THE BECKS EFFECT
Can icon extend legacy to Miami, where MLS was huge flop before?
Twelve years ago this January, the death knell sounded in South Florida, officially ending the Miami Fusion professional soccer team’s four-year run with Major League Soccer. Glum team owner Ken Horowitz lamented how “depressing” it was to go to the Fusion’s Lockhart Stadium in Fort Lauderdale only to see “the parking lot with so few cars, and so many empty seats.” He added that he and his Fusion investors had dropped $50 million into the team, but that the investment and the fan support withered in the Florida sunshine. The Tampa Bay Mutiny was contracted by MLS that same day, reducing the number of teams to 10.
“When we tried to sell sponsorships,” Horowitz said then, “we fell flat on our face. How many times can you bang your head against the wall only to be heartbroken?”
More than a decade has passed in Florida — a span during which the local professional baseball teams each went to the World Series (with the Florida Marlins winning in 2003), the Miami Heat won three titles (and went to a fourth Finals) and the Buccaneers won a Super Bowl – and professional soccer has remained absent, that is, until a certain Englishman came calling last week.
David Beckham — the retired soccer megastar who played for everyone from the marquee Manchester United and Real Madrid clubs to the L.A. Galaxy — announced Wednesday that he is trading places, moving from the pitch to the South Beach boardroom, after exercising an option in his Galaxy contract to become an MLS expansion team owner.
“I mean, why not?” the 38-year-old Beckham said Wednesday to a crowd that included 197 credentialed media members, when he was asked why he had chosen Miami over other U.S. cities.
But while his smile sparkled during the press conference, and while MLS commissioner Don Garber fully embraces Beckham in this new role, there are daunting steps ahead for the former midfielder and questions he will need to answer.
Can Beckham, whose fame stretches around the globe and who is married to a former Spice Girl, lure big soccer talent to play for his Miami team? Can the Beckham brand fill the seats of a proposed new Miami soccer stadium? Does Beckham have the business smarts to avoid the fate of Ken Horowitz and the Fusion?
“The decision to exercise the option is a nobrainer. From a business perspective, (Beckham) gets an MLS team at a wonderfully cut rate, so that makes complete sense,” says former U.S. national team defender Alexi Lalas, now an ESPN soccer analyst, who was the Galaxy GM when Beckham arrived in 2007. “But as far as I know, David Beckham is not going to kick a ball. Once the glitz wears off, there has to be a quality product. Regardless of who you are talking about, you need to have a quality and competitive product right from the get-go. This will be a reflection on David Beckham, post-playing career, and one of the biggest business ventures that he will be associated with so directly. He has a real interest in making this work. I like that pressure that he has put on himself. I think he enjoys that challenge.”
Garber, commissioner since 1999, calls Beckham’s decision to become an owner “a big day for the sport of soccer in America,” and says he is confident Beckham can transition from his famous playing career into a successful executive.
“If you spend time with David, you kind of learn very quickly that in many ways, his celebrity is not the definition of his identity,” says Garber. “He has really dreamed about becoming an owner. He’s worked very hard to achieve that goal.”
Beckham said during the Miami presser that he hoped to model his soccer team using the Heat’s blueprint. “We will want to bring some of the best players in soccer to Miami to play on this team. I’ve seen what happens to teams when you bring great players in — I’m talking about the Heat,” said Beckham. “When you look at a franchise like that, you want success. You want people talking about the team. And yes, we will bring great players into this team.”
The Heat may be one of the hottest tickets in sports, but even the team’s fans have shown their fickle side. During last year’s Finals against the Spurs, many left Miami’s American Airlines Arena during Game 6, convinced San Antonio would win the title. Miami pulled off the miraculous victory and then won Game 7. Heat star LeBron James has been reported as being a possible investor in Beckham’s team, but Garber says that is “premature” speculation.
Real Salt Lake midfielder Kyle Beckerman, a member of the Fusion during its final two seasons, endorses Beckham’s plan to be a hands-on owner.
“When you have an owner that’s handson with any team, especially in our league, it’s a big deal,” Beckerman says. “It’s not the case for a lot of clubs in our league, and I don’t know about other leagues, but there’s
teams where they only met their owner once or twice. There’s other teams that know their owner and have their phone number.”
During meetings with MLS executives, Beckham demonstrated he’s not all about penalty kicks and pinpoint passes, according to Garber. The MLS commissioner says Beckham was “poring over documents, looking at financial information, and asking questions that I think would shock people in the level of detail.
“The due diligence process that we went through with (Beckham) was no different than any other owner who came into the league,” says Garber. “He wanted to know the status of our collective bargaining agreement, when our television agreements were expiring, what level of revenue is shared between the league and the clubs, and as much detail as whether the league was involved in player sales and transfers. He’s a very bright guy.”
Beckham proved his smarts when he announced during the press conference that any new soccer stadium built in Miami would be privately funded, and would not rely on taxpayer money.
“That certainly endears him to the community,” says Lalas. “Having said that, they are still going to need public support in terms of how they go about the infrastructure of the stadium. But the fact that they are going to build it on their own dime, that is certainly music to anyone’s ears.”
Garber adds that Beckham knows that publicly-funded stadiums are a “controversial” topic, but that Beckham has “taken that issue off the table.
“Now the issue is, ‘Can we find a site that is going to work for the community, that will make sense in downtown Miami and provide the value that David will need to be successful?’” says Garber, who adds that the Miami team will not start playing before 2016. (Beckham’s ownership partner, Marcelo Claure, has said they are shooting for 2017.)
Although the MLS commissioner says, “I still feel the pain of those” Fusion fans and talks about how “tough” a decision it was to fold the team in early 2002, he believes Miami — and the country as a whole — has evolved tremendously with respect to its view of professional soccer and the importance placed on the sport.
“Look how much has happened since we made that tough call. The league has grown from 10 teams to 22 teams. We went from five owners to now having an owner for every MLS club,” says Garber. “We went from only two soccer stadiums to now having 15 of our clubs playing in stadiums. The league has changed dramatically. The city (of Miami) is so much different. At that point (when the Fusion folded) much of the real explosion of diversity had not yet happened, and now (Miami) is filled with people from Argentina and Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico and Honduras — soccer-loving countries.
“It has us really convinced that now is the right time and Miami is the right place.”
A more accessible stadium in downtown Miami would be far more attractive to customers than the city-owned Lockhart Stadium in Fort Lauderdale, where the Fusion played. As Real Salt Lake general manager and former Fusion player Garth Lagerwey says, the Fusion’s “model wasn’t perfect.” Even with the right location, however, the stadium must be constructed with the humid Miami summers in mind.
“You literally need something to protect the seats out of the sun,” Lagerwey says. “It’s gonna have to be a little more expensive than some of the MLS stadiums because you’re gonna have to have protection. It’s literally hot enough during the day where you can’t sit down on a chair.”
On top of that, Beckham faces another considerable obstacle despite his cachet: grabbing and holding people’s attention.
“It’s a bad sports market,” Lagerwey says of Miami. “There’s a lot of things to do in Miami. The Dolphins don’t sell out every game. ... When you’re competing against sunshine, it’s not always an easy sell.”
According to MLS figures, the average attendance at an MLS game last year was 18,600, third behind the NFL and MLB for professional sports leagues in the States. The Seattle Sounders, who have star Clint Dempsey, twice had crowds of over 67,000 and the club set the MLS attendance record for the fifth consecutive season, averaging 44,038 last year, according to MLS figures. That average attendance would rank sixth in the Premier League, just behind Liverpool.
Now it’s up to Beckham to use a franchise like the Sounders and duplicate the success in South Florida. Lalas, for one, thinks Beckham needs to go big, and avoid another fold job like the Fusion suffered.
“It behooves (Beckham) to do everything in his power to make sure it’s successful — spend money, and do big things, given where MLS is in 2014 and where it will be when this team kicks off,” says Lalas. “But, the (press conference) was much more about style than substance, and that was calculated.
“I think his time in the U.S. and seeing how MLS goes about their business, how the business of sports works in the United States — this cannot be a toy thing. This cannot be something that it’s just there to pass the time and entertain you,” adds Lalas. “Yes, you should take enjoyment in it, and have a passion for it, but this business is directly related to the bigger business, which is soccer in the United States. For those of us who have been around for decades, and live and breathe this sport, and have a vested interest in the future of the business, we don’t like to see things fail and we can’t afford to have too many of them fail.”