SoccerWise - Interview Dan Rutstein President of Orange County SC

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

With the holiday season in full swing David sits down with Dan Rutstein, President of Business Relations at Orange County Soccer Club. They dive into all the big topics surrounding soccer in America from the future Pro-Rel, to USL club finances, turning teams into global products, how to invest in a club, and much more.Soccerwise Live 2pm ET Every Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday on Youtube/Twitch/Twitter

Hey everybody, welcome into SoccerWise. David Goss here with you once again. We've got a special episode for you. Another interview. We're going to sit down with someone very interesting across the American soccer landscape. As you know, we like to touch all parts of the game and talk to a lot of different personalities and a lot of different people. And we've gotten a lot of questions in our Discord about the USL and talking USL and how it can change. We've talked Charleston Battery already in the past with Ben Pierman. Now we get a chance to talk to the president of business operations at Orange County SC, Dan Rutstein. Dan, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, David. Honor to be on your show. I appreciate that. I appreciate

the jersey in the background as well. Very festive. Yeah, and I'll explain a bit more about the jersey when we talk about some ownership stuff later, because it's a special jersey from a distance distance but even more so close up all right let's start here uh i mentioned your title which is straightforward right people understand president of his operations at a soccer club your past getting here though is not exactly as straightforward as maybe a lot of people would think didn't start in the sales office and then slowly move up before we dig into the club and usl and so many different things that are happening let's start with yourself and how you ended up here yeah so um

i guess i would describe my career path as non-linear um and my english friends really do describe it as what we think in england the american dream. So I've always loved soccer or football. I don't know what I should call it. I think I'm going to call it... Whatever feels natural is what I tell people. Your audience know. So I've always loved the game. I saw myself as a reasonably good player as a youngster,

but wasn't. So I played at a reasonable level. I sort of touched the edges of being on a pro club's books, but I was never really going to make it. So I actually became a referee and got to a much higher standard as a referee. So I refereed non-league football. Later in my career, I did some international stuff in some far-flung places. But work-wise, I was a news reporter. Then I became a sports journalist, which was magnificent. I think probably the highlight of it was there was a famous year when Manchester United pulled out of the FA Cup

because they were busy playing in the Club World Championship. And for a variety of reasons, I ended up interviewing David Beckham at some little non-league ground in Yorkshire and Alex Ferguson, which was a fun highlight as a sort of 20 year old journalist but then I went on to become a sports journalist I covered mostly rugby league but a bit of soccer as well then I moved out to Bermuda where I was deputy sports editor of the newspaper over there for a few years then I thought I'll get a real job no no offence to sports journalists. I joined the British Diplomatic Service and I spent 12 years working for them. And again, sport was always in the background.

So I was in Germany for three years and undoubtedly the highlight for me was every time a British team played a German team in Champions League or European competitions, I would go. I probably went to 50 or 60 games at some of the greatest stadiums in the world, if you've ever been to the sort of Dortmunds. Then I was posted to Los Angeles. So I came out here and very quickly I realised that I love the weather out here and I also did not like Brexit.

So I decided to leave government and stay out here. Ran a tech company for a couple of years until the pandemic destroyed it and then ended up meeting the owner of orange county soccer club because i host a whiskey podcast and he likes whiskey and he came on as a guest and one thing led to another some drinks were consumed i was gonna say it's a good mindset to be in no it really was and he offered me a couple of days a week consulting for them because orange county had just started a partnership with Rangers in Scotland. And I think they needed help translating the accents of the people on the phone, among other things. So I started working for the club. I did a couple of years of different roles in the club. And then I think about a year and a half ago when our president got recruited by Pittsburgh Riverhounds, I took over as the president on the business side of the club.

So I've always been involved in the game of football in some way. I've never worked on the sports administration side, but I must say it is quite the remarkable job. And all my friends in England don't think it's a real job running a football team, but it definitely is. But I really enjoy it. They can't believe there's an owner that gets to make that decision over whiskey probably as well. I have a lot of questions for you because I think, you know, when we talk about soccer in this country

and we talk about what we want it to be and what it could look like, the economics are important but are sometimes overlooked or sometimes not really pointed out right we always want to talk about well what it makes sense from a soccer point of view but that's not the only way all these things work um so let's start with sort of in your role as you set goals as you look at your club and and what it needs to accomplish and and sort of what the near and far future look like what are the focuses for a USL championship club right now? Yeah, look, it's a good question, David. I think it's what makes football in this country fun.

And you know, why your job is so interesting is because there is no time like now for growth of the game. So if you look where things are, you've got, whether it's Ted Lasso, the welcome to Wrexham stuff Messi playing into Miami eyes are on this game like they've never been on it before and obviously you've got this run into the World Cup so we had Copa America last year the Club World Championship next year, and then the World Cup itself.

Soccer's in a completely different place. There was a time, you know, when I first saw games over here, and maybe when you were first involved in the game, where, you know, MLS penalties were ice hockey penalties. And, you know, only real fans of the game were the nerds who got up in the morning to watch the games and they followed this sport. It wasn't in any way mainstream. Your average person in the street may not have even known soccer existed. And if they did, they might have heard of Brazil and not much more. And the world has completely moved on now. And there are plenty of real football fans

across the country who both follow locally, but also, you know, get up in the morning to watch the European games. But, you know, Messi being in a Super Bowl ad. I was minding my own business, driving home from work a couple of weeks ago, and a Bank of America ad came on talking about the FIFA World Cup. Now, that isn't something that you would normally hear on the radio. So it's coming and it will come more and more. And being right in the middle of that now is the time. And we see that as a club. So we've just finished our season. It ended in the playoff semifinal defeat,

unfortunately, in extra time. But we're now in the off season. And last year we set revenue records in every business category. So attendance was up. Ticket revenue was up. Merchandise was up about 50 percent. Corporate sponsorships were up. Every category was growing. Now, there are teams across the world who have been who are 120 years old who are just they're all plateauing to an extent. Yes, they are. But, you. But we're only 12 years old

and we're very much in the growth phase. So there's a thing I say to my team, I think they get a bit bored of me saying it, but I say it pretty regularly. I'll sit them down and give my sort of, my version of an inspirational talk. And I'll say to them, look, there is no reason why we can't sell out

every game going forward. So the most we've ever sold out is a third of our games in a year but locally to us if you're the the angels or the or the ducks you're not going to sell out every game because it's 40 or 80 games the delta to sell out is 10 maybe 20,000 seats for us you know we're a thousand seats away from selling out every game it's only a five and a half thousand seat stadium but within our grasp is a chance to sell out our stadium every game we're at the stage where we're looking to put in additional seats we need to sort of justify that with more of these

sellouts but we're in this phase where we've transformed the club in the last two or three years and there's so much more of that to come and you know selling out every game um you know doubling partnership revenue because every company's now interested in football um our merchandise is you start seeing it not just around orange county but around the country and actually in bits of europe as well you know it's becoming you know there's a lifestyle brand to our staff as well as the kits. You know, it's just we're at that place in the upward cycle as a soccer team, along with the rest of the country of real growth. And it's a really exciting time. And we're ambitious. We don't want to grow by 5% in any category. You know, we want to see sellouts. We want to see 40 to 50% growth in all the business categories

because now is the time to do that. And the economics of soccer, as you mentioned at the beginning, are not amazing. You know, most clubs lose money. Now there's losing money and there's losing money. You know, how do we get our journey to break even? Some clubs don't even have a path to that. This is upside down and it is what it is.

For us, there's something there, partly because of what we're doing on the business side, but also we have this transfer thing that other teams don't have. I call it the fifth quarter in terms of revenue because we've sold more players to European clubs than any other team in North america including mls teams and i think that's something that can really make a huge difference particularly if we get the secondary transfers that can really see real financial money flows um i want to talk about that transfer policy because it is a big part of you know i cover

the youth game and so often you see player at an mls academy or non-mls academy in a big youth tournament and then you see the news release come out a few months later that they've joined orange county and then you see them going over to europe but before we get there i want to ask about that break even that conversation um you know so often we start from the top and it's in mls the conversation of the apple deal and the billion how it gets dispersed and all of that for a club selling out stadiums putting people in seats having the games on how much of that becomes sustainable and what sort of what do you have to reach for it to be sustainable yeah i mean look you know the economics are tricky most sports really get their money from

from tv you know that is that's why the premier league became the premier league why the nfl is is where it is it's it's those deals and obviously for mls although there are arguments about whether taking the game away from domestic tv and putting it behind a plane always good for the game that's that's somebody else's argument but but there's definitely money there you know we're a growing sport so the TV deals are not yet in that place where it's making a huge difference, but you need to have the content and the product for that to grow. And I think that's where USL is in such an interesting place.

You know, the games are very competitive. You know, anyone can beat anybody. There's none of the drafts that you need in other sports to keep it that way but but you know it really is a fascinating the fascinating game and you've seen games you know it's a great landscape there's great young players involved in it the crowds are growing i think you know we pride ourselves in being a community club and usl clubs a bit like sort of non-league and lower league clubs in the UK, caters to a different audience to an extent.

So you can bring your whole family to one of our games for less than the cost of parking at an LA Galaxy game. And that doesn't mean it's not a great experience. It's just a different financial model. So we do have some wonderful premium seating options. But as a family option as well you know we make it very easy for people to come and i think other teams in our league are in the same place and there's there's something about being able to go to a stadium where you can still

high-five the players on the way off and actually you know some of our players know the names of some of the kids who follow them on instagram and And you get, you get a level of interaction that you don't get at the higher levels because rightly there needs to be that separation. So, you know, a couple of our ex players are sort of coaching locally. There's a lot we do where there's a, there's a real bond between the fans and the players.

And I think that's our USP as a league. And we're trying to lean into that. So in terms of the economics, you know, if we sell out every game, if partnership continue to increase, we definitely get pathway to break even. Now, what there is in our league is a very clear growth of the asset. So, you know, the sort of American sports model to an extent, apart from NFL teams, is, you know, you have an operating loss annually, but the value of your franchise goes up significantly and that covers the gap. And we're seeing that now you know our club we ended up with a valuation of 50 million when we did a crowd fundraise recently um but you know oakland's have raised at 78 and i think now 93 um and i can't speak to the rumors about Sacramento when they were sold recently, but the numbers I've heard are very significant. So that helps everyone follow the model, because if you are making an annual loss, but your franchise value is growing, then that's how a lot of teams are run.

And we're trying to get to a point where we can wash our own face annually anyway. We're not quite there yet, but that's the intention. And it's doable if the league keeps growing. And maybe with a bit of ProRail at some point, maybe with some of the bigger TV deals, then it starts becoming a really interesting model. I want to talk about ProRail. But first, before we get there, I'm curious. I think this probably affects you less in Orange County, which is a nice spot to be. But we're hearing a lot about scheduling in the United States.

NWSL is talking about it. MLS is talking about it. College soccer is talking about it. If the prime product right now is fans in the stadium, how does a flip of the schedule to a European model where it runs from, you know end of august through early july and through the winter how does that affect that and and how does the idea around a schedule change sort of come across your desk and how's it discussed internally in the club yeah it's an interesting one i mean there's definitely pros and cons to it i think you know from as a you know as a sort of transferring club we're in an interesting

spot because there is an advantage to the seasons being flipped yeah um in terms of you know taking we've had lone players from rangers in the past we've talked about that with other european partners there's obviously an advantage to them playing through playing through the summer um then um but there's also an advantage the windows being aligned so that you sell a player at the natural end of your year and you don't end up losing your best player you know just before the playoffs you know i think we have an advantage from a weather point of view where if we flipped it would make no difference to us um now there are some teams in our league you might not want to be you might not want to be playing them in january i mean you know detroit away or colorado springs on january 10th yeah i

mean i think we haven't won in colorado springs for six years so just going up the mountains hard enough even when it's sunny can't get worse then yeah but so but i mean obviously you know albeit with a winter break, the Germans and the Swedes managed to get through winter. Theirs are a bit, you know, they're pretty serious winters as well. So, you know, I think we're open to all versions that make sense.

I think, you know, for us, you know, in terms of in stadium, summers are tricky. You know, crowds drop in the summer because everyone's on holiday. We're not quite at the Vegas temperatures, but it's the 90s, so our unshaded side of the stadium, no one wants to sit on the B side of our stadium for a July game, even at a 7 o'clock kick-off. There's definitely pros and cons to it.

I grew up playing in the snow and playing in gloves and all that sort of stuff so i'm not against it i think we need to we need to be doing it for the right reasons it can't just be a fad you know we don't want to do it if it helps with a transfer model it helps the league be taken more seriously it helps with tv you know that's right if you're just doing it because you want to sound like you're a real league competing, you know, alongside the rest of the world, then maybe that's a reason to do it. But it's I think for us, we're very much we're open to it and we see the advantage. Yeah, I'm I'm not looking forward to Detroit away in January. You mentioned promotion relegation.

Let's talk about it from an economic point of view. You're a club that already exists in the USL Championship. So in this model, you open up the threat of being dropped down while also creating, I think, a little more energy in the season and how it happens and maybe one day eventually the possibility of moving up. How do you assess what promotion relegation would look like, how it should function in the US and how it would affect your club? So, I mean, obviously a great question and a very hot topic, I think, is I'll give you my background before I give you sort of where we are as a club. You know, I'm British. I love promotion relegation.

I follow AFC Wimbledon. We went from the 13th division to the third division. Like I've seen promotions and relegations and the jeopardy that creates has just been mesmerizing. And, you know, not all Americans. I mean, it's a shame in a way. It took Ryan Reynolds buying a fifth division team for some Americans to understand what it looks like. But they've seen and the fact that Wrexham didn't get promoted in the season one of the documentary i think is actually quite helpful as well because the agony of not making it is is part of the jeopardy and drama so if you're a real football fan there is no disputing

that promotion relegation is a remarkable thing you know it's been running for 100 years around the world why wouldn't it work um and the backlash when the american owners of european teams tried to do a nfl version of a you know european super league real football has promotion relegation that's just what it is that said we're a business in america how do we make this work at the moment i don't think the conditions exist so the whole mls thing is is completely you know off no one's going to pay 500 million dollars which i think is the latest fee for a franchise and potentially get relegated the next year so mls is just off the table so usl is theoretically in a position where it could do something here i think as a club we would want it under the right conditions so at the moment

it's effectively for us it's not pro rail it's just rail um right and so and that's and that's fine but if they just brought it in today we are now probably going to have to increase our playing budget to avoid being the worst team in the league with no upside for not getting relegated. So if you're a USL League 1 team, I mean, fantastic. And in the future, a USL League 2 team, and moving between the three would be great. But at the moment, the conditions aren't there. Now, if a big TV deal comes in that says,

we want to fund the USL being on TV with promotion relegation and there's real money so there starts being prize money for positions like in the Premier League the difference between eighth and ninth can be a million pounds if there starts being real prize money for not just staying up but where you, that justifies the additional expense of not getting relegated for us. If maybe winning the USL gets you into the Champions League, not just the Open Cup, that starts being a thing that becomes appealing. So there needs to be some upside benefit for championship teams,

not just downside risk. There'd obviously need to be parachute payments and all that stuff to make it work so the principle i i would i don't want to speak for other usl teams i think you know there are some usl teams who are sort of owned by baseball owners as well who just aren't interested because it's it's not their world yeah yeah american sport they're all in. There are a lot of owners who have either been exposed to it or they are from those places, and they see the value of it. But there has to be the right incentives within the league.

And a lot of it comes down to sponsorship deals and TV money. But if the conditions are there, I think everyone would agree that it would be a wonderful thing. We would end up being, I'm not sure if we'd officially become the Division One team in America, but we would be seen as the real football league. Because MLS is already a little bit,

I think I'm allowed to say, a little bit anti-football. You're allowed to say whatever you want. You know, with the way they treated the Open Cup last year, this year, with sort of, you know with the way they treated the open cup last year this year um with sort of you know they care about franchise value which is great and that does very well but it's not necessarily helping the game in the country um well i think usl is in a unique position to be a real football league system in a real footballing country um but there has to be something to incentivize the championship

clubs because at the moment we're just in a league where most teams are losing money annually to have to lose even more with no real benefit doesn't really make any sense but the fact that you know mls is now on apple um and therefore the cbs of the world, who have obviously done a lot of stuff with USL, they obviously know what promotion and relegation looks like because they have it on their other channels and they see it and the jeopardy around getting into the Champions League and so on. It feels like there's a future version of life where this works. So our position is we love the principle, but the conditions need to be in place for it to actually work. Can I ask, and this might be a harebrained idea, so feel free to ignore it. Is there a world where it's the opposite, which is you just have complete revenue spending across every team through every division, and therefore there's almost no financial jeopardy,

but yet you still have the on the field promotion and relegation and movement up and down what sorry so explain that first part that so instead of having the um advantage of doing better which is you know eighth place gets more money and usl championship makes more than usL 1 and USL 2. What if you revenue shared from USL 2 all the way up to the top of USL Championship so that there was no jeopardy from a financial point of view, but yet on the field teams are getting promoted and relegated based off results? And there's perception of being in those leagues, but there's no financial sort of danger.

Is that even in a world of possibility or it's carrying too many clubs financially? Yeah, I think the issue is, you know, the reason MLS is off the table is because the buy-in fee is, you know, so high. The USL, you know, there's obviously a franchise fee for USL. I think the issue is some people are 10 years in um and so you know they have lost whatever they've lost uh in terms of operating loss and i think to sort of ignore that exists and then sort of move into a future version gets very complicated so i i can't see them it's a sort of turkeys voting for christmas issue you would end up at um i think

because you know no one's going to want to. They've made investments, others haven't. And then they're potentially putting all of that at risk with no upside. I think that's where it can get a bit complicated. I do think there's a way it works in the future. I think, you know, obviously you need the jeopardy of promotion relegation is the bottom of the league and the top of the league below. But what makes it work really well in other countries is there's something at the top end. So obviously, in the UK pyramid system with 13 divisions, you know, somebody's getting promoted, somebody's getting relegated. That's great. But even the Premier League now, you know, there's obviously there's Champions League spots, Europa League spots, Conference League spots. So top eight, there's something to play for.

So unless there's a very even split of the season, somebody has got something to play for almost till the last maybe three games, even at the top level. So, you know, when 13th plays 12th on the the last day of the year how much do they care about an extra million pounds i mean it's not so much about that but it's the fact that you'll probably either just need to be clear of relegation or you're fighting for the bottom europa conference spot for quite a lot of the season and i think the problem we've got is you're trying to get into the playoffs which is obviously has value for us, but what's the really big incentive? Where is the, you know, maybe it's a playoff against the worst MLS team for a spot in the Champions League, but you know, where can we get into the, you know,

the continental competition? Where is their real prize money? You know, where is there, maybe it's a, you know, and I don't want to speak for the league and I don't think we want to replicate the league's cup because that's been a bit of an odd experiment. But, you know, maybe maybe there is something else that can be put in for USL teams near the top as an incentive, because you can't have all the incentives at the bottom because otherwise you don't really get the conditions that you need for for the for the jeopardy and the excitement and the drama, which is effectively what promotion relegation really is all about. I think we could talk about this for two hours, but I appreciate you taking the time so far. But let's keep talking about some of these other topics you've you've brought up.

And one of the big one you mentioned is Orange County's history and focus on transfer policy. Talk to me about how a club sort of embodies that. Like, what is the conversation for a club to say, okay, we want this to be our identity and then how it actually plays out? Yeah, so look, you know, the principle of this predates me in terms of how it was set up,

but we live it every day. So, you know, the owner, James Keston and Oliver Vease, who was our president of soccer, who's now the technical director for the league, because it works so well, they want everyone in the league to be doing it. And then Peter Nugent, who was Oliver's deputy, who is now our president of soccer.

You know, this is something they've done since the beginning of the club's rebrand from the LA Blues and the OC Blues. It was part of the DNA. It was sort of, let's sell players, not just hot dogs. And it's the model of the club in terms of how we set up. So I think I'm right in saying we had the youngest average age last year within the league. We've won a championship and got to the playoff, had decent playoff runs twice with teenagers starting. We've had the US under-21, under-19, under-18 captains playing in our teams.

We skew young. So, you know, we want to, we don't just want to be a development club for the sake of it, where we just play a load of teenagers. We lose five nil every week, but we sell a few of them. Because A, that doesn't actually work because they need to play properly. It's pairing a young player. It's having Michael Orozco with his 29 caps for the US,

playing alongside Kobe Henry, who we win a championship and Kobe gets sold to France for a then record transfer fee. It's that model, integrating young players the coaches coach the team to win games, but the young players have a whole separate individual development plan around them. We recruit on the basis of come here, play for us and then move on. We do media training specifically. I mean, we offer media advice and so on to everybody, but we do specific media training with an agency for the young players to prepare them for what they're going to need if

they go i think there's a lot of stuff we do around it's it's the intangibles um around sort of dressing room behavior and how to operate even sort of if you go on trial to a european team you know shaking hands with people and what you wear at the airport you know it's stuff that doesn't sound very important but actually is can make the difference um because we want to train these young players onto how to fit into this world so it it runs through everything we we think about and do and obviously on the on my side of the business, this is all what Pete now does and the coaches, and it's all part of the process. But on my side of the business, even how we do the marketing, which players we feature when, how our social media team work, it's all geared towards

this overall principle of developing these young players. And look, certainly up to now it works. So we've sent six players to Europe. You look at the moment, it happens every so often. It happened a couple of weeks ago. We got all three of our players who were, three of our players ended up scoring in one. And one's a defender, so it happens less often. But, you know, Kobe Henry scored in a pre-season game.

And then we had Milan Oloski at Nautilus scoring. And then Karade, who's playing, he was sold to Feyenoord, but he's now playing in the Dutch second division for Dordrecht. I mean, he seems to be scoring every week at the moment, based on social media, or at least assisting. So it's definitely working and obviously the aim is we sell them we take a fee we take all the milestone payments that you get from these sorts of transfers and and the big fish is the secondary transfer um and and we're very

deliberate about it we sell to selling clubs so we're selling to the sorts of clubs who might sell a player later on to the really big the psgs and the chelseas of the world because we want that secondary transfer um so it runs through everything from how we recruit to how we coach to how we play where we play what we do in the front office it's it's in the dna of our club and our fans know um now we've been we've been good to our fans where we can. So, you know, Milan Oloski, when we sold him, the deal was done during the season, but the sale was made after the playoffs because we felt we had a good run.

So we try and do that, you know, where we can. But the fans know that some of our players are going to be transient and they get to enjoy them while they can. And hopefully, maybe at the 26 world cup might be too soon, but maybe it's the one afterwards, you know, we've had players play at pretty much every level of us youth international.

And Kobe was one of the first USL players to be called up to the full national team when he was with us. So, you know, we are, we are genuinely trying to play our role in developing US soccer by giving these young men a chance to fulfill their European soccer dreams and hopefully help the national team grow and wouldn't it be lovely to see an Orange County player playing for the

national team in a World Cup you know we've had ex-players play we've had we've had a player who played in the World Cup for Denmark and then played for us which isn't quite the same thing but you know we had a goalkeeper who's now played in the champions league um josh cohen yep um uh you know we are there is a time that's going to come where there'll be an orange county player playing for the full national team um and that's we want our fans to remember them when they were with us if you see see what I mean. Yeah, 100%. I think it's a really interesting conversation around the, not just the marketing, but, you know, I think it's important for American clubs to accept and acknowledge where we sit in the world order.

We're not the top. We're not going to be the top, maybe ever, but not anytime soon. We talk about selling teams and selling leagues a lot, and it is hard to sort of contextualize how to get a fan who watches the NFL and expects to watch the best act like a Colombian league fan who's like, I want to watch my player to then go to Liverpool and then cheer for them on the national team. It's not something that has existed in American sports a little bit with minor league baseball, but that's really not the same. And i think it's really fascinating to think about how fans will react to that and how clubs can be built on it um because we don't really

have a blueprint for it yeah that's exactly right david it does feel a little bit alien in america but there's nothing wrong with it and it happens in other countries as well for real football teams just you know chelsea and man united are not development clubs right but alfhampton um you know there was a their fans don't mind the fact that you know some of the best players to play in britain have come through them um and they're financially stable because of that um you know there are and obviously if you go down into championship league one league two you know afc winwood and my team back at home you know we love the fact that aaron ramsdale the england goalkeeper came to us briefly before he went off to us he still comes to game sometimes

when he's not playing um we love having him as an ex-player and we're a real team with real fans who go to real games but we also also know our place in the world. And, you know, we sold a player to Ipswich just before they got promoted. We got a huge fee for that. We're all very excited because that sustains our club because they make an operating loss if you don't sell players. So it's just because, you know, we're not,

you can't compare yourselves, as you say, with the American sports teams, but there's very few teams in the UK who actually aren't like that. It's the top 20 who aren't, but the other, you know, whatever it is, 300 teams playing professionally or semi-professional are completely fine with that model. And it doesn't make them any less of real fans. Let me ask you about the economics of the transfers because this is something you know we hear the number and everyone gets excited and you move on does that go into the full club or is that held only on the sporting side when you sell a player is the money purely built into funding the salaries of the players in that side, or does it affect the entire thing?

So I think the sporting side would love it if everything was recycled internally. I mean, you know, the money goes into the pot, as it were, the broader pot. But obviously there's an element of the more transfers we have the easier it is to make an argument for you know the purchasing or the signing of certain players because it's not just the young players you're signing it's the mature players playing alongside them that help them become better so there is an element of you know when you have an operating loss everyone's a cost center not a profit center anyway um but you know there are definitely incentives for the technical side to make more

sales um and if they don't make the sales do their budgets get cut i'm not sure we've ever got to that place and that's someone else's part of the business as it were but um you know we know that you have to invest to make it work um so you know if you just sell a player and don't do anything to make sure the next player's coming through the whole thing falls apart and the fact that we've done six and that number i'd like to think will be double figures probably within a couple of years means that there's definitely an element of recruiting and investment back towards that goal. You mentioned a player sent to Feyenoord.

You mentioned the relationship with Rangers as well. I think those are the two clubs you have official relationships with. We sort of hear it from the outside. It's exciting. You know, it's a big name, one you've heard of. How does that actually tangibly work for the club? How does it affect Orange County? So it's a good question.

So they've morphed as models. So, you know, when we did the original partnership with Rangers, they were still on their way back up to the Scottish Premier League after all of their issues that they had off the field. We were in a different place. so we did some player loans the pandemic sort of made a bit of a mess of all of that because part of the appeal for a young rangers player is rather than being loaned out to dunn firmlin or green at morton you're being then you're being loaned out to orange county when there's a pandemic and you can't leave your apartment to go to the beach it becomes a bit different.

So some of the player loan stuff didn't quite work the way we wanted it to, but they took one of our players. We still talk to them. I think that one's become very much a fan relationship, and Rangers do this elsewhere. They have a non-technical partnership with Hamburg, but whenever

Rangers are playing in Europe, the Hamburg fans will go and support whoever Rangers yeah go support Rangers and go and support the German team who are playing Celtic um because that's what they're like um so it's become very much a fan team and we've got a UK ownership thing going on at the moment and a lot of the new owners are Rangers fans some of it is because they like the color orange some of it is because they know about the relationship. So in the past, we've done training camps with them. So they've flown out coaches to coach young players here. We've done co-branded merchandise, all that sort of stuff. So we've done different versions of that. Feyenoord, they've taken players on loan.

They ended up buying one of our players. Again, on that one, nothing's exclusive because that doesn't really work in the transfer model, but it's sort of preferred partner. So their scouts get an insight into our players. Until recently, Rangers were funding one of our coaches, so they get first look at our young players. So I can't give you a very sort of, you know, we do these three things they do these three

things it's i think you'd class yourself as sort of friends with benefits um so first look at players first person we talk to when we're potentially making transfers but very much you know we've also sold players to other clubs as well so it's it's a little bit and there's no ownership or anything like that um So they are strategic partnerships. And let's say the Rangers one is becoming more of a fan partnership. And that's actually working very well. Tell us a little bit about, it was a UK fan ownership fund, rounding fund that you just are in the middle of or did.

Tell us a little bit about the idea behind that and how it worked out. Yeah, so it's been a really interesting thing so since i started working for this club four years ago i wanted to do some version of fan ownership because back at home i'm a part owner of afc wimbledon um you know i think americans broadly know the story of you know our franchise got stolen basically in a way that's never it happens all the time in america never happens in england and so there was a whole thing the club started from scratch we all became very small owners there's bricks at plow lane i'll stayed in with my kid's name on it you know i own 0.091 of the club but when you own something it's very different to just being a fan even a season

ticket holder and you see that with the green bay packers. You know, if any of your friends own a piece of the Green Bay Packers, you always know about it because they tell you. And so it's a version of that. Now, we didn't really have a reason to do a fan ownership thing because you can't just say who wants to own the club. There needs to be something. And unfortunately, the something for us was two years ago, we nearly lost our home to LA galaxy and there was a whole battle we ended up

with hundreds of fans turning up at council meetings to try and save the club and that there was the watershed moment for me when i realized that there was something special i think sometimes you you don't realize what you've got until someone tries to take it away from you. So two years ago, we announced, once we saved the club a year ago, we announced a 10-year partnership with the city to stay at the stadium. And the day after that, we launched the American fan ownership scheme. And 1,500 people became owners of the club. We raised serious capital as well. But for me, it was as much about giving people a chance to own a piece of the club. And I think it was an extraordinary thing. So obviously, a lot of our local people did, as you would expect.

But we had people from 40 different states ended up with ownership. And this kit behind me is one of my favorite parts of it everyone who put in a thousand dollars or more which was about 200 people they get their name on the kit so from a distance it's just a nice design but when you look close up there's the names on there and some of the celebrities are on there as well so johnny bananas john green who's a big wimbledon fan as well um you know their names are on there and we wore that kit for owner's night last year we opened up the stadium early everyone came in it was an extraordinary people genuinely were in tears um there was some kid from tennessee who'd been washing cars for the last few weeks

on weekends to earn the money to buy his hundred dollar stake in our club like it was such a special night and the thing has worked like we raised some money but the most important thing is our fans feel a different relationship there were people who bought season tickets who'd not even been to a game yet but because they were owners they wanted to be part of it um and that's been really special and we we were always planning because of our european outreach to do something in the uk as well So we ran a scheme in the UK and a few hundred people became owners in the UK as well. Now, a few hundred people might not sound that exciting, but a few hundred people in Britain owning a piece of a USL team in Orange County. You know, if you take a step back, that's quite that's quite a thing.

It says a lot about British views on American soccer, you know, something about Orange County there. But it shows where we are as a club. And, you know, there are scores of people walking around in Britain wearing Orange County merchandise. And I think for us, that's a really special thing. And some of them put in 50 pounds, which was a minimum in England, literally just so they could go down the pub and tell their mates that they own a bit of a team in California, which is entirely fine. But some people have also put in five figures because this isn't some crypto silly thing where you're not going to get your money back and you get to vote on what music the team run out to this is you know a real investment vehicle and if we sell the club in the future at a higher valuation which we i imagine will do at some point then they're getting their real money back um so it's been uh it's been an extraordinary thing for us to to be able to have the best part of 2000 owners across 40 states it's about five countries and a few hundred people in the uk um and we've actually got a waiting list of over 500 people for our next us raise we weren't sure if we wanted to do it but

a load of people asked if we would again because they missed the first time yeah and so we're probably probably at some point in april or so we'll do a second raise in the US as well and give more people to own a chance to own a piece of our team. So it's been a really special thing for us. I gotta be honest. I missed that first one as well. And I ended up buying into Oakland and Minnesota Aurora because that was the chances I had to buy into the team.

Because as you said, I want to be able to say I own a thing and you want to be able to be connected to it. So maybe on the next one, listen, I'm equal opportunity. I love everyone equally just because I'm connected to some a little bit more, but it is a really cool thing.

It is a really cool setup. The ability to be connected to these teams. Let me ask you big picture. I know we talked, you know, the world's cup coming and the club world's cup and all those things before I let you go. I'm just curious.

Big picture for people to think about from a USL point of view. What should people be most excited about? What should people be looking out for over the next three to five years about where this league and then I think USL League One and Super League are going? That's a good question. So, first of all, I will hold you to this david you know i listeners your show will be disappointed if you showed favoritism to oakland would never would never in april uh i think which is when we're going to launch here we'll be back in touch okay um and if you put in enough you might even get on a shirt i would love to get a name on a

shirt um so uh usl so look i think it's it's if you don't know what usl is and i think that's one of the biggest problems usl has got not just our team across the country is some people if they only know a little bit about soccer they think there's only mls so you know if you go to a usL game, you might not be able, just looking at the field of play and the players on it, you know, the top of the USL is the same level as the bottom of the MLS. Yeah.

Which is part of why the MLS teams don't want to play in the Open Cup because everyone gets to see that half a dozen times every year. So on the field, great quality of football. Anyone can beat anyone it really is that sort of league so it's great football if you want to watch it it's community football you you know the entry point in our league for a ticket depending on the teams you know there's

a lot of teams that got tickets under 10 bucks particularly if you're buying as part of a family even if it's not it's probably 15 bucks like it's you can come as a family in a world where it's not, it's probably 15 bucks. You can come as a family in a world where it's getting increasingly expensive to watch sport in America. MLS tickets for messy games are going for a thousand bucks. And an NFL team is three or 400, I think, to get a decent seat at a good stadium now. It's very accessible. So it's family friendly. You're closer to the pitch. It feels more of a community club because it is. It's like lower-level soccer in the UK. It's like minor league baseball versus major league baseball, not in terms of the quality of the product,

but in terms of that family feel, the proximity to players, being part of it, fans knowing the names of the players, players knowing the names of the fans. It's a very special league. But it's growing. The quality on the field is very much there. Thanks to CBS, more people are getting exposed to that. There'll be more football increasingly on TV over the next couple of years that you don't need to get through a

paywall to watch. So it's going to be very accessible. There's new teams coming into the league. Teams are upgrading their facilities. New Mexico are putting in a new stadium. Rhode Island are building something extraordinary. There's some really nice facilities in a really good league, which is very competitive, but still knows they're all community teams. I can't guarantee there'll be promotion relegation, that's above my pay grade, but there's definitely much more chance in our league than there will be in MLS. I think I can safely and categorically say that. There are probably going to be some changes that create more jeopardy and opportunities within the league over the next year or two that will make it interesting. So I you know if you're if you're

a real soccer fan my view is the usl is more of a soccer product than the mls is anyway if you're a if you're towing around the edges of this and you want to you're a newbie and you want to get into it better to test the water at a usl game where it's, you know, shorter lines for food, lower price of entry, probably not even paying for parking at some of the stadiums, which is a rarity in American sport. I think it's a great way in. So I think it's a great league to follow. And if you're watching the Wrexham documentary, you should be watching your local USL team.

There's no excuse. One of the big stressors for people in North American soccer has been this quote-unquote soccer wars. Throw the Z on there at the end if you want, right? We had USL versus NASL for a while, NASL against MLS. Now there has been a bit of a break between MLS and USL after working close together. I'm curious your view on USL championship teams, mainly in independent markets versus sort of one like yours, not exactly where you have MLS teams there. How does it work differently?

How do you see successes maybe of what you'd like to see in future expansion teams of clubs in their own market versus clubs being in markets where there are other professional soccer teams? Yeah, look, great question. I think the answer is maybe in the old days, there wasn't room for everybody. But there's a lovely map, and you may have even seen it because you're a real football person of London. There are 33 teams in London. Some of them are literally two or three miles away from each other.

And they, there are plenty of people to go around so they can all watch all of their teams so i know there's obviously been some very high profile examples of there not being space for both teams san diego being a particularly sad local example we loved playing san diego loyal and i thought they did a really good job of building up a real fan base but they decided for a combination of reasons that they couldn't compete. We're not going to have a team in Orange County because we're in the same region as LA and there's two teams already. But there are 3.1 million people in Orange County. There's a large Hispanic population.

There's definitely enough people to fill up our five and a half thousand seat stadium and maybe a 10,000 seat stadium if that's where we end up in the next three to five years, which is our plan. So if the sport is growing, there's definitely enough football teams to go around and enough fans to go around that it shouldn't matter. And I think if you can make the economics work in terms of availability of stadia and enough sponsors, there should be plenty. If soccer is growing the way we all think it is, you know, the person who wants to be on the sleeve of an MLS team for a million dollars is not necessarily the same partner who wants to be. Now, if you want stadium naming rights or front of shirt for a USL team, your numbers are not a million miles away. But, you know, if you want to put up a field board at one of our stadiums and have a 30 second spot on a local TV broadcast, you're looking at 10, 15 grand. It's a different set of sponsors. It's a different price point. It's a different set of fans. there's room for everybody so if if we can lose some of the politics um and football grows away it's going to grow and if you look at the number of boys and girls playing it it's the fastest growing sport there's enough room for everybody um so i know some mls teams

have been trying to crunch some usl teams that happened in Indy, obviously, as well recently. But there's actually space for everybody because we are not trying to be MLS teams. There are some teams in our league who obviously very much have been trying to be an MLS team. Maybe they still have pretensions, but we definitely don't want to be one. And there's plenty of other markets where it's just not a possibility. But we should be proud of the usl product and it's growing and all the things that can happen in our league with

tv and pro rel and all that stuff in the future we don't need to worry about should we become an mls team to survive we can survive and thrive as usl teams and we should be proud to do so all right i took enough of your time i promise this is the last one but you mentioned boys and girls playing the game um and we cover obviously nWSL very heavily here at SoccerWise, but we are trying to add Super League as well as the league grows and, you know, more opportunities, more space to play. I've always said anytime any soccer thing comes into existence, more soccer jobs is great, whether it's on the field or off the field. As someone, most of what we saw in the super league though is new clubs joining right new clubs entering usl on both fronts as someone who already operates a team how do you look at the super league and how does it sort of fit in

to what your club does and then i promise you can go yeah thank you david so um we obviously love women's football half my staff seem to be season ticket holders at Angel City. And I think a couple of them work there at weekends as ushers. And I love going. I take my daughter to games. So, you know, women's football is inland and pittsburgh um and there's real value in doing so we we definitely want to um it's we've talked to partners on and off over uh the last couple of years around opportunities. Obviously, there's a whole load of economics that needs to be sorted out at the back end and so on. But the principle of growing the women's game, we've got a reasonable percentage of female fans as part of our club.

It's a logical thing for us to do. We've got to find a way of making it work with our scheduling and what we do with our front office and how we grow the club but as a principle i think no usl men's team should write off having a women's team it makes great sense now the economics aren't there yet but then the economics aren't quite there yet on the men's side either so it's about how you make it work um so we're definitely up for it in principle. It's just about finding the right partners and finding the right way of doing it. Cause what we would never want to do is do it badly. You know, I like the model that is increasingly the case around the world.

That's not so much here. Like in the UK, when I was a kid, I used to referee women's league and there's a team called Doncaster Bells who had nothing to do with Doncaster Rovers. But, you know, Arsenal ladies, Chelsea ladies, Man United ladies, it makes sense. Same kit, fans recognition, a lot of support both teams. I think there's something there and I like that model

where if there was a team, you know, I don't know what the exact name would be, but they would obviously wear orange. There would be some shared stuff there in the way that Oakland have got that. I feel like that's for us. I know it's not how it works at NWSL level, but for us, I think that's the right way of doing it because the community values that the USL holds so strongly really apply in women's soccer, maybe even more so. And I think if we're going to grow the game, that's the way to do it.

It's an exciting time for the sport in this region. It is always fun for us to take the conversations we're having online and with all of our fans where we're debating these things and thinking about these things and going and talking to someone who's in the trenches working on it every single day. Like yourself, president of business operations at Orange County SC. Dan Rutstein, thank you for taking the time and happy holidays. And hopefully we'll talk to you again soon. Thank you, David.

And look, I feel like I should say as well, thank you to you. I think obviously the sport's in a great place now, but it is people like you who have taken it from the sort of the dark corners of media into becoming a mainstream and you deserve the world cup and you deserve messy to be here and all those things, because you were doing this before it was popular and cool and sexy to do it. And there's a lot of people like you who've been on that journey. So thank you to the,

the real broadcasters and the real supporters of, of the growing game of soccer, even before people knew it was popular. I'm like the lifestyle brand of podcasters, you know? It was cool and trendy for a little, and then we sneak in, and then everyone popular shows up, and then Messi just takes it all and moves on. But I appreciate you saying that. Thank you so much.

I will talk to you when the round of funding opens once again, so that I can be an equal opportunity California owner. Thank you once again. I will talk to you when the round of funding opens once again, so that I can be an equal opportunity, California owner. Thank you once again for joining us and we'll talk to you again soon. Thank you, David. you