MPLS 2020 REVIEW: WHAT THE BLEEP JUST HAPPENED? (Part 1)
Every year, I write a recap of our season with a focus on how we did financially and what we learned along the way. This is the fifth in that series. - Dan H.
And every year, Protagonist Soccer begs MPLS City to let us run this important document for our readers. This is our second year and this year will run in three parts. We’re incredibly thankful to be a part of sharing this vital information about one of the best grassroots clubs in the country. - Dan V.
Looking back, it’s increasingly clear that the only effective judge of things is time. This is true of a great many things: books, people, technology, even—especially–soccer clubs. How many clubs over the years have launched with mega hype, maybe even had a good first season, and then withered away?
This series has told our story from raw start-up, to aggressively growing, to established club. Time is judging us, and it seems pleased with what we’ve been able to do.
Time isn’t the only one. A friend showed me a text from his buddy who knows Rob Stone. “The little guy in your backyard has a lot of juice right now” Stone said, referring to us appearing in a BBC article about Manchester United’s new third kit. Or maybe the #UpTheThieves kerfuffle with St Louis City SC and our Futures youth program branding. Less likely, but not impossible, is that he read the three-page World Soccer magazine article about us.
Whatever reason he had in mind, Rob Stone nailed it. We do have a lot of juice right now.
So, as we look back on a year where we reached a milestone, faced down a pandemic, and suffered a cancelled season, we find ourselves stronger than ever…and at a crossroads.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
“There’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark out and we’re wearing sunglasses” – Elwood, Blues Brothers
The crazy thing is that this all started in the Minnesota Recreational Soccer League’s Sunday Third Division back in 2010.
My childhood friend Jon Bisswurm had moved to Minneapolis and convinced me that we should start our own soccer team instead of playing on one of the over 150 existing teams in the Twin Cities. He had a friend, Nick Sindt, he had met in Wisconsin who lived in town who would help. Jon described Nick as “good at soccer and paperwork” and therefore an important addition. We talked to our friends, invited them, invited their friends, and made surprisingly effective use of the internet to cobble together a team. We named it Stegman’s Old Boys after Tom Stegman, a legendary youth coach Jon and I had. He wore Sambas and high socks, those old school hatched Umbros, had a mustache of Selleck-ian lushness, and drove a Jaguar with the vanity plate STEGGY.
While the level of play that first year, it will surely surprise you to hear, was not particularly high, we brought a level of organization, effort, and fun to what we were doing that stood out. Our players had a blast. Other players were interested in joining. The next year, we added a second team.
As the years we on, we grew to where we had multiple teams at multiple levels of the adult recreational league and the very competitive Minnesota Amateur Soccer League—including, after merging with one of the most decorated clubs in that league’s history, a team in Division 1. Then we decided it was time to go national.
We joined what was then the Premier League of America and spent our first season playing against Minnesota United Reserves, Milwaukee Bavarians, Croatian Eagles, Cedar Rapids Rampage, and Madison 56ers. It was a fantastic, high quality league. That we played in a patchy field nicknamed “The Barnyard” took nothing away from the experience.
A year later, obviously, it was time for NPSL. That was 2017.
YOU ARE GOING TO FAIL
“If you want something different, you have to do something different.” – Just a quote from the internet
Since going national, we have done pretty well. Using just local players, with just volunteers, we have built a club that has won multiple trophies, qualified for the Open Cup multiple times, and won an award for our first logo design. We added a U23 team, a program for players 16-20, more than tripled our season ticket holders, and done the work to grow the club’s revenue every single year[1].
When we launched we were told by a big name in local soccer that we wouldn’t last more than two years.
I bring that up every year because there is nothing wrong with a little schadenfreude, but in truth his reasoning was sound: it’s not like there was a history of clubs successfully doing the lower division thing. There were some failures[2] and there were some clubs you forget about[3]. It was not unreasonable that we would just be another one of the same.
We knew the history and we didn’t want to repeat it.
Coming in with no baggage had a lot of positives. We weren’t big names in soccer[4], we hadn’t made a name coaching for decades, we didn’t even work in soccer as a day job. That meant that we weren’t beholden. It was liberating not to know whose ass we had to kiss, what unwritten rules we had to follow, and what decorum was in this milieu. We didn’t know it, didn’t care to learn it, and weren’t held back by it.
That allowed us to create a club so different than what had come before.
Our story is pure grassroots. We took our experience running Stegman’s, a $5,000 loan from one of our founders, a mission to create a club that made a difference for local players, and hope that we could build a community around that vision…and we got a Twitter account[5].
We worked hard to craft a unique voice for the club, one that would stand out in the world and especially in a metro with every major professional team, including a new MLS franchise, a Big 10 program, and well-supported minor league sports[6]. Sometimes we fucked up. There’s a fine line between being funny and being stupid. Hitting the perfect note every time, especially for something so personal, is difficult. And when the founding group is weird and dysfunctional in an It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia sort of way[7], mistakes are bound to happen. But everything we did came from a good place, was well meaning, and in service to creating a club that would last, would serve local players, and help the local community.
The sporting side worked hard, too. While we had the Stegman’s experience and could count on Stegman’s players, like Aaron Olson, Tim Wills, and “Big Game” James Neher, to anchor the team, we didn’t have an airtight pitch to potential players. We were starting a new thing, with no big-name backers, no big-name coaches, and we didn’t even know for sure then where we would play home games.
Pure hard work got us through that. Making calls, sending messages, inviting guys to a session–it added up. And making those sessions good sessions, with good players, in the best situation we could afford[8] kept them coming back. It worked. We pulled together a good team and every year we’ve gotten better and better.
We have been successful.
Our success has made a lot of people angry. Really angry. After all, we were nobodies. We didn’t respect the existing order of things. Who the fuck were we to do soccer this way, to be brash, bold, and, worst of all, successful. WHO DID WE THINK WE WERE?!?!
Left to right, 2019 NPSL North Champions and 2018 NPSL North Champions
That attitude is the default in U.S. Soccer. Crazy, I know, given the state of the game in this country, but there is a deeply entrenched group of people who make their living in the game and they like it just how it is thank you very much.
WHAT WAS GOING TO BE
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” – Robert Burns
The wind was at our backs going into 2020. Off the field, we had smashed our previous record highs for Members, attendance, and merchandise sales. On the field, we had won our conference for the second year in a row and qualified for the Open Cup. More than that, we had a group of players who had grown over the past few seasons and were peaking together combined with some fearless, talented young guns. I have no doubt that the 2020 vintage was the best group of players we have ever put on the field. We were in rude health.
Because the club is self-funded and because we had big plans in the works that would need cash to execute, our plan for 2020 was to keep tight control of costs, budget extremely conservatively, and use the profits we hoped to earn to self-fund our next stage of growth.
A few FAQ-style notes on the budget:
Sponsors represents cash only and not the (significant) value of in-kind benefits
Gameday includes tickets and Memberships on the revenue side and cost of those things and non-facility rental items to host a game
Facilities includes training and stadium rental for our NPSL and UPSL teams
Travel includes the first round Open Cup game but not second (or third or fourth…) round
League fees include dues, player registration, referees, etc
Anyway, we went through the fall and into the winter serenely expecting that 2020 would be like any other year and were all systems go when COVID hit.
It was just a week away from our first round Open Cup match, against Chicago FC United in Bridgeview. The winner got Forward Madison in the second round, so everyone in the club was buzzing. We had been training multiple times per week for about 8 weeks, had hosted closed-door tune-up matches, had bought and neatly packed all of our new team gear, had players registered and insured, had our flights and hotel sorted. We even had our special Open Cup kits, now worn by Manchester United apparently, ready to go—we were officially in-season.
Action was happening off the field as well. We had people out at bars and restaurants putting up posters, giving out branded pint glasses, we had launched our new kit, had the store running, events scheduled, and community plans coming together. Club operations were, ahem, fully operational.
We were off to a good start.
Financially, we were already within 5% of our total goal for Annual Memberships and still had seven weeks to our home opener, with the two weeks before the opener always a big sales period for us, still to come. The only thing slowing down our kit launch was that we kept selling out, over and over. We had a number of new sponsors lined up and two premier friendlies that would have made waves.
We were going to far surpass our revenue forecast.
IT ALL CAME CRASHING DOWN
“And I didn’t even see it coming!” – Lloyd Christmas, Dumb & Dumber
The last week of March, just days before we were scheduled to travel to Chicago for our U.S. Open Cup match, USSF suspended the tournament, USASA suspended all affiliated clubs from any playing activities, and everything stopped. That put us in a precarious place. What if things didn’t re-start? We had already spent a lot of money.
Back in March, nobody was sure what would happen next. Our response was to turtle: we just stopped moving and withdrew into our shell. No practices, no club status meetings, no marketing efforts, heck we barely even tweeted. We just ate some of the 50 lbs of rice we hoarded[9].
We’re safe here.
Then, the NPSL cancelled the season. It was the first league to take decisive action. It soon became clear that either UPSL would follow suit or, if they wouldn’t, we would cancel unilaterally. That clarified our situation: we had (potential) money problems.
To date, we had spent $62,578.00.
We did have revenue locked in, mainly because we had the foresight[10] to launch a really popular new kit a few months before the pandemic. Merchandise sales and other smaller revenue sources meant that, of the money in the bank, $40,030.73 was ‘locked in’ insofar as it was not at risk of having to be refunded.
On the one hand, without a season there were costs that we would not have: stadium rental, training facility rental, travel, and other operational expenses related to gameday.
On the other hand, with the season cancelled and a pandemic clearly in full swing, we knew that we would offer Members refunds. We also knew that our sponsorship agreements would be in jeopardy, and in fact called our sponsors to tell them to keep their money and get through this. Between those two, we had $27,472.59 that just might disappear.
And we had revenue that would not materialize. We typically post big Membership sales the two weeks either side of our home opener, but nobody was going to buy a season ticket to a cancelled season! Further, our store was closed and our games were huge merchandise sales days. We had to re-think our merchandise strategy. Matchday ticket revenue, which is decent to good depending on the opponent and weather, was gone too.
There were question marks, too. What would happen to our donations, for example? It was impossible to say, but we didn’t have high hopes.
We gritted our teeth and re-worked our budget.
[1] We look at things on a fiscal year basis (and we use the cash accounting method), with the fiscal year running from September 1 to August 31 to give us the best possible snapshot of how we did in a given season.
[2] More than a few in the Upper Midwest. I won’t name them because it’s damn hard to make something like this work and I wish it had worked for them. You can probably find them with Google though.
[3] Like he did when he said that everyone from around here who had tried had failed. There are a few clubs in the Upper Midwest that have lasted a long time. I won’t name them because it’s damn hard to get noticed doing something like this. You can probably find them with Google though.
[4] Locally or otherwise
[5] It’s @mplscitysc and you should give us a follow
[6] The St. Paul Saints, an independent minor league baseball team, has a downtown stadium and averages over 8,000 fans per game, just to give you an idea of what I mean by ‘well-supported minor league sports.’
[7] Dan is Dennis, Adam is Mac, Sarah is Sweet Dee, Bizz is Charlie, Matt is Schmitty, people who cross us are the McPoyle’s, and everyone argues over who is Frank.
[8] We started prepping for the 2016 season in the winter. In Minnesota indoor time is expensive and largely booked by youth clubs that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars booking out entire facilities, leaving scraps and odd times to smaller renters like us. For those first sessions, we played in a far suburb in a dome that was sort of heated and it’s memories like that which make me laugh and wonder how we pulled this all off.
[9] This did not actually happen
[10] Narrator: Luck is not foresight but often looks like it in hindsight.