“So, Let’s Build A Professional Soccer Team From Scratch …”
A manifesto on the intersection of startups and lower-level soccer that ends with the United States winning the World Cup.
About a year ago I got hooked on this idea to start a soccer team from scratch located in the middle of the Hudson Valley, and try to make a run at qualifying for the US Open Cup. (The US Open Cup is a 100-year-old soccer tournament that works kind-of like the NCAA basketball tourney in that lower-ranked, lower-level (even amateur) teams get the chance to compete against the biggest and best teams in all of US soccer.)
And for the past year or so, a small army of us have been working to make the idea a reality.
Our club is called Kingston Stockade Football Club (“Stockade FC” for short). We’re based in Kingston, New York, about two hours north of New York City — right in the middle of the Hudson Valley. We play in a league called the NPSL — a.k.a. “Division 4”, three tiers below MLS — as do some 85 other teams spread throughout the country.
Our first season kicks off today (Sunday May 8) and we’ll play 16 games this spring and summer throughout New York and New England.
Now around nine months in — as in nine months ago, we submitted our application for an expansion team — it’s been one of the most fun and challenging nights-and-weekends projects I’ve ever worked on. Over that time, we built a team of coaches and scouts, held five tryouts and recruited a squad of 30 players. We lined up sponsors, designed jerseys, and attracted a supporters group. We fought our way through pre-season matches that ended with kids from the stands rushing the field to get autographs from our players.
What was once just a crazy idea — starting a club from scratch — is actually now happening.
Despite all this, I don’t think things really start to get interesting until our season kicks off. But before we get there, I wanted to give a little background on the “whys” and “hows” behind the club.
Stockade FC is my third “from scratch” project — and with both Dodgeball and Foursquare, I’ve always regretted not capturing the “before launch” mindset. This time, however, I’m making an effort to archive the early days — the excitement, progress and madness that comes in the days before that original “crazy idea” blows up into something much bigger. (By the way, that’s exactly where we’re headed with this one).
Oh, and before we start — quick reminder that the views represented here are my own personal opinions, and not that of the NPSL (the league in which Stockade FC competes).
How?
So first, the “how.” How did the idea to start a soccer club from scratch come about? There were three distinct moments that got this thing off this ground:
June 3, 2015
We’re five years into Alphabet City SC (the men’s league team our buddies play for in NYC). Our crew is getting beers at a bar called Angry Wade’s in Brooklyn, and we’re debating the future of our team as our friends are starting to move out of the city. We mid-to-late-30 years olds are also growing tired of getting crushed by 20-something year old recent college grads every week, so the conversation turns to, “What would have to happen in the universe for Alphabet City SC to play, say, the New York Red Bulls?” We knew some answers (lower level soccer in the US, qualifying for the US Open Cup) but not all of them.
So I started doing some research.
June 17, 2015
I fell pretty deep into the “lower level soccer” rabbit hole. We trek out to Hofstra University to catch an NYCFC vs. NY Cosmos match (fourth round of the US Open Cup). I’m not sure if you know the history of the NY Cosmos, but the Cliff Notes version is: Powerhouse team in the 1970s (pre-MLS) led by Pele. Team falls apart in the 1980s as the league (NASL) falls apart. In 2010 (25 years later!), an investment group resurrects the Cosmos from the dead and re-joins NASL (2nd division/D2 soccer, just below MLS).
Anyway, we trek out to the Cosmos’ home stadium on Long Island to find 10,000 fans fired up to see their D2 team take on the $100 million D1/MLS empire that is NYCFC. Naturally, we adopted the Cosmos as our team — gotta root for the D2 underdog! — and they won in a shootout, knocking NYCFC out of the US Open Cup.
Amidst all the supporters singing and chanting — and the smoke bombs — I had this moment of, “so you’re telling me someone resurrected this club from the dead, re-started it from scratch, and now there’s 10,000 people here cheering them on? Why don’t we try to do this too?”
June 29, 2015
I’m back in Boston to give a talk to some 8,000 high-school students about tech startups and entrepreneurship in general. I do this quite often, but this is probably one of the biggest crowds I’ve ever spoken in front of. (And, yes I’m super nervous.)
I walk them through the story of Dodgeball and Foursquare and my days being unemployed vs. my days at NYU. Near the end of my presentation, I put up a few slides that summarize some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. One of the things on the list is:
“If there’s something you want to see in the world and it doesn’t yet exist, go out and make that thing.”
It was this point that sucker-punched me as I said it aloud. As I’m talking, I’m thinking, “Here I am telling these kids to build the things they want to see in the world, and meanwhile I’ve got this soccer club idea stuck in my head. It’s something I want to do and build and see, and I’m just sitting here doing nothing about it.”
And so it began. Not 10 minutes after I got off that stage, I decided to make the idea a reality. We would get a crew together to try to build a soccer club from scratch, and put it in the Hudson Valley.
Why?
So, next the “why.” Why a soccer team? And why in the Hudson Valley?
I love the Hudson Valley
My wife Chelsa and I got married up here. We bought a house just outside of Kingston a few years ago. And while we’re currently splitting our time between NYC and Kingston, the master plan is to raise our kids here. (Chelsa is due with our first child any day now!)
I like to build things
More specifically, I like building things that bring people together. This is why we built Dodgeball back in the day. This is the reason we created Foursquare when Dodgeball went away. In the three years since Chelsa and I got hooked on the Hudson Valley, it’s been impossible not to notice all the creative & entrepreneurial energy happening in and around the area. And I want to be a part of all it! I want to add to everything that’s happening and contribute to everything that’s being built and reinvented.
I like soccer and wanted to watch matches upstate
I didn’t grow up playing, but I picked it up a few years ago after we started that club team in NYC (Alphabet City SC). I’m pretty awful (no, I am not going to play for the team), but I love playing and going to matches, and I really dig the supporters culture and worldwide appeal of the sport.
About a year ago, some friends and I found ourselves wishing there were matches to see on a Saturday afternoon here in the Hudson Valley. We were thinking how fun it would be to get a group together to support a local team and bring our kids to the matches. It also seemed crazy to me that all the others people and families that love soccer in the Hudson Valley have to drive two hours to NYC or New Jersey to catch a match.
For as long as I can remember — through Syracuse and NYU, Dodgeball and Foursquare — I’ve been living by this idea of, “If there’s something you want to see in the world and it doesn’t exist, go out and create that thing.” So that’s what we’re doing.
I want to see the United States Men’s National Team win a World Cup in my lifetime and I believe that supporting local soccer is one small way to help make that happen
I’m not going to pretend to be some soccer scholar here, but it makes sense that if we (the United States) are going to succeed in world soccer, we’re going to need to a lot more of it.
We’ll need more players. We’ll need more fans. We’ll need more kids sticking with soccer. We’ll need those kids getting more opportunities to play for bigger and better teams. We’ll need more of those teams trying to find and develop top talent. And we’ll need more high-quality teams at all levels for those players to play for and play against.
In short, to change the output of US soccer at its highest levels, I believe you need to focus on where it starts … the lower levels of the professional soccer pyramid.
(Note: I edited this post and added “Men’s National Team” to be more specific. The 3x World Cup Champion Women’s National team is amazing and has inspired thousands of youth players around the country, and I am often asked, “When will Stockade FC have a women’s team?” We are focused on getting our men’s club off the ground to start, and I’m hoping the answer to the women’s club question is … “soon!”)
So, instead of sitting around and waiting for these things to happen, my hope is that by starting a club from scratch in Kingston, New York, some of those things can happen now— at least locally.
Let me give you a run-down of my goals for Stockade FC:
1. Qualify for the US Open Cup by 2020. This is a badass goal, but it’s what started this whole story. And I think that in chasing this objective, we’ll accomplish some of other goals in this list.
2. Give the best players in the Hudson Valley an opportunity to play at a high level and on a national stage. In building our team this year, we held five tryouts and saw more than 120 players. Some are currently playing for college teams, some were former college players, and some never went to college. I would not be surprised if a few of the best guys on our squad — after getting a chance to play and be seen in this league — get the opportunity to move up a level and play for a D3 team. Creating more opportunities for great players to play at a higher level (and possibly even professionally) is good for soccer in this country overall.
3. Inspire youth players (8 years old and up) to stick with soccer. My hope is that hundreds of kids who play youth soccer in the Hudson Valley will make their way to a Stockade FC match this season, watch our team which is almost entirely comprised of players who grew up playing in the area. I want those kids to say to themselves, “I want to play for Stockade someday.” I’m a big believer in the “you have to see it to be it” school of thought and I want the kids who come to our games to leave thinking, “I can do that too, even if that means I have to double-down on soccer instead of football or basketball to get there.” A local, high-level soccer club is sure to inspire more kids to stick exclusively with the sport.
4. Create more fans of the game. For every person I’ve seen in Ulster or Dutchess County walking around with a Real Madrid or FC Barcelona or NYCFC or Red Bulls jersey, there are thousands more who have never watched a soccer match from beginning to end. I think that for many, coming out to see a Stockade FC match will be their first exposure to the game at a high level and the supporters culture that goes along with it (banging on drums, singing songs). My hope is that the people we expose to soccer through Stockade FC will become fans of the game, not just at our level, but at all levels. And more fans of the game is good for soccer.
5. Inspire others to create clubs like Stockade FC in their own communities. Kingston is a relatively small city (population 19,000) amidst modest-sized counties (180,000 people in Ulster County, 300,000 in Dutchess). But how can we think bigger? What if we could use Stockade FC as a “blueprint” to show people in other communities how they, too, can create lower-level clubs in their own backyards? What if we can show people that having a local team actually does, in fact, help kickstart a deeper love and long-term commitment for the sport in these areas? If we did this, could we help to inspire another 10 or 50 (or 100 or 500?) clubs across the country? And would that additional infrastructure at the lower levels be able to help make soccer in the US grow stronger, faster?
This seems worth trying.
I want what we’re doing to be more than just, “Hey, we started a soccer team in Kingston!” I want it to be an example of, “Hey, if we started a club, you can do it too.” (Another case of, “You have to see it to be it.”) At the the end of this season, I plan on packaging up and sharing all the tools we used to get from “crazy idea” to “home opener” — everything from our pitch deck, to financials, to the timeline and schedule we used to keep us on track. (POST SCRIPTUM, OCT 2016: You can find our 2016 Season Recap, chock full of data & analysis, here. POST SCRIPTUM, MAY 2017: You may also want to check out our “what we learned / what we changed in 2017 ” post too.)
My hope is that the story of Stockade FC (and some background on “how we did it”) might lower the barrier for others to get started, and in turn, inspire others to build their own clubs.
For what it’s worth, I’ve seen this happen with Foursquare — the simple fact that we built a tech startup in New York City inspired other people to try to do the same. Some of those startups succeeded, some of them failed, but I’ve met a good number of people who were inspired enough by our story to at least try. Not only has this personally been incredibly rewarding to witness, but those founders — whether they succeeded or failed and whether they know it or not — helped solidify New York City as a stronger tech community. And if our tech startup helped to inspire other folks in NYC, then why can’t we try to do the same with a soccer startup on a national level?
This, of course, is exactly how Stockade FC got started.
In our early days, we reached out to the folks behind Chattanooga FC, Detroit City FC, Nashville FC, and San Francisco City FC — teams we watched from afar that inspired us. Each of those clubs were incredibly supportive in taking the time to help us get started. They shared documents, talked us through their origin stories, and gave us advice and answers when we got stuck. A huge thank you to those teams for pushing us towards the finish line. Packaging up our story and trying to make what we’ve done more easily accessible and reproducible is our way of paying it forward.
So, let me try to summarize a few of my thoughts so far:
- Stronger local soccer is one of the key pieces to stronger national soccer. I don’t see any way in which you can argue against this. #SupportLocalSoccer
- “Support local soccer” really translates to “support lower-level soccer.” There’s more to soccer in the United States than those 20 MLS teams. There’s a good chance that there’s a local team near you — and a good chance you may not even know about them. There are now ~200 teams across the NASL, USL, NPSL, and PDL in the United States.
- If you live somewhere that doesn’t have a club within a one hour drive, then go build one.
Admittedly, that last one is a bit of a doozy, so let’s unpack that a bit:
Creating a club from scratch is a lot of work, but it’s not impossible
Hey, we did it in nine months while having day jobs! There’s probably 500 different things you’ll have to do to get a club off the ground, and if you chip away at one or two of them each day — and you find some folks to help along the way, and you don’t quit when things feel impossible — you will get get them all done. Eventually.
For me, big difference between launching a tech startup and a soccer startup is that there are a lot more resources available online to help guide people through the process of building the former. So, maybe Stockade FC can help fix that.
Creating a club from scratch is expensive, but not prohibitively so
Our budget for this year will run approximately $50,000. Yes, you could build a club for cheaper and, yes, you could spend five times as much, $50K should hopefully get us pretty close to break-even. Our revenue comes from a mix of sponsorships, merchandise and ticket sales.
Think of it like a wedding. There’s four-to-six big ticket items that add up quickly: field rental, transportation, kits/gear, coaches/trainers, players, marketing.
Said another way, all this “starting a club from scratch” talk isn’t just lighting money on fire — there’s a legitimate way to make clubs work financially over time. We set up Stockade FC as a non-profit, we’re currently not paying our players, and we’ve gone very heavy on social media and earned media (vs. paid media) to promote ticket sales and merchandise.
Our story so far has been one of volunteers raising their hands and pitching in every which way to help make this happen (special thanks to Dan, Kale, Nick, Marjorie, JP, Randy and others!). The plan all along has been to keep our club on a strict and modest budget with the intent of sharing our financials so we could show others how it can be done.
(Note: Kingston Stockade Football Club is operating as a non-profit via fiscal sponsorship under Innovative Charitable Initiatives, Inc., (ICI) a 501(c)3 tax exempt charitable organization. A copy of ICI’s latest annual report may be obtained upon request by writing to Innovative Charitable Initiatives, Inc., 272 Broadway, Albany, NY 12204 or from the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau, 120 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, New York 10271.)
Creating a club from scratch has to be worth all the time and effort required
Creating a club from scratch obviously requires an investment of both time and money. And while it’s possible to create a break-even-or-better business from it, there are currently zero growth opportunities within the existing US soccer system.
Sure, you could grow your fan base, or sell more merchandise than you did last year, or even outgrow your stadium and need to find a new one with twice as many seats … but these are examples of successes “off the field”, not “on the field.” The fundamental problem with the US soccer system is that even if you build something truly great on the field, and even if your team can win consistently, there’s just nowhere for your team to go.
Compared to the way soccer works throughout the rest of the world, the US soccer system (aka: the US Soccer Pyramid) is broken. In most parts of the world, if you start a team at the lowest level and you prove that can win matches consistently, then you earn the right to get “promoted” into a better league. This can happen over and over and over again until you find yourself playing in the biggest and best leagues against the biggest and best teams.
The same applies for the teams that lose. If your team consistently plays poorly, you can get “relegated” — knocked out of the top leagues to make room for those up-and-coming teams. Throughout the rest of the world, playing in the top leagues is a privilege, not a right.
These two systems working together are called “promotion and relegation” (or “pro/rel” for short) and the leagues that support it are called “open leagues.” It’s easily one of the most awesome things about the sport around the world due to its extreme accountability — teams who invest and succeed are rewarded while teams who neglect and falter are punished.
Meanwhile, the United States is one of the only countries that does NOT support promotion and relegation.
So let’s say you start a club from scratch (Stockade FC!), you invest in discovering and developing great players for your club, and your team consistently plays well. Regardless, the only way for your team to gain access to a “better” league would be if you were to buy your way in. And by “buy your way in,” I literally mean writing a big check in the form of an Expansion Team Fee to join an existing league like MLS (reportedly ~$100M fee) or NASL (reportedly ~$5M fee). These “buy your way in” leagues are called “closed leagues.” There are no “open leagues” in US soccer that connect D4 to D3 to D2 to D1.
(By the way, our 4th Division league, the NPSL, is also a closed-league and the buy-in is around ~$12,000.)
Place this in context with the wide-open English Soccer Pyramid. There is no way to “buy your way in” in these leagues. Rather, instead of clubs paying the league to join, clubs are paid by the league as a reward for being promoted. (And this year, promotion to the top level in England, the Premier League, will pay more than $320 million to each newly promoted club … Congrats Burnley and Middlesbrough!)
In fairness, comparing any dollar amounts between MLS and EPL is very much apples-to-oranges, but this idea of “any club can compete, any club can win, any club can get paid … paid via the broadcast and sponsorship winnings that are shared with any club who earns their way into the league” is what we’re missing here in the US. I believe it is the lack of this “open system” that holds back major investment across lower-level soccer in the United States.
I think it’s easy to understand why there are plenty of soccer fans and supporters in the US that really want to see pro/rel work within the domestic soccer pyramid, and why the lack of pro/rel is holding the US back from getting better, faster.
If there are limited opportunities for a club to grow, then there are limited reasons to invest. And as long as there are limited reasons to invest, there will be always be a shortage of quality lower-level clubs. And if there’s a shortage of lower-level clubs, the entire US soccer system misses out on the benefits of these clubs busting their asses to scout, train, and develop high-quality players.
At the same time, I can understand how difficult it is to make pro/rel feasible in the current environment — and thus why MLS has opted to not support it.
Pro/rel involves solving for minimum stadium standards, funding travel budgets of smaller clubs, dividing broadcast rights and sponsorship dollars with teams moving between leagues, and the fear of losing the long-term stability of both smaller clubs and smaller leagues due to overall financial strain. It’s additionally complicated and polarizing because the conversation involves the owners of MLS franchises, some of whom have invested invested large sums of money in both marketing the league and building its infrastructure over the past 20 years — investments that have enabled soccer to even exist in the United States at this level in the first place; investments that could be threatened by relegation.
So, what can fans & supporters in the US do to make change happen?
Right now, there are plenty of people making noise about how much they want an open system and how frustrated they are that the top league in the US (MLS) has no intention of supporting it. However, pro/rel is something that needs to be applied across all levels and leagues across US soccer — not just MLS.
I’m always surprised how the criticism exclusively focuses on how the top needs to open up to the bottom:
• “MLS needs to open up!”
• “Give lower level teams a chance to get into MLS!”
• “D1 soccer is a monopoly!”
And while I agree with this, I honestly don’t think there’s any amount of bitching at MLS that will make a difference. They have a business, it’s working for them, and there’s no incentive for them to change.
If we (the fans!) want to restructure American soccer into an open system that rewards investment in the lower levels, gives the lower levels a chance at moving up, and incentivizes supporters of all kinds to rally to the cause of clubs like ours — it’s we (the fans!) that have to make that change happen. And it starts by wrapping our heads around the idea that it’ll have to happen without MLS in the beginning.
My advice to anyone really passionate about this space is to get organized and to starting thinking about how the lower-level leagues can create a pro/rel system amongst themselves. Imagine if multiple D4 leagues self-organized and created something that supported Premier League-esque promotion storylines that were more interesting than anything in MLS (hey, the NCAA Basketball tourney does it every year!). Imagine if D4 proves itself so interesting that some D3 teams are motivated to join the narrative too. Imagine if multiple lower level leagues worked together in an “open system” to create something fans found much more interesting than the “closed system” version of MLS — despite the lower payrolls and smaller stadiums.
Actively working on an alternative seems like a much better use of time than begging MLS to change its ways. Best Case: it works and MLS wants to play too. Worst Case: the lower-level leagues create an interesting alternative to MLS, one that is constantly churning out homegrown, American versions of the Leicester City story.
(Sidenote: Not to be Johnny Tech Guy™, but this is how it works in the tech startup world. You don’t beg Google and Facebook to make the app you want to use. You start from scratch and you build it yourself. And if you do a good job, if it grows and proves interesting and people love it, then you force the big guys to either copy you or work with you. The history of tech is full of stories like this — each one starting with someone’s “crazy idea” that kept going and going and going.)
Again, I’m not a soccer scholar and I don’t have all the answers on how to solve all the complex and nuanced details to make pro/rel happen in the United States. But I also don’t believe you need to have all the answers to all the problems in order to simply get started. In the tech world, there is the concept of a “Minimal Viable Product”— the smallest, scrappiest thing one can do to get the point across and to illustrate that something could actually work. So, what is the “Minimal Viable Product” for pro/rel within the lower level leagues of US soccer? That is, what should we be talking about and scheming to build, even if it’s limited to D4 to start (and even if MLS/D1 isn’t going to be open to the idea for years, if ever).
So why should you care about our club, Stockade FC?
This is an admittedly a long post — thanks for reading this far! Let me wrap it up with the following:
- We started our club because we thought it was crazy that people in the Hudson Valley had to drive two hours to catch a professional match
- We started our club to give the best players in the Hudson Valley a platform to both play and be seen on a national stage
- We started our club in the hopes of encouraging youth players to stick with the sport and aspire to play for our club someday
- We started our club so we could learn how to do it with the intent of showing others how they can do the same
- We started our club to have a voice in organizing the lower levels in an effort to promote an open system across all levels.
- We started our club because we ultimately want to make soccer in the United States better, faster.
If these ideas resonate with you…
… and If you’re one of those folks who lives more than an hour from an MLS team and there’s no other local club to support, give the “let’s start a club from scratch” idea some thought. Consider rallying your friends, and their friends, and other folks in the community to help start a club from scratch. Talk to potential sponsors, investors, donors.
The hardest part of getting started, is just that — getting started. And when you do get started, be prepared to live in a world of promotion/relegation and be prepared to work with us to help push the idea that any team in any league should have the chance to rise up or be pushed down. (Please give me until the end of the summer/early fall to get the Stockade FC story, budget, templates, etc. in a shareable format — POST SCRIPTUM, OCT 2016: You can find our 2016 Season Recap, chock full of data & analysis, here. )
… and if you’re not quite ready to start a club from scratch, then throw your support behind Stockade FC! Everyone on our squad would appreciate the support, even if you only follow along on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). If you’re feeling generous, buy a t-shirt or season ticket, even if you live 1,000 miles away. And if you do live in the northeast, come out and cheer us on — we’re playing later tonight in Massachusetts, in Brooklyn on Friday May 13, followed by three home games in Kingston, NY (with another 11 matches to follow). Come out and support!
Fri May 13, 8pm — Stockade FC @ Brooklyn Italians (in Brooklyn, NY)
Sat May 21, 2pm — Stockade FC vs. Rhode Island Reds (in Kingston, NY)
Sun May 22, 4pm — Stockade FC vs. Greater Lowell UFC (in Kingston, NY)
Sun June 5, 5pm — Stockade FC vs. Boston City FC (in Kingston, NY)
[full schedule // add schedule to your calendar]
So, that’s it. Thanks for reading, thanks for supporting. And if this somehow motivates or inspires you to move forward, give us a high-five someday — preferably, when your club meets Stockade FC in the US Open Cup.
And 30 years from now, when some US National Team player who got their start hustling for one of our lower-level clubs — like Chris Wondolowski, who got his start in the NPSL! — plays a big role in leading the United States to our first World Cup victory, well, we can high-five to that too.
Part 2 of this story (posted Oct 2016) can be found here:
“Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Operating a Division 4 Soccer Club (But Were Afraid to Ask)”
Part 3 of this story (May 2017) can be found here:
“Stockade FC in 2017 — The “Open Source Soccer” Approach to Creating a Killer Second Season”
