the world, you know, I think probably the most memorable too for me was going to Germany and seeing millions of people under the Brandenburg Gate, millions of Germans celebrating their team.
Uh, being in South Africa and seeing how this sport and this competition brought Nelson Mandela out to wave to the crowd.
I mean, these, these are not games.
I mean, we’re gonna have 100 Super Bowls, so is our country prepared for that?
I don’t think so, but they will be, and I think it’s gonna be the rocket fuel.
I think it will be the stimulus that our league and the women’s leagues and the youth market and everybody who loves the game.
Uh, really can look forward to we’ll look back on it.
I hope it’s not a concert, you know, they’re big concert tours, but it’s something that is foundational.
The international schedule is something I’ve read you’ve thought about a bit going from August to May.
Is that realistic for MLS?
You know, it’s, uh, it has probably more impact on, on a, a fan in Philly than it does on a fan in Miami, uh, but the rest of the world adapts to the international calendar, albeit in a different.
Uh, market, uh, for a reason, and we have to find a way to get more closely aligned and this is a little bit of inside soccer, but not having our playoffs in the middle of the most busy busiest time in the North American, uh, sports landscape where their busiest seasons are in the fall and our playoffs and MLS Cup are in December.
I’ve been to some pretty cold games in Philadelphia.
We have to find a way to make it work to manage the schedule more teams allows us to have more flexibility.
How do we figure out the right way to align in ways that we can buy and sell players in accordance with or in time with the rest of the world work to do but it’s the MLS thing, you know, we always kind of look at what could be, uh, take a little risk you know nothing’s impossible for us uh we ought to be able to get there but we got a lot of work to do.
In grassroots soccer and investing in grassroots obviously it’s gotta be something very important to you.
What’s been your strategy in terms of looking at grassroots soccer, investing in grassroots soccer?
Obviously every MLS team has an MLS next team, um, because that must play a big part in the future and the vision for the future, you know, I, uh, I, I was involved with grassroots, uh.
Marketing and promotion at the NFL and uh it was crucial to get people to play the game and think of the the success of flag football and rule changes that are allowing and um more people to have access to playing the game and I remember when I first took this job, people would say to me well so many people play soccer why has soccer not made it?
And I said, what does make it mean, right?
We have the largest mark more games more soccer games are broadcast in in America than any other country in the world by a lot more exhibition games here than a lot.
We have more pro teams here, you know, we have 30 teams.
There’s, you know, a bunch of minor league teams.
There’s 2 women’s leagues, so soccer has truly made it in the US and it was birthed by participation.
The sport’s not foreign.
People understand the game.
I was, we have a new team in Saint Louis, Rich, that you’re aware of, and when we were lobbying that team, the governor played in college, the mayor played in college.
Everybody who you met said, Oh, I played the game and I’m a fan of the game, and you launch a team in Saint Louis that has 15,000 people on a waiting list for season tickets.
I mean, it’s been a phenomenon, so.
The grassroots pyramid we call call it is crucial to where we are today.
It’ll be even more important going forward.
We want to develop players for our men’s and women’s national teams.
Christian Palii came out of Pennsylvania, best player that America’s ever had.
He’s starting for the top teams in the world.
Our national team is pretty darn good.
Uh, I hope they win in 2026, and I don’t think it’s even, it’s impossible that that could happen.
That would have been impossible to think about years ago, yeah, and, and I think the development of players through MLS Nex has also become a bit of an innovative business strategy for the teams here, right, because you have seen these teams have a real revenue line of transferring players internationally.
So when you see a great young American player get developed here.
And then get transferred to a team overseas is that a bit of a bittersweet?
Yeah, it is for me it’s probably bittersweet for some fans, but if I were only thinking about sitting at the top, uh, it’s crucial to the development of our league as a player in the global soccer market.
Uh, we were 5th or 6th in the world with incoming and outcoming player sales.
Uh, and that’s spectacular because it wasn’t that long ago that you know we would sell a couple of players and they’d be for a few $100,000.
Philadelphia has almost led the pack because they’re so focused on their academy, their MLS next team, their MLS Next pro team, and if you think about some of the stars of our national team have played as kids in Pennsylvania then for the Union Academy.
And you have another little kid looking through the fence and saying I wanna be that guy and that’s Kevin Sullivan today, one of the top young 16s in the world, 15 years old, and that kid might have gotten his play his because he’s seeing McGlynn or he’s seeing Aronson, he’s seeing some kid that grew up and was wearing a Philadelphia Union jersey and he wanted to be that kid.
Yeah, I guess it’s no different than.
Someone watching Luca, uh, watching Jokic and training and developing as a basketball player with the idea of coming to the NBA, um, you mentioned all the different leagues.
I’m not quite sure if you mentioned the USL, but what has been your feeling on the USL announcing this first division league?
What does that even mean?
Yeah, what, you know what it means is that any league can decide to launch a first division league.
I mean there are two women’s first divisions, but I. I don’t know that uh that most fans are thinking much about any women’s league other than the NWSL um I, I want more soccer.
I want more professional soccer.
I want more jobs for people who can be in the business.
I want more marketing promotion, so if they’re able to pull it off, good for them, and you mentioned the women’s leagues, um, were you impressed by the NWSL media deal?
Well, I, I’m impressed by a lot of the things that they’re doing.
I mean, their teams are growing in value.
They’re building a couple of stadiums.
The media deal was smart and certainly from where they were, uh, I think they’re in the beginning of their growth phase.
I remember us when we were then and you know you’re like drinking from a fire hose, and I think in time, you know, they’ll be a dominant major league.
You know, here in North America and we hope to continue to be the top women’s league in the world and do you feel like it’s something you have to figure out in the future whether it’s internally or aligning more strategically with the NWSL?
Yeah, we do.
We need to figure out what our women’s strategy is and how that gets executed.
Rich sitting here today I don’t know.
But you know we have a lot of stadiums, we have a lot of markets, we have a lot of fans we’ve got a lot of youth teams and just from an integration and and efficiency perspective it makes sense for us to have a strategy that we’re able to go and grow the market for fans and grow the market for players.
Alright, so I have 2 more questions for you.
Imagine we’re going up in the elevator and then down, so like these questions probably have a million different ways you can answer it, but for the first one I would just ask what for you is your dream for the future like for for the league to achieve, for you to achieve as commissioner of the league, um, and.
And do you feel like you’re moving in the direction that you want to be from that standpoint?
I, I think it’s ubiquity.
It’s, it’s having our clubs be super relevant in their market and when MLS Cup is played, it’s no different than the Super Bowl or the World Series or the NBA Finals or the Stanley Cup Finals.
It’s a moment where people stop and say, hey, MLS is having its championship, and there’s time.
That we need and and lots of miles uh in front of us to be able to achieve that.
It’s having, you know, more messy’s and having the best players in the world that we could attract to our league, but it’s also having a homegrown player.
They came through the Philadelphia Union Academy.
That’s the best player in the world.
It’s very simple to me.
It’s 3 things, you know, it’s not that complicated from my perspective.
All right, so for our last question and our last part of this elevator ride, you mentioned what you took from Pete Rozelle, um, Paul Tagliaboo looking at the other commissioners today.
Roger Goodell, Adam Silver, Rob Manfred, what are some of the things that you see that you envy certain things that you look at from their leadership style or their, you know, we, uh, I think about that and we’re friends, you know, we’ve all grown up together.
I mean, Roger to me is uh the most uh ambitious relentless executive in American business, uh, a league that has so much and yet continues to go from strength to strength to strength.
I don’t think people look at him enough that way.
It’s just he happens to run a football league, but think about if he was running any company to continue to have the pedal to the metal and drive forward.
Uh, I have a personal affinity for Gary Bettman.
Uh, look what Gary just did with their, their nation’s tournament.
I mean, everybody paid attention.
The idea that I said I want people to stop and pay attention to our league.
I stopped and paid attention to that tournament, and it captured the imagination.
And Gary’s been at it longer than I am.
I’m the 2nd longest standing commissioner, and Gary continues to be creative and have a lot of energy, and Adam has an incredible spirit, an incredible understanding of the culture of his sport relationship with.
His players and the importance that uh the NBA can have in its community.
I mean the NBA is a total innovator there.
I go to their tech summit.
I haven’t been for a couple of years, but you know the biggest and brightest and most successful tech people in the world were just descending in San Francisco because Adam has them all coming together.
I love Rob.
I think the changes in baseball have been terrific.
I went to the World Series this year and uh baseball is, you know, still a wonderful sport and uh I I think that they’ve got a lot of growth ahead of them.
Well, thank you Don this is awesome my curious mind has been answered.
uh I’m excited for the future and um I’m excited for what’s to come with the league.
And thank you again this is um Rich Kleman and Commissioner Don Garber from the MLS offices in Midtown New York.
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