Finding and engaging new revenue partners, helping to guide major facility changes, learning the in’s and outs of broadcast relationships, dealing with an evolving support base, trying to negotiate a solid and growing niche in a very crowded sports marketplace and helping forge a new and engaging brand that can be many things to many people. These were probably some of the huge challenges then-Rutgers athletic director Tim Pernetti was looking at as the Scarlet Knights went through their Big East football schedule last fall, while the campus was gaining its footing with the start of the new semester. No one could probably predict the well documented roller coaster Rutgers would go through in the coming months, from the elation of joining the Big Ten and all its challenges and opportunities to the highly publicized changes that came about on so many levels following Mike Rice’s ouster and the subsequent moves that changed the leadership of the Scarlet Knights.
All those moves are now in the past, and the athletic department, under new AD Julie Hermann is looking to regain its footing, re-inspire and engage donors and heal its wounds from the ugliness of scandal as it looks ahead to a future that could bring bigger dollars, brand awareness, and overall exposure hopefully for all aspects of the University as well as athletics.
For Pernetti, his “to do” list is probably very similar, although instead of worrying about a host of sports he is focused on one ball, and the building of a new brand in the tri-state area as the new head of the business side of New York City Football Club. While different in many ways, the core challenges with NYCFC will be very similar…creating a thriving business culture and developing an elite sport brand in the most crowded marketplace in the country, if not the world. He will have a core base of passionate soccer fans who will need to be wooed to spend their time and dollars not to follow elite clubs like Chelsea or Manchester United, but to engage with the new kid in town, one with the large packets of the New York Yankees and Manchester City Football Club behind them. However with those bug pockets come big expectations…the announcement of NYCFC stole the back pages of the New York tabloids for days, and seemed to have awakened the rival Red Bulls into a new brand expansion across the Hudson and into New York, where NYCFC will eventually be home when they kick off in two years.
The new team business head will have to find ways to keep brands engaged without team or players and build excitement about the future, much like he and his team did in Piscataway as RU expanded its facilities and started the process moving toward being the New York home of arguably the most powerful college conference in the country. Much like with Rutgers, there will be media deals to be struck, a stadium to be build and many brand decisions to be made on the look, feel and culture of the club, which arguably could be the last startup sports franchise ever in the tri-state area.
Unlike with Rutgers, NYCFC will not have to answer to those opponents of athletics who believe that college athletics sends many of the wrong messages and misspends millions of dollars. Instead, NYCFC will have to negotiate the politics of stadium placement in a community and all the expenses that go along with it. Different challenges both with the same goal…building a brand and a business that is representative of the community and can show effective ROI with passionate fans and big expectations, all on a challenging budget. As big as the brands behind NYCFC are, this is still cost controlled major League Soccer, a league which is still finding its way in most markets east of the Mississippi, including New York where the Red Bulls brand success still ebbs and flows. It’s also a market where the NASL Cosmos created a good deal of soccer noise with their Long Island launch before fading into the background. Both are challenges NYCFC will have to deal with…a fickle audience with lots of choices and limited disposable income on professional soccer, and the balance of sizzle over steak.
The good news for Pernetti is that the grassroots for his new brand are very strong, thanks to decades of young people running around in short pants every fall, many of whom are now savvy consumers of global soccer. The market for the franchise is for sure New York and east, but New Jersey and north still also have hankering for the sport, and engaging those families now with a taste of what is to come will go a long way in drawing fans to a new stadium and a new brand once the lights go on. For now, selling hope and hype will have to do, something the Rutgers grad did well as he built consensus and popularity for his business brand in Central New Jersey before the floor fell out late last winter.
As a challenge, NYCFC will be a different one than Rutgers was and is, and in many ways both are in various stages of startup. The Scarlet Knights are transitioning to a new neighborhood in the Big 10, the soccer club coming into existence from the ground up. Where they both are in the fall of 2015 will be interesting to watch as their challenges come to a head, one in football of a global nature, the other partly with the old American kind of football along with all the other opportunities and pratfalls that exist at The State University of New Jersey. One thing is for sure, Tim Pernetti’s prints will be on both brands, one albeit a little more recent than the other. It will be interesting to see which gets the headlines, positive ones, two falls hence. The measurement for success in Gotham and Piscataway will be quite complex.
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