How to build a brand for a new football team
Most Arsenal fans know who Peter Wood is – even if they’re not aware of it.
‘Pedro’ as he goes by, runs one of the most successful Arsenal blogs ‘Le Grove’ and the Arsenal Opinion podcast.
But he has rarely watched a game in person in recent years after taking up the opportunity to move to New York to follow his dreams in the advertising world.
You could say that it has worked out well for him, winning more than 100 awards that have established him as a major player in the advertising world.
So perhaps it came as a surprise that he would leave the bright lights of the Big Apple and the advertising world behind to move to Missouri and the city of St Louis, to take up a role as the Vice President of Content for St. Louis City SC, a brand new Major League Soccer (MLS) team, bringing together his expertise in marketing with his passion for football.
Peter’s journey to St Louis came through one of his advertising clients, Enterprise Rent-a-car, which also took him to New York in the first place. After six years, a meeting with his client Lee Broughton, who was a senior marketing executive at the company and part of the family who founded Enterprise, led to discussions about the plans for St Louis.
“Growing up going to the football with my dad and my extended Arsenal family, it doesn’t matter what the score is, right? It’s just being together and you learn so much as a kid going to football.
“The idea that I could help craft that experience with all of the amazing people that work here was just something that doesn’t come around very often. There aren’t too many new clubs that pop up, so to be here from the start was the attraction.”
The decision was made to create a new soccer club in the heart of the city with training facilities and a new model that differs from most others in the MLS, who officially granted the city an expansion franchise in 2019.
The founder group includes the Taylor Family, led by patriarch Andy Taylor, and Jim Kavanaugh with Carolyn Kindle the first female President and CEO of a MLS team, which notably is also the first majority female-ownership group.
St Louis has a fine soccer tradition, providing almost half of the 1950 World Cup team who famously beat England and plenty of international players since – but the city never had its own professional team.
“Research had shown that St Louis could be quite down on itself for a whole number of historical reasons, while people in other cities didn’t have an opinion or know anything about it.
Peter added: “St Louis really is a soccer city: they absolutely love the sport. When you’re driving through the highways and you look over at the fields, it’s soccer goals everywhere. We’ve got 22,500 seats in the stadium and 70,000 ticket deposits were put down, so there’s a there’s a huge demand for soccer.
“The mission of the club is to make people pay attention to what's going on in St Louis and to help regenerate downtown. It's not about how many T-shirts can you sell or how we can make a big profit on this.
“It's a gift to the city and we hope it's going to be one part of a regeneration project that will bring new business to downtown and give people in the city a feeling of increased pride.”
Peter’s role focuses on managing fan engagement, ranging from content creation to marketing, the fans’ singing section within the stadium and even the e-sports team, who just won their first MLS Cup.
With football still a challenger sport in the US, Peter’s role is to keep fans interested even when things are not going so well on the field.
He added: “We are really focused on the bigger picture than just soccer, because a lot of clubs focus on what happens between the lines in 90 minutes and that's great if you're doing well. But if you're not doing well, people can switch off. People here don't generally understand British sports fandom being your birth right, where you don't have a choice in who you support and you pass it down to your kids.
“In England, it doesn’t matter how badly a club treats you or how awful the product is on the pitch, you're going to turn up with your friends, your family every week and you all sit there, because that’s what we’ve done for 140 years.
“In America, it's a bit different. We've got baseball, we've got hockey, so to get eyeballs and to get love in this town like we really have to work hard for it, we have to show fans that we are in the community, that we care about their opinions and integrate their good ideas into the fabric of the club.
“For instance, many clubs have a pay-to-play model where you pay a lot of money to go to an Academy and that takes a lot of people out of the system. So our ownership decided that they were going to break that model and we created a programme called City Futures which teaches kids about the beautiful game and also how to be better people. The focus is on the kids having fun, giving everyone a chance to taste what it’s like to be a part of soccer.”
Premier League clubs in England are finding out the hard way that fans will not turn up and pay big money for their second-rate food with little more than big screens, and St Louis are also utilising local cuisine to bring the fans in earlier.
Fans were asked which local restaurants they wanted to see in the stadium which resulted in over 8,000 submissions and 25 local experiences being integrated into the stadium. The impact of this approach is smaller queues in the stadium at bottleneck moments, and it encourages fans to arrive early because there’s always something new to try that is authentically St Louis.
FootyScran, the popular football food review account on Twitter recently saw 1.2 million views for the St Louis pork steak sandwiches.
Peter explained: “We've also been trying to integrate local culture into our stadium, to make it feel like a stadium for everybody. So we've got a programme called CITY BLOCK PARTY which uses the stadium as a platform for new music, bringing in local artists.
“Everybody has loved the vibe and it gave people a little bit of pride: this is our city; this is our food; this is our music. The Premier League could take this approach but it’s hard to change entrenched pregame behaviours that have lasted generations. We have had the opportunity to start afresh and create the tradition.”
St Louis has established a number of commercial partnerships with brands such as Purina, BJC Healthcare, Moneta and Cisco, and has an innovative agreement with banking sponsor Together Credit Union called the ‘Saves for Savings’ initiative which sees a new US$300 savings account opened for a local student for every save made by club captain and goalkeeper Roman Bürki.
With such a diverse and interesting range of stories to tell, it’s no wonder that content creation comes easily.
Peter added: “The real focus in year one is to land the plane with the fans and hope that what happens on the pitch brings more excitement to the city.
“The sponsorship team work very closely with us because they know the job that we're trying to do is to build the brand in the first few years. Everything is very intentional and thought through.
“We smashed the MLS record for kits sold and the Adidas CEO for North America thanked our ownership for driving so much additional revenue. So it's the town that has really taken to the sport. We're very lucky to have that passion and our job is to maintain it. How do we keep people feeling engaged in the club and how do we make them feel that this is their club.
“We're working with such a simple construct – would this idea make someone from outside of St Louis pay attention? Yes, OK. We're good to go. So it just makes everything a lot simpler. It's nice to work in a club that values doing things the right way rather than the easy way. Doing things the right way is the hard way nine times out of 10 and they pay off in the end.
“The economic impacts of what we're doing, like are more people going into downtown, are new businesses setting up, are their new hotels in the region, are businesses thriving and can this be the catalyst to regenerate a downtown that's needed a bit of love over the last 20-30 years?”
MLS has also benefited from a broadcast partnership with Apple, who provide a dedicated app and streaming service for fans to consume content, which has transformed exposure of the teams and competition.
With a central broadcasting deal rather than local agreements and a simple subscription, as well as via a television, fans can watch games, receive scores or written updates via an app on their phone.
Peter explained: “We're getting the real Apple treatment. They spend a lot of time with us because they want to make this the best possible, and it's been a really good start so far.
“Our social metrics have been through the roof and we've already gone past some of the more recent teams who've entered as franchises. Our engagement numbers tick upwards and our merchandise sales have been getting better and better.
“The clubs create the content and we’re like a media platform. We’ve just created a three-part documentary with Rafa Honigstein that's going to go up very soon. We’ve got origin stories and comeback stories as well.
“We track all of the numbers so we know how engaged fans are, we know how often that they’re opening the app, we can track when they get into the stadium, what they purchase. So there are lots of ways to track the success and the overall sentiment of fans.“
St Louis made a great start to their inaugural season as well, winning their first five games to put a marker down that they won’t be the whipping boys of the MLS Western Conference.
“Everybody's very focused on the sporting side, so we’re feeling very confident that all the predictions that we were going to finish 14th are off,” Peter said.
“It's fun and I’m in a privileged position. I don't feel like it's a job because I love football. Every meeting I go into is like some sort of experience I've had on the other side. It's been better than I could have imagined, and a lot of that is driven by the ownership group that I work with.
“They're principled people, they want to do what's best for the local community and they want to give St Louis the pedestal that it deserves. They want to elevate the city and have a clear mission.
“It's been a great project and I feel blessed that I've got to work on it.”