Latest / I Hate Soccer with Jason Collinsworth / I Hate Soccer #90 - Alex Lubyansky, GM and Head Coach of Detroit Metro Football Club

Transcript

I Hate Soccer #90 - Alex Lubyansky, GM and Head Coach of Detroit Metro Football Club · I Hate Soccer with Jason Collinsworth

0:00
SPEAKER_02: I've known Alex Lubyansky for about uh 14 years or so.
0:07
SPEAKER_02: We actually played against each other in high school.
0:10
SPEAKER_02: He was a goalkeeper as well for North Farmerton.
0:13
SPEAKER_02: I played at Lake Orion.
0:14
SPEAKER_02: We played against each other our senior year.
0:17
SPEAKER_02: Um, we covered that in the video, but Alex um has a unique perspective.
0:23
SPEAKER_02: He was born in Ukraine.
0:25
SPEAKER_02: So he went to the University of Michigan uh and he played for the club team.
0:30
SPEAKER_02: He did so such a good job that he made the full varsity team, error quotes, varsity team, and university of Michigan, and then he had a couple trials overseas.
0:44
SPEAKER_02: Now his project is uh Detroit Metro FC.
0:49
SPEAKER_02: It is a pro soccer team in in Southeast Michigan, in Detroit, really, and he tells we go into all of it.
1:03
SPEAKER_02: We go into his youth, his his college, playing professionally overseas, and also just building this club from the ground up.
1:13
SPEAKER_02: As always, please like, share, and subscribe to the channel.
1:19
SPEAKER_02: Uh, you'd really be helping the show out.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: I hate soccer.
1:24
SPEAKER_02: There's a couple stories that I tell about you that I've said that I've taught that I've so okay.
1:31
SPEAKER_02: Catch up on me.
1:33
SPEAKER_02: I went out to Buffalo to coach pro women's soccer, right?
1:39
SPEAKER_02: Because I always wanted to be at that level and whatnot.
1:41
SPEAKER_02: And then uh I kind of I didn't want to stay at that club, and I countered with like an offer.
1:50
SPEAKER_02: They offered me a spot to like stay as a goalkeeper trainer and do the club goalkeeper training and the pro goalkeeper training, and then like three teams, and then like a rec team, and I'm like, and you're offering me$24,000, and I'm like, uh, and then I countered and they're like, no, let's find somebody else.
2:10
SPEAKER_02: So, but I stayed.
2:11
SPEAKER_02: I stayed and I started my own training company, and I've been doing that for 10 or 11 years, and then I was like, started this podcast, and it's exploded.
2:20
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, if I can grow it in Buffalo, what can it become back home?
2:26
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, let's just move home.
2:28
SPEAKER_02: And then now I'm talking to you and catching up with you, and okay, so the story that I tell about you is one, actually, there's two stories that I tell about you.
2:38
SPEAKER_02: One, you went and played club soccer at the University of Michigan, tore it up, and then you ended up being on the I guess you call it the varsity, the whole team, like the real team, right?
2:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay.
2:54
SPEAKER_02: That's one story, and then your story when you went overseas.
2:58
SPEAKER_00: Oh man.
2:59
SPEAKER_02: Okay, and I I work on little stuff like that all the time where you like clip a ball in, you have to keep the ball in the air.
3:05
SPEAKER_02: There's two players that you're trying to hit, and a player, player A, heads it to player B, and player B tries to finish, all one touch, and you they tried to score.
3:16
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember that story?
3:17
SPEAKER_01: You're killing me.
3:18
SPEAKER_01: So, with specificity, now that you've reignited my memory, yeah.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: I know I know that story perfectly, and I'll tell you where I got that story.
3:28
SPEAKER_01: Because when I got offered the trial of Dina Mokiev, which is logically the insane way that soccer actually works.
3:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean, how on earth is a dude who is five foot nine completely unrecruited to a school where academically his brain is going to be in any way correct to say yes to.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: Right.
3:50
SPEAKER_01: I go to U of M not knowing, dude, am I gonna play it all?
3:54
SPEAKER_02: Right.
3:54
SPEAKER_01: They're not letting me try out for the varsity team.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: It's not where you show up and they let you.
3:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
4:00
SPEAKER_01: And I go to club soccer tryouts at Michigan, and I don't want to bore you to death, but I'm gonna go, bro.
4:05
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
4:07
SPEAKER_01: That team is good.
4:09
SPEAKER_01: Right, it is not a team to this day that you just sign up for.
4:14
SPEAKER_02: Right.
4:14
SPEAKER_02: You gotta try out.
4:15
SPEAKER_02: You're playing.
4:16
SPEAKER_02: You gotta try out.
4:17
SPEAKER_02: So these days you're playing MLS next guys, homegrown guys, academy guys, like That's these days.
4:23
SPEAKER_02: Right.
4:24
SPEAKER_01: You wanna know those days?
4:25
SPEAKER_01: Yes, please.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: I had a teammate that played in the MLS and played in Scotland for Rangers.
4:32
SPEAKER_01: Why on earth?
4:33
SPEAKER_01: How old is he?
4:35
SPEAKER_01: This dude at that time.
4:37
SPEAKER_01: 22, something like that.
4:39
SPEAKER_01: Mid-20s, and guess who makes more money?
4:42
SPEAKER_01: An attorney that graduates from the University of Michigan Law School or a major league soccer player.
4:48
SPEAKER_01: Dude, it's not close.
4:51
SPEAKER_01: It's embarrassingly disparate as far as what you're going to earn.
4:54
SPEAKER_01: That's why pay-to-play kills me today.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: Right.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: Because nothing has changed, by the way, in my view, other than great false advertising.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: And I mean the best I've ever seen.
5:05
SPEAKER_02: False advertising from who?
5:07
SPEAKER_01: From deceptive clubs.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: Not all clubs.
5:11
SPEAKER_01: There's great clubs, unbelievable clubs.
5:13
SPEAKER_01: My kids play in those clubs.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: Those clubs tell you what's up, and you make a decision.
5:18
SPEAKER_01: My family can afford it, and we made a great decision.
5:20
SPEAKER_02: Are you talking about transparency in the city?
5:22
SPEAKER_01: Transparency, dude.
5:23
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
5:23
SPEAKER_01: So, anyway, at U of M, on the club team, I show up to tryouts.
5:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm not arrogant.
5:29
SPEAKER_01: I knew I'm at U of M.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: Good luck, right?
5:32
SPEAKER_01: They already had four goalkeepers.
5:34
SPEAKER_01: The varsity goalkeeper was their starter.
5:36
SPEAKER_01: He had finished his eligibility, and boop, I'm playing this.
5:40
SPEAKER_01: Four.
5:41
SPEAKER_01: They're not looking for a goalkeeper.
5:43
SPEAKER_01: At that tryout, I'm an 18-year-old kid going to U of M, showing up to this tryout, 200 players.
5:51
SPEAKER_01: 200 goalkeepers, 15 spots, zero.
5:57
SPEAKER_01: That's the start of my college career.
6:00
SPEAKER_01: So for that to get me to a trial with a top four team on earth was a pretty fun journey.
6:07
SPEAKER_01: Could I talk about it for two hours?
6:09
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
6:09
SPEAKER_01: Do I need to?
6:10
SPEAKER_01: I hope not, buddy, but uh, whatever you want.
6:12
SPEAKER_02: I'm a here.
6:13
SPEAKER_01: So when I get to Dinamo Kiev, which is unreal that I even got to go.
6:22
SPEAKER_01: I grow up watching this team.
6:24
SPEAKER_01: I'm born in Ukraine and move to the States when I'm three.
6:27
SPEAKER_01: I watch Andriy Shevchenko score four against Barcelona as a kid.
6:32
SPEAKER_01: I watch that club revolutionize defending.
6:37
SPEAKER_01: Their coach Lebanovsky invented what we think to be just normal because we don't appreciate the history of the game.
6:46
SPEAKER_01: How do we arrive upon four at the back playing in a certain pattern?
6:50
SPEAKER_03: Right.
6:50
SPEAKER_01: It's guys like that.
6:52
SPEAKER_01: Intellectuals that built this game from nothing in Europe.
6:57
SPEAKER_01: That's what started this game.
6:59
SPEAKER_01: It's not us here.
7:01
SPEAKER_01: We're supposed to be learning from them, twisting it and making it better.
7:05
SPEAKER_01: The players that we get access to are as talented as they were back then, but grossly underdeveloped because of the pulse advertising.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: Back then, guys like me still had a chance.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: Guys like me that came through something different could still get an open-minded Jeff Shook type coach that would say, Hey, we don't even need a goalie, but I'm gonna sign you as the fifth guy because you showed me something at a tryout that I want to see again.
7:30
SPEAKER_01: By the end of it, Shooky trained me for 900 days for free.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: You want to talk about evolution of a player?
7:38
SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't because mommy or daddy paid Jeff Shook.
7:42
SPEAKER_01: He wouldn't take it if I wanted to.
7:43
SPEAKER_02: Was this before you got to Michigan?
7:45
SPEAKER_01: Because at Michigan.
7:46
SPEAKER_01: I met him at Michigan.
7:47
SPEAKER_01: He took a fire on me, dude.
7:49
SPEAKER_02: Hold on.
7:49
SPEAKER_02: Didn't you guys live in like the same neighborhood?
7:51
SPEAKER_01: After, ten years later, we've become best friends.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: He's at my wedding.
7:55
SPEAKER_01: Because you went to North Farmington.
8:00
SPEAKER_02: And he lives in Farmington.
8:01
SPEAKER_01: Now, not then.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: He lived in Lavonia then.
8:04
SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
8:05
SPEAKER_01: Got it.
8:06
SPEAKER_01: I played against you, our senior year.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I remember him well.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: You guys were sick, but you have like Billy Weaver was a good one.
8:13
SPEAKER_02: No, that was my junior year.
8:15
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
8:16
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
8:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
8:17
SPEAKER_01: Billy was there.
8:18
SPEAKER_01: You guys beat us though.
8:19
SPEAKER_02: You guys beat us there.
8:20
SPEAKER_01: We probably beat you in the first half of the season, and then we had a historic switchy switchy.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: I think we won every game at the start, and then every game on the tail end, everybody figured us out, cut off our pipeline, and we couldn't score goals anymore.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: Um so I'm gonna guess we won at the start and not at the at the important part.
8:39
SPEAKER_01: I think we yeah.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: We had some good players.
8:41
SPEAKER_01: You guys had some great players.
8:43
SPEAKER_02: We had Billy.
8:44
SPEAKER_02: Billy was our team.
8:45
SPEAKER_02: Get involved with Billy.
8:48
SPEAKER_02: But uh but you know what?
8:49
SPEAKER_02: I think about this all the time.
8:51
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so uh we lost a couple guys to private school as well.
8:56
SPEAKER_02: Uh we lost BJ Goodman, who was at Detroit Country Day.
8:59
SPEAKER_02: Yep.
9:00
SPEAKER_02: And then Ben Pierman had would have maybe been to Lake Orient or Rochester.
9:05
SPEAKER_02: It was like school choice or something.
9:07
SPEAKER_02: But Billy was like Ben Pierman would have came to Lake Orion.
9:10
SPEAKER_02: And then we would have that would be a sick team my senior year, right?
9:14
SPEAKER_02: But but we lost him.
9:16
SPEAKER_02: But think about today's game with the MLS next.
9:19
SPEAKER_02: Those kids kids like us, we don't get to play because I did I couldn't afford Vardar back in the day, I couldn't afford Wolves back in the day.
9:29
SPEAKER_02: So I can I know I could have made it.
9:31
SPEAKER_02: I know you.
9:32
SPEAKER_02: Where did you play clubs?
9:34
SPEAKER_01: So my family uh really saved our lives by getting out of Ukraine even back then.
9:39
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't exactly the greatest.
9:40
SPEAKER_02: What year did you come over?
9:41
SPEAKER_01: 87, 88?
9:43
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
9:44
SPEAKER_01: So when you do that, and you're obviously coming from communism, so I'm not talking about that we actually had something in the first place, but whatever little bit we did have got taken, and they said, get on this plane and leave.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: We came here with nothing.
9:57
SPEAKER_01: We lived in the projects.
9:59
SPEAKER_01: So am I playing soccer for 10 G's a year?
10:03
SPEAKER_01: No.
10:04
SPEAKER_01: How?
10:05
SPEAKER_01: How impossible.
10:08
SPEAKER_01: So I played for Farmington Fury.
10:10
SPEAKER_01: It was like a couple hundred bucks a year, and dead ass, we were legit.
10:14
SPEAKER_01: We were legit because back then your community club could matter.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't this age of MA inside of youth football, where suddenly community clubs all have to be one of the mega club badges being cannibalized and being completely eradicated.
10:34
SPEAKER_01: And that's what I'm seeing.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: Right.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: The community club has almost completely ceased to exist.
10:38
SPEAKER_01: Farmington Fury still kicking, kicking, still really affordable.
10:45
SPEAKER_01: Parent run, I don't mind it.
10:47
SPEAKER_01: It still exists, and I'm really happy to know that it does, and I've cheered for them ever since throughout this whole process because they've held true to their roots, and I know how hard it is to do that.
11:00
SPEAKER_01: I know the temptation of accepting the new badge.
11:04
SPEAKER_01: I've lived it, man.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: I've been inside this world my whole life.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: Right.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: So I'm watching it, and I'm sad.
11:11
SPEAKER_01: I am sad with what it has become, and I am sad watching the national team that I love, the US, produce the outcome of 20 years of systematic failure to produce a system that can allow what used to happen to happen again.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: Right.
11:31
SPEAKER_01: And we're about to watch it this summer, brother, and it is gonna be even more sad.
11:37
SPEAKER_01: But I genuinely believe that through this little project that we have started here, we're gonna get enough eyeballs and enough ears that listen to it, not because we're somehow footballing geniuses, the exact opposite.
11:53
SPEAKER_01: I don't have an original idea.
11:54
SPEAKER_01: Why would I?
11:55
SPEAKER_01: I have an idea that's worked for a century across, and I've lived it.
11:59
SPEAKER_01: This isn't out of a book.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: I've lived it.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: Right.
12:02
SPEAKER_01: And it does work.
12:04
SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot of hatred on the internet over, oh, this is just impractical.
12:09
SPEAKER_01: How could you possibly start something new?
12:11
SPEAKER_01: It's gonna fail.
12:13
SPEAKER_01: How could you possibly pay your coaches?
12:15
SPEAKER_01: How could you possibly do this?
12:17
SPEAKER_01: You're just going up against a private equity backed giant.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: Dude, I don't care.
12:21
SPEAKER_01: You know how every great evolution in the history of forget soccer, anything is gone.
12:25
SPEAKER_01: Somebody stepped out and said, I'm gonna try.
12:29
SPEAKER_01: And that's what we're doing.
12:30
SPEAKER_01: And I firmly believe that this effort will lead the national team in 2030 to having a player on it, and a second, and a third, and a fourth, and competing.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: Not writing angry emails or litigating or begging the club director for a spot, but competing.
12:50
SPEAKER_01: And our system is not producing competition because it's producing customers.
12:54
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
12:55
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I lost my chain of thought because I'm just like so like dialed in right now.
13:02
SPEAKER_02: I mean, so go into how much you know the system over there, like what we were talking about with your club over there.
13:13
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
13:13
SPEAKER_02: And uh just go into, I mean, okay, so you graduate Michigan, you you start coaching at RSC.
13:20
SPEAKER_02: You don't go right into law, right?
13:22
SPEAKER_01: Did you start did you start law right away?
13:26
SPEAKER_01: I got licensed right away.
13:28
SPEAKER_01: I passed the bar right away.
13:29
SPEAKER_01: I'm intellectually a thoroughbred, I'm just a soccer player that's very average.
13:33
SPEAKER_01: I'm 5'9.
13:34
SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to keep balls out of the net.
13:35
SPEAKER_01: Not in my tiny hands.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: Stop though.
13:37
SPEAKER_01: You're not.
13:37
SPEAKER_01: Well, listen, bro.
13:39
SPEAKER_01: I'm not built to be an elite level footballer.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: I'm built to be an elite level coach.
13:44
SPEAKER_01: I'm built to be an elite level sporting director.
13:46
SPEAKER_01: I'm built to be an elite level attorney, and I am.
13:49
SPEAKER_02: Right.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: Because I'm not 5'9 up here.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: Of course.
13:53
SPEAKER_01: So that's what's up.
13:55
SPEAKER_01: And how do I know that it works in Europe and that it could work here?
13:59
SPEAKER_01: Because I did it.
14:00
SPEAKER_01: I didn't read about it.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: Reading bores me to death.
14:04
SPEAKER_01: Doing is interesting.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: I've done it.
14:07
SPEAKER_01: I don't know how many other guys have done what I've done.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: I hope there are way more real soon.
14:14
SPEAKER_01: But I have done it.
14:15
SPEAKER_01: I have been in the room to shop for franchises in this country.
14:18
SPEAKER_01: I have been in the room to shop for by the way, they're not franchises anywhere else, are they?
14:24
SPEAKER_01: Clubs all over the world.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: Right.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: And I did execute an acquisition.
14:30
SPEAKER_01: I did run it.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: I did win games.
14:32
SPEAKER_01: And guess what?
14:33
SPEAKER_01: I don't talk out of fun little theory.
14:35
SPEAKER_01: Winning games in Europe makes money.
14:37
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't make money here.
14:39
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
14:39
SPEAKER_02: Go into that, right?
14:40
SPEAKER_02: Because like everybody complains about okay, why are all these NFL players and whatnot or celebrities like Rexham are why are they investing in soccer there and not here?
14:51
SPEAKER_02: Well, they make money over there.
14:53
SPEAKER_02: You can't make money.
14:54
SPEAKER_02: You said it.
14:56
SPEAKER_02: MLS, it's not clubs.
14:59
SPEAKER_02: MLS is, if you think about it, MLS is the club.
15:03
SPEAKER_02: And then they have affiliates almost underneath it.
15:08
SPEAKER_02: That's how that's how you have to look at MLS.
15:10
SPEAKER_02: It's not like anybody.
15:12
SPEAKER_02: You could go to a country right now and start a club over there, and we end up and we start in the bottom tier.
15:18
SPEAKER_02: And then we try to clean like climb our way up.
15:21
SPEAKER_02: And maybe we fail.
15:22
SPEAKER_02: Maybe we don't make money.
15:24
SPEAKER_02: But we could climb.
15:26
SPEAKER_02: Here, you have to have what?
15:28
SPEAKER_02: Five a net worth of 500 million to get into the MLS?
15:34
SPEAKER_01: Much more, much more.
15:35
SPEAKER_01: Is it more?
15:35
SPEAKER_01: That's that's the buy-in, buddy.
15:37
SPEAKER_01: Think about the kind of 500 million is?
15:39
SPEAKER_01: Well, think about it.
15:40
SPEAKER_01: If you have the amount of money for the buy-in, no chance on earth are you risking your entire life on that bet.
15:46
SPEAKER_01: Because you're also intelligent.
15:48
SPEAKER_01: Now, are they excellent salespeople?
15:50
SPEAKER_01: Some of the best I've ever met.
15:51
SPEAKER_01: And I've been in a lot of rooms.
15:53
SPEAKER_01: But I don't know that you're going in there and risking your life.
15:56
SPEAKER_01: You have to have a net worth well, well north of many billion dollars to even think about this.
16:04
SPEAKER_01: Because here's how you justify it if you're actually talking ROI.
16:08
SPEAKER_01: There's only one or two ways, and it has nothing to do with winning soccer games because that's not on their mind.
16:14
SPEAKER_01: Right.
16:14
SPEAKER_01: It's real estate or it's tax write-offs.
16:19
SPEAKER_01: It's a loss.
16:21
SPEAKER_01: It's a loss.
16:22
SPEAKER_02: Like think about loss.
16:23
SPEAKER_02: Think about craft in a way.
16:24
SPEAKER_02: It's a loss.
16:25
SPEAKER_02: It's a loss for him.
16:26
SPEAKER_02: It's a loss.
16:27
SPEAKER_01: Fine.
16:28
SPEAKER_01: No problem.
16:28
SPEAKER_01: By the way, I don't judge it.
16:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
16:31
SPEAKER_01: It's fine.
16:32
SPEAKER_01: However, I grew up a certain way from a certain demographic where I happen to think it's intellectually fascinating to make money.
16:40
SPEAKER_01: I love it.
16:41
SPEAKER_01: We came from communism.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: We want to make money.
16:44
SPEAKER_01: Right.
16:44
SPEAKER_01: We don't want to look cool.
16:46
SPEAKER_01: You want to look cool?
16:48
SPEAKER_01: And you're already from generational wealth in this country?
16:51
SPEAKER_01: Go for it, bro.
16:52
SPEAKER_01: You'll look really cool.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: You know what?
16:54
SPEAKER_01: You could look cool owning an NBA team too.
16:56
SPEAKER_01: That's an exclusive club, but they make money.
16:58
SPEAKER_01: You know why?
16:59
SPEAKER_01: People watch the NBA.
17:01
SPEAKER_01: You know what people don't watch?
17:02
SPEAKER_01: Soccer.
17:03
SPEAKER_01: Major League Soccer.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: And I'm addicted to soccer.
17:06
SPEAKER_01: I haven't seen a game, nor will I.
17:07
SPEAKER_01: There's nothing to watch.
17:09
SPEAKER_01: You take a European that loves this game and eats it and can't get enough, and you tell them to watch this, they will laugh at you.
17:18
SPEAKER_01: Do you do you feel that same way about like USL and other leagues?
17:22
SPEAKER_01: 100%.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: All right.
17:24
SPEAKER_01: There was a moment in this city where I loved watching soccer, where I wasn't involved in it.
17:30
SPEAKER_01: And it was called Detroit City FC.
17:32
SPEAKER_01: And I watched it religiously, and I got fueled and inspired and motivated and loved it and was a fan.
17:37
SPEAKER_01: I'm still a fan, God bless them.
17:39
SPEAKER_01: I get that.
17:40
SPEAKER_01: Back in the day.
17:40
SPEAKER_01: But when they were in the NPSL, got it, and they were fighting giants, it looked like European football, man.
17:48
SPEAKER_01: That looked like the game.
17:50
SPEAKER_03: Right.
17:50
SPEAKER_01: Guys hungry to prove something.
17:52
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
17:53
SPEAKER_01: That's the game.
17:54
SPEAKER_01: Now, could they do that and go up the levels?
17:57
SPEAKER_01: Of course not.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: Of course not.
18:00
SPEAKER_01: Because our system is designed to prohibit sporting merit.
18:05
SPEAKER_01: And then we wonder, for the ones of us that care, I'm one of them, why our teams can't compete.
18:10
SPEAKER_01: It's simple.
18:11
SPEAKER_01: I can speak Russian fluently for one reason.
18:13
SPEAKER_01: I was born into it.
18:14
SPEAKER_02: Right.
18:15
SPEAKER_01: I am not going to go and learn Portuguese at a native level.
18:18
SPEAKER_01: Can I learn it?
18:19
SPEAKER_01: Hell yeah, I can learn it.
18:20
SPEAKER_01: But I will always sound like an American speaking Portuguese.
18:23
SPEAKER_01: Our players can't play European football.
18:26
SPEAKER_01: It's impossible.
18:27
SPEAKER_01: It's impossible.
18:29
SPEAKER_01: They have developed there.
18:31
SPEAKER_01: We will always have this tinge of developing here.
18:35
SPEAKER_01: How much of it until we don't.
18:37
SPEAKER_02: How much of it is culture though?
18:40
SPEAKER_02: In terms of the development, right?
18:41
SPEAKER_02: Is it co like everybody blames coaches and youth coaches, which it pays?
18:46
SPEAKER_01: No, youth coaches are good people.
18:47
SPEAKER_02: They're good.
18:48
SPEAKER_01: We're doing these.
18:49
SPEAKER_01: By the way, pay-to-play are good people too.
18:50
SPEAKER_01: I got nothing against pay-to-play.
18:52
SPEAKER_01: Of course.
18:52
SPEAKER_01: But if we're talking about producing world competitive soccer players, we can't under the current system.
19:02
SPEAKER_01: It is impossible.
19:03
SPEAKER_01: And when I got to make those decisions, and by the way, we did make money.
19:08
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: We had success, the club that I acquired and ran.
19:12
SPEAKER_03: Right.
19:12
SPEAKER_01: But someone will eventually ask, hey Lubes, did you sign an American?
19:18
SPEAKER_01: And I will tell you, not just because I didn't want to, but because I obviously ran the club well.
19:26
SPEAKER_01: I spoke to agents, I spoke to other sporting directors, I spoke to insiders of the field.
19:31
SPEAKER_01: It's not taken seriously.
19:34
SPEAKER_01: So, no, of course not.
19:35
SPEAKER_01: Because what I wasn't going to do, and this happens in the NFL, I wasn't going to, as the sporting director, force feed something on my coach who is a legend.
19:45
SPEAKER_01: Dude, the guy I hired to run that club, 100 plus goals in La Liga.
19:50
SPEAKER_01: 100 as a player, coached at Real, coached at the highest level.
19:55
SPEAKER_01: We got him to go to a small little village to change it.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: And we lived it and we loved it.
20:04
SPEAKER_01: And the last thing I was going to do is force feed an American pay-to-play player on him.
20:09
SPEAKER_01: I'm not insane.
20:11
SPEAKER_01: I'm just passionate.
20:12
SPEAKER_01: That team was built with Europeans, South Americans, and we won.
20:19
SPEAKER_01: And we got paid for winning.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: It's impossible here.
20:23
SPEAKER_01: Today.
20:24
SPEAKER_02: This episode is brought to you by the North American Soccer Expo.
20:28
SPEAKER_02: If you remember last year when I had Alexi Lawless on, so many of you were blown away and kept on messaging me, how did you get Alexi Lawless to talk to you?
20:38
SPEAKER_02: And to be honest with you, it was the North American Soccer Expo.
20:42
SPEAKER_02: The expo has workshops and seminars and field presentations from top coaches and industry experts.
20:50
SPEAKER_02: I will be there this year.
20:52
SPEAKER_02: 100%.
20:53
SPEAKER_02: I'll be set up on podcast row.
20:55
SPEAKER_02: In addition to the podcasts that I'm going to be filming there, I'm also going to have an open hour where any coach at the expo or anybody at the expo can come sit down at the chair and have a one-on-one 15-minute chat with me, and you guys can just come and chat and talk about whatever you want.
21:14
SPEAKER_02: North American Soccer Expo, July 30th to August 1st, Novae, Michigan.
21:19
SPEAKER_02: I'll see you there.
21:20
SPEAKER_02: So how do you get paid?
21:22
SPEAKER_02: In terms of the obviously the fans and the gate, but also as you climb leagues, you get money and you get paid.
21:33
SPEAKER_01: Our team made no money from fans.
21:34
SPEAKER_01: Our team made no money from gate.
21:36
SPEAKER_01: Our team made no money from the entertainment off the field.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: Our model is different.
21:40
SPEAKER_02: Okay, go.
21:41
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
21:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sure.
21:43
SPEAKER_01: I acquired a club in a country you never would have heard of.
21:46
SPEAKER_01: God knows I didn't, because again, I shopped all over the world.
21:49
SPEAKER_02: What country?
21:50
SPEAKER_01: It's called Andorra.
21:51
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
21:53
SPEAKER_01: Size of Northville, Michigan, my friend.
21:55
SPEAKER_01: Nestled in the Pyrenees Mountains, between Spain, Portugal, and France.
22:01
SPEAKER_01: I could go for about 30 hours about why.
22:04
SPEAKER_01: I will tell you, intellectually fascinating, legally fascinating, business-wise fascinating.
22:08
SPEAKER_01: But let's talk about it.
22:09
SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about our model.
22:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, go.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: That country is so small that there is essentially three venues.
22:22
SPEAKER_01: You don't pay rent.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: There's a venue.
22:25
SPEAKER_01: There's like the national team venue.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: There's the domestic league venue.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: Oh, by the way, in a country the size of Northville, Michigan, I'll just let you know academically for fun, they have pro rel.
22:36
SPEAKER_01: I'll just let you know academically for fun.
22:39
SPEAKER_01: You could drop not just a tier two, but you could go lower.
22:42
SPEAKER_01: I could tell you intellectually that if you start doing math and you start thinking logically, that means that the gas station attendant in Andorra probably plays football in a professional pyramid.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: Do the math.
22:55
SPEAKER_01: 80,000 people live there.
22:57
SPEAKER_01: Three leagues feeding into one another.
23:00
SPEAKER_01: We acquired in the top league.
23:02
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
23:03
SPEAKER_01: We acquired one of the most winning clubs, not franchises.
23:10
SPEAKER_01: I'm Americanized now, bro.
23:11
SPEAKER_01: It's terrible.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: I want to say franchise.
23:13
SPEAKER_01: There is no franchise.
23:16
SPEAKER_01: So we go into this and we get the winningest one that just had a bad year.
23:23
SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
23:24
SPEAKER_01: We get our hands on it less than 30 days before the next season starts.
23:29
SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
23:30
SPEAKER_01: You know what that means?
23:32
SPEAKER_01: We bring in our own staff.
23:34
SPEAKER_01: We bring in our own players.
23:35
SPEAKER_01: I chose every guy, bro.
23:37
SPEAKER_01: Every one of them.
23:38
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
23:39
SPEAKER_01: So how do you make money?
23:42
SPEAKER_01: Well, you win.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: So it's a small place.
23:47
SPEAKER_01: No one's watching Andorran football on television.
23:51
SPEAKER_01: Right.
23:51
SPEAKER_01: No one's paying money to get into these games.
23:53
SPEAKER_01: It's a little place.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: But guess what?
23:56
SPEAKER_01: You win there, you go somewhere bigger, don't you?
23:58
SPEAKER_01: Because that's how real football works.
24:01
SPEAKER_01: Hello, ladies.
24:02
SPEAKER_01: We went to Europe.
24:04
SPEAKER_01: We had domestic success and got into European competition.
24:08
SPEAKER_01: And guess who watches that?
24:10
SPEAKER_02: Everybody.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: Everybody.
24:13
SPEAKER_01: And when people watch, you get paid.
24:15
SPEAKER_01: Does anyone watch the MLS?
24:16
SPEAKER_01: I sure hope not.
24:18
SPEAKER_01: I sure hope not.
24:19
SPEAKER_01: But I'm sure they get a little bit.
24:21
SPEAKER_01: But they hide behind ambiguous numbers.
24:25
SPEAKER_01: Right?
24:25
SPEAKER_01: Like, what's this Apple TV deal?
24:27
SPEAKER_01: Who's watching it?
24:28
SPEAKER_01: Like, is it super clear that it's even close to the viewership of like the WNBA, for example?
24:34
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
24:35
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
24:36
SPEAKER_01: But over there, you're talking about European competition.
24:41
SPEAKER_01: I still watch it.
24:42
SPEAKER_02: Right, of course.
24:43
SPEAKER_01: We all do.
24:44
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
24:45
SPEAKER_01: All over the world, people want to see this because it's intoxicating.
24:48
SPEAKER_01: Right.
24:48
SPEAKER_01: So if a club from a little place like that starts to go in Europe and make a little bit of a run, you get revenue every time you win.
24:58
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
24:58
SPEAKER_01: It's shared.
24:59
SPEAKER_01: There's a coefficient.
25:00
SPEAKER_01: UEFA has a coefficient.
25:02
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: And if you win a game, you get paid.
25:04
SPEAKER_01: And you win another one, you get paid more.
25:05
SPEAKER_01: You win another one, you get paid more.
25:06
SPEAKER_01: Right.
25:07
SPEAKER_01: And I know all of those numbers.
25:08
SPEAKER_01: And every year they do only one thing, they go up because more people watch it.
25:12
SPEAKER_02: I talked to uh Joe Funichello from Soccer Visa.
25:15
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
25:15
SPEAKER_02: Do you know him at all?
25:16
SPEAKER_02: So he uh he him as a player, he made Europa League.
25:22
SPEAKER_02: And his club made like something like$250,000 each game.
25:27
SPEAKER_02: There you go.
25:28
SPEAKER_02: And then and then as you make the knockout stages and everything, it's just more and more and more.
25:34
SPEAKER_02: Is that I mean, obviously that's what you're talking about.
25:37
SPEAKER_01: You are correct, but it's not a fictitious artifact, it's real.
25:40
SPEAKER_01: And if you have anyone with capital, heart, desire, risk-taking ability, there is no choice to be made between investing a dollar in the United States versus investing a dollar in Europe.
25:53
SPEAKER_01: It's an easy decision.
25:55
SPEAKER_02: So go into the cost over there versus the cost here.
25:59
SPEAKER_02: In terms of, okay, you're renting this facility.
26:02
SPEAKER_02: Did you have to rent facilities over there, or was it just uh available?
26:07
SPEAKER_01: Every single one of them is unique.
26:08
SPEAKER_01: I've shopped all over the world.
26:09
SPEAKER_01: I've shopped in South America, I've shopped in probably roughly 35 European markets to land on the one that I chose.
26:17
SPEAKER_01: You can do an MLS model over there as far as prestige ego-driven tax write-off.
26:22
SPEAKER_01: They exist, and you can do it, and you can burn and you can bleed and you can have all the fun looking cool you want.
26:27
SPEAKER_01: But here's what you can do there that you cannot do here.
26:32
SPEAKER_01: You can also do what we did.
26:34
SPEAKER_01: You can find a market, you can find an undervalued asset, you can flip it around, and you can cash flow.
26:41
SPEAKER_01: You are not cash flowing in the United States of American professional soccer.
26:45
SPEAKER_01: I don't care who you are, you cannot.
26:49
SPEAKER_01: You cannot turn it around and go up through the levels.
26:52
SPEAKER_01: You cannot.
26:54
SPEAKER_01: You cannot attract eyeballs here, really.
26:57
SPEAKER_01: You might sign a retiring player and get some fans in the stands, but are you making up for the rest of it that way?
27:04
SPEAKER_01: Come on, man.
27:04
SPEAKER_01: Let's not kid ourselves.
27:06
SPEAKER_02: Go into like the money out in terms of solidarity payments for players and training compensation for the players that you did sign.
27:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
27:16
SPEAKER_02: Like go into go into that.
27:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, man.
27:20
SPEAKER_01: There's all sorts of mechanisms that are foreign to Americans because they don't exist here truly.
27:26
SPEAKER_01: Do they exist in a closed system?
27:28
SPEAKER_01: Of course.
27:28
SPEAKER_01: But dude, but they block it.
27:30
SPEAKER_01: If I were to walk into a European room and explain designated players or how the league actually operates, or here's the what, dude, I was literally on a podcast in Sweden last week because I have lived in both continents, so it's fun.
27:46
SPEAKER_01: They cannot stop laughing when I'm describing the fact that there is a salary cap.
27:53
SPEAKER_01: It is nuts.
27:54
SPEAKER_01: It is nuts.
27:55
SPEAKER_01: It is by design boring.
27:58
SPEAKER_01: You you have just assured mediocrity with your structuring.
28:03
SPEAKER_01: If not only can you lose by an unlimited amount and still be in the league, but you can't even pay more than others without being either on the sly or your DPs are somehow there's a side deal.
28:16
SPEAKER_01: Dude, it's like it's brutal.
28:20
SPEAKER_01: So now you've got parity by design, it's boring by design.
28:24
SPEAKER_01: You know what intellectually fuels actual intellectuals?
28:29
SPEAKER_01: Somebody bleeding capital here on purpose for whatever reason.
28:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
28:34
SPEAKER_01: Investing whatever they want.
28:36
SPEAKER_01: There's teams that have over a billion on their starting 11.
28:41
SPEAKER_01: Right.
28:42
SPEAKER_01: And you come in with your little village in Andorra and you want to give it a go, you can.
28:48
SPEAKER_01: You can.
28:50
SPEAKER_01: And you can not only do the difference.
28:53
SPEAKER_01: Which of course they do.
28:55
SPEAKER_01: But you want to talk about developing an American mind that might actually help us win a World Cup.
29:02
SPEAKER_01: Guess what we have right now?
29:04
SPEAKER_01: We have one of the softest outputs of system in the world.
29:09
SPEAKER_01: And we have to go up against actual opposition.
29:12
SPEAKER_01: It's going to take an American, Justin Marshall, we missed, bro.
29:16
SPEAKER_01: It's going to take an American that has had to figure it out to tactically adjust, to intellectually adjust, and to convince the men, the men, that it's worth the effort.
29:32
SPEAKER_01: And right now, the way that we develop players, good luck.
29:35
SPEAKER_01: I don't care if you put Pep Guardiola in the room, we're losing, bro.
29:39
SPEAKER_01: You cannot convince the product of a customer service system that they're inadequate.
29:46
SPEAKER_01: They have been brainwashed that they can actually compete.
29:50
SPEAKER_01: It is a painful, you've coached.
29:53
SPEAKER_01: Good luck coaching those egos without the actual base that allows an ego.
29:58
SPEAKER_01: You want to talk about ego, bro.
30:01
SPEAKER_01: Global players have ego.
30:02
SPEAKER_01: They also have hard youth, a hard pathway, a hard development, an ability to persevere and to become that ego.
30:13
SPEAKER_01: Here.
30:18
SPEAKER_01: He played at Michigan Rush.
30:21
SPEAKER_01: And I don't blame him because I do believe him to be our current generational superstar.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: And he's an incredible talent.
30:27
SPEAKER_01: However, once again, I cannot speak native Portuguese no matter how hard I try.
30:33
SPEAKER_01: I can speak Portuguese.
30:35
SPEAKER_01: But am I gonna go into a room and really trick some people?
30:38
SPEAKER_01: No, bro.
30:39
SPEAKER_01: No.
30:40
SPEAKER_01: And I get it.
30:41
SPEAKER_01: Some of these guys have made the best clubs.
30:46
SPEAKER_01: But are they truly hardened, elite killers?
30:50
SPEAKER_01: No.
30:51
SPEAKER_01: No.
30:51
SPEAKER_01: Why?
30:52
SPEAKER_01: Because we can't produce that.
30:54
SPEAKER_01: Nor, and this might be one of the wildest things you hear me say, we are not trying to.
31:01
SPEAKER_01: We are trying to run a safe, predictable business.
31:06
SPEAKER_01: I'm an MA attorney.
31:07
SPEAKER_01: I understand why things get built a certain way, and I understand the impact it can have on the actual product.
31:13
SPEAKER_01: And it's one thing when you do a roll-up of medical offices and the quality of care suffers a bit, but you're still making tremendous revenue because you've centralized and you've done all of these things to somehow optimize customer retention.
31:29
SPEAKER_01: Okay, but I'm addicted to soccer.
31:32
SPEAKER_01: So to watch that same mentality take the easy road to making profit in this country, it drives me nuts.
31:42
SPEAKER_01: Because we do have the talent, they're just priced out at four years old.
31:48
SPEAKER_02: It's true.
31:49
SPEAKER_02: How, okay, go back to the salary cap stuff.
31:52
SPEAKER_02: Because what what everybody hates, and this is an American thing, Major League Baseball, it's always the Yankees.
32:00
SPEAKER_02: It's always it's always the Dodgers, right?
32:03
SPEAKER_02: And then whoever has the biggest bank usually wins.
32:07
SPEAKER_02: Very rarely does like the lowest payroll ever win in baseball.
32:12
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
32:13
SPEAKER_02: Could the system could a pro role system work with a salary cap?
32:19
unknown: Yeah.
32:19
SPEAKER_02: So that it's not always, okay, throughout our lives, we can name five clubs that are always, at least three of them are always in the top four of the EPL.
32:31
SPEAKER_02: You got Arsenal, you got Liverpool, you got Manchester United, you got Man City, and then who am I leaving out?
32:40
SPEAKER_02: It's always one of those, always one, always two or three of those clubs.
32:45
SPEAKER_02: And it gets, for me, that gets boring.
32:48
SPEAKER_02: I gotcha.
32:49
SPEAKER_02: I loved the best year of the EPL when Leicester City won.
32:54
SPEAKER_02: That was the by far.
32:55
SPEAKER_02: And that proves that that would be like, I don't know who has the lowest payroll in the Major League Baseball, but it's like the cheapest.
33:01
SPEAKER_02: It's like in the NFL, the cheapest owners are like the Cincinnati Bengals.
33:05
SPEAKER_02: They're never winning shit.
33:06
SPEAKER_02: So, you know what I mean?
33:07
SPEAKER_02: Like, so I don't know.
33:11
SPEAKER_02: Do you think that there's we could have an Americanized system of pro rel?
33:18
SPEAKER_02: Or is it we have to go no salary cap?
33:20
SPEAKER_02: That means Miami is going to win every MLS league.
33:24
SPEAKER_02: If if they got rid of the salary cap, Miami would just win everything for the rest of our lives.
33:30
SPEAKER_02: What's the fun in that?
33:31
SPEAKER_02: Unless you're in Miami, unless you're born in Miami.
33:34
SPEAKER_02: What do you think?
33:35
SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you what I think, buddy.
33:36
SPEAKER_01: Do it.
33:38
SPEAKER_01: Billy Bean is what I think.
33:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, money ball.
33:42
SPEAKER_01: Moneyball is what I think.
33:44
SPEAKER_01: Intellectual solution against problem as opposed to systematic avoidance of problem is why our country loses at stuff other than soccer.
33:57
SPEAKER_01: It's why our country is producing some of the least successful graduating high school classes I've ever seen.
34:06
SPEAKER_01: Boots on the ground, bro.
34:08
SPEAKER_01: Look at our educational system.
34:10
SPEAKER_01: Read the coddling of the American mind.
34:12
SPEAKER_01: Kids aren't even driving at 16 for the most part because they're paralyzed.
34:16
SPEAKER_01: And they just do Uber.
34:17
SPEAKER_01: Paralyzed by parental intervention and societal gloves.
34:23
SPEAKER_01: Uh-oh.
34:24
SPEAKER_01: Little Johnny might fall off his bike.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: Bro, my kids fall off the bike, dog.
34:30
SPEAKER_01: And my kids will not fail.
34:32
SPEAKER_01: Right.
34:33
SPEAKER_01: They will fail correctly because failure is a requisite part of success.
34:39
SPEAKER_01: You avoid the failure, you're delaying the most painful thing in the world for what now is an adult American, which is, dude, I joke about it, but it might be a 50-year-old.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: It is sad.
34:52
SPEAKER_01: So, Billy Bean, yeah, Leicester City's a great story.
34:56
SPEAKER_01: Look at Spurs.
34:57
SPEAKER_01: Look at what they invested.
34:59
SPEAKER_01: Look at the stadium that they're building, and they're on a relegation battle.
35:03
SPEAKER_01: That's fun.
35:04
SPEAKER_01: You want to talk about how people despise, you know, the upper, they've got generational wealth, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
35:12
SPEAKER_01: Dude, I would love to watch inner Miami overinvest above everybody else and then get relegated.
35:19
SPEAKER_01: That's real.
35:21
SPEAKER_01: That's fun.
35:22
SPEAKER_01: That's someone to root against.
35:23
SPEAKER_01: That's a villain.
35:25
SPEAKER_01: Those clubs don't always win.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: This is soccer.
35:27
SPEAKER_01: We need to be able to do that.
35:28
SPEAKER_01: Statistically, soccer is one of the most luck-driven sports in the world.
35:33
SPEAKER_01: Now, if you can weaponize tactical, you can weaponize motivational, you can weaponize an actual output of a system that produces men and not customers, you can beat a budget of any size, unlimited.
35:51
SPEAKER_01: Because at some point, those egos on those wages are what I like to call unmotivated men.
36:01
SPEAKER_01: If you start being paid a billion to be on a team, are you really at that point trying your hardest?
36:07
SPEAKER_01: Are you really at that point still trying to prove anything?
36:10
SPEAKER_01: Why is the MLS the one of, we're not the only, but one of the best retirement leagues in the world?
36:16
SPEAKER_01: Because Messi, should he so choose, could be the best player in this league for another 25 years.
36:22
SPEAKER_01: I wish that was a joke.
36:24
SPEAKER_02: Oh no, Ronaldo's gonna come here when he's 45.
36:26
SPEAKER_01: And why not?
36:28
SPEAKER_01: We have become a parody.
36:30
SPEAKER_01: Mike Tyson is still fighting.
36:32
SPEAKER_01: People watch.
36:33
SPEAKER_01: It's entertaining.
36:34
SPEAKER_01: I watch.
36:35
SPEAKER_02: I watch, yeah.
36:36
SPEAKER_01: But that's entertainment knowing what you're paying for.
36:40
SPEAKER_01: This is false football.
36:42
SPEAKER_01: I will not watch.
36:44
SPEAKER_01: Until they treat it as the joke that it is, I will not watch.
36:48
SPEAKER_01: You want to put Messi in an arena against the output of the pay-to-play system, one versus 30.
36:54
SPEAKER_01: I'll pay a hundred bucks to watch that game.
36:56
SPEAKER_01: Now you've made it an event.
36:58
SPEAKER_01: Now you've taken the great parts of sportstainment and been honest.
37:05
SPEAKER_01: Forget this transparency problem, bro.
37:07
SPEAKER_01: Be honest.
37:08
SPEAKER_01: Let's see if the graduating class of MLS Next can beat Lionel Messi 11 versus 1.
37:17
SPEAKER_01: I'll pay happily.
37:20
SPEAKER_01: But you're telling me that our actual top tier of football, which is closed, is a watchable sport.
37:28
SPEAKER_01: It's not a sport.
37:30
SPEAKER_01: It's not a sport.
37:32
SPEAKER_01: That's why Europeans can't possibly take it seriously.
37:37
SPEAKER_02: What what was the okay?
37:40
SPEAKER_02: When you own this team, do you still own the team?
37:43
SPEAKER_01: Or do you still uh you sold?
37:45
SPEAKER_01: I'm not involved at all anymore.
37:47
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
37:49
SPEAKER_02: Really two questions.
37:50
SPEAKER_02: One, who did you play when you got into Europe?
37:52
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
37:53
SPEAKER_02: And then two, uh damn it.
38:00
SPEAKER_02: Um go on.
38:02
SPEAKER_02: Uh okay, go into that.
38:03
SPEAKER_02: Who did you play?
38:04
SPEAKER_02: Who did you play?
38:05
SPEAKER_02: And then I'll and then I'll tell you who we lost to remember my question.
38:08
SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you who we lost to because that's probably the most fun.
38:10
SPEAKER_01: The other clubs, while they're fun for me, don't really carry weight with an American audience.
38:16
SPEAKER_01: But this one does because this club has had American players.
38:19
SPEAKER_01: Oh boy.
38:20
SPEAKER_01: We lost to AZ Alkmar.
38:23
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
38:24
SPEAKER_01: That club has had US men's national team players play on it.
38:30
SPEAKER_01: That club had a budget 50 times, 5-0, 50 times the size of my club's budget.
38:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
38:38
SPEAKER_01: And we took them to the real deal.
38:42
SPEAKER_01: We gave it a game.
38:43
SPEAKER_01: We had an experience.
38:45
SPEAKER_01: Their stadium is not in a small village.
38:48
SPEAKER_01: Their stadium is like an MLS stadium, buddy.
38:50
SPEAKER_01: Right.
38:51
SPEAKER_01: And for our players to earn their way, there's a big difference, bro, between mommy giving little lubes a car and little lubes getting a job and buying one.
39:01
SPEAKER_01: Our players earned their way into that stadium.
39:06
SPEAKER_01: They will never forget that moment, nor will I.
39:09
SPEAKER_01: It is a life-defining moment.
39:12
SPEAKER_01: I don't remember quite a few of the legal battles I've been in because they're easy for me.
39:19
SPEAKER_01: I have this.
39:21
SPEAKER_01: I can tell you with specificity every time I pull the ball out of the top corner of the frame because I'm 5'9.
39:30
SPEAKER_01: It's an addiction.
39:32
SPEAKER_01: You create a system that allows addicts to thrive, people watch.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: You create a system that allows mediocrity to be customers.
39:39
SPEAKER_01: Their own parents may not watch.
39:41
SPEAKER_01: There might be a better coffee shop down the street.
39:44
SPEAKER_01: And that is what we have.
39:45
SPEAKER_02: That's a good point.
39:46
SPEAKER_02: That's a very good point.
39:48
SPEAKER_02: I remember my question.
39:49
SPEAKER_02: Super League, when they try to do that, right?
39:52
SPEAKER_02: And they try to close the system.
39:54
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
39:54
SPEAKER_02: Are they trying to actively adopt the American system over there?
39:59
SPEAKER_02: They're trying to get rid of promotion and relegation for safety, right?
40:03
SPEAKER_02: And I don't know about salary cap.
40:05
SPEAKER_02: They probably can't do that at this point, but like go like it's so funny because they're trying to copy us because they want the security and the closed system.
40:18
SPEAKER_02: And we are trying to copy them and have promotion relegation and an open system.
40:24
SPEAKER_02: And it's like, is it is the reason why we think that we are so far behind is because it's the global game.
40:32
SPEAKER_02: It's not like, but this is happening in other sports too.
40:35
SPEAKER_02: Other countries are developing better players than we are in basketball.
40:39
SPEAKER_02: You name the five best basketball players outside of Cade Cunningham.
40:44
SPEAKER_02: Uh, if you name the five best basketball players, they're Europeans.
40:47
SPEAKER_02: You got Jokic, Giannis, Luca, like they're all Europeans.
40:54
SPEAKER_02: Don't even start about hockey, although USA, finally.
40:57
SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
40:59
SPEAKER_02: But you know, I I don't know.
41:03
SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you straight up, that was one of the scariest moments of my entire professional life.
41:07
SPEAKER_01: Because at that time, that all of this went from behind closed doors to public facing to announcement, if you recall, was during COVID.
41:18
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
41:18
SPEAKER_01: So what ruled the airwaves?
41:20
SPEAKER_01: COVID.
41:21
SPEAKER_01: COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID.
41:23
SPEAKER_01: There was so much stuff going on that wasn't getting any publicity until the European Super League.
41:31
SPEAKER_01: The first media break in COVID was that, which makes it even more memorable because it shifted everything in the media to finally have a distraction.
41:42
SPEAKER_01: But dude, to me, that was far scarier than a pandemic.
41:47
SPEAKER_01: Was our business model was an inch from becoming theirs, and it was horrifying.
41:56
SPEAKER_01: And if you recall, it wasn't a hypothetical, dude.
42:00
SPEAKER_01: They announced it.
42:01
SPEAKER_01: It was close.
42:02
SPEAKER_01: They had a dozen clubs chartered to be part of it.
42:07
SPEAKER_01: It was signed, sealed, delivered, and then people rioted.
42:15
SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't riots from places like Andorra exclusively.
42:21
SPEAKER_01: The most germane part of this whole situation was the riots were from the 12 clubs themselves, not the owner, the fans.
42:30
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
42:31
SPEAKER_01: What an awful, unbearable thought intellectually to have to watch this thing.
42:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
42:38
SPEAKER_01: This terrible, terrible output that is not sport at all.
42:45
SPEAKER_01: And those riots had success for a while.
42:50
SPEAKER_01: Do I still lose sleep at night thinking that our model might make its way over there?
42:55
SPEAKER_01: Of course I do, because it has.
42:57
SPEAKER_00: You know.
42:58
SPEAKER_00: It has.
42:58
SPEAKER_00: You know that.
42:59
SPEAKER_01: The European Super League is only one thing.
43:01
SPEAKER_01: There are so many ways that our model has polluted European football.
43:06
SPEAKER_01: Number one, European football is launching clubs and academies joking and laughing their way to the bank because God knows you're not going to play for those clubs if you sign up for ADGs a year to be in that club here.
43:21
SPEAKER_01: But they are adding it to their PL statement.
43:26
SPEAKER_01: Here's the other one.
43:28
SPEAKER_01: And I know this because I am a former professional soccer coach in the United States.
43:35
SPEAKER_01: You know who else is doing this?
43:38
SPEAKER_01: European pay to play pro teams.
43:41
SPEAKER_01: Fake pro soccer.
43:43
SPEAKER_01: And I know because I believe in open trials, always will.
43:49
SPEAKER_01: So I let everyone come.
43:51
SPEAKER_01: And then when I look at some of the god awful most players I've ever seen, they're American kids that say they played professionally.
44:00
SPEAKER_01: And these pods in Spain and England and all these other countries, all they're doing is extending pay to play over there and saying you're on a 7th division professional team.
44:12
SPEAKER_01: You just gotta pay.
44:15
SPEAKER_01: Bro, I've sat in on those meetings because I was doing P2P youth soccer here for a while, and some of my players, by the way, no one's to blame at all.
44:26
SPEAKER_01: This is awful.
44:27
SPEAKER_01: It is some of the worst false advertising I've ever seen in my life.
44:30
SPEAKER_01: There's really good people, really good club directors, really good coaches, really good parents, really good kids.
44:35
SPEAKER_01: They're victims.
44:37
SPEAKER_01: True victims.
44:39
SPEAKER_01: Dude, I, other than franchises for pro teams here, which are incredible salespeople, here's your next wave of incredible salespeople, fake European pro soccer salespeople.
44:50
SPEAKER_01: Oh baby.
44:52
SPEAKER_01: I sat in and my man is like, you can come in.
44:57
SPEAKER_01: My man's multilingual, looks like a dude from like Shrek, like one of the comedic villain princes, like Lord Farquad.
45:06
SPEAKER_01: Bro, I would date this guy, but unfortunately I'm married and I have two kids.
45:10
SPEAKER_01: So, but he is one of the best looking guys I've ever seen.
45:13
SPEAKER_01: And he's naming American college coaches in six languages, bro.
45:18
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, oh boy, what do I pay?
45:20
SPEAKER_01: I want to go be a pro over there.
45:23
SPEAKER_01: Sixty thousand American dollars a year.
45:27
SPEAKER_01: And here's what happens: you fly over, you're obviously not on the pro team.
45:33
SPEAKER_01: We perfected this ourselves, by the way.
45:35
SPEAKER_01: You're not on the reserve team.
45:37
SPEAKER_01: We perfected this ourselves, by the way.
45:39
SPEAKER_01: You're just dropping the tag of whatever color is on the end of this club.
45:44
SPEAKER_01: We perfected this over here, they just took it.
45:47
SPEAKER_01: You're not even on the field with the coaches, but you're still paying that massive tuition.
45:53
SPEAKER_01: You're living in this little dorm, and you'll never step foot on a field with an actual pro.
45:58
SPEAKER_01: That's going on right now?
46:00
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
46:01
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
46:02
SPEAKER_01: I know it because I've been in the room.
46:05
SPEAKER_01: I have the ability to launch a business in this sport in whatever way I so please.
46:11
SPEAKER_01: I refuse.
46:12
SPEAKER_01: I want to launch a business.
46:16
SPEAKER_01: And let me be clear, Jason.
46:18
SPEAKER_01: What we are doing with Metro is not a charity.
46:22
SPEAKER_01: This is not a 501c3, let's save the world play.
46:27
SPEAKER_01: This is a business play.
46:30
SPEAKER_01: That's when it gets really sexy.
46:32
SPEAKER_01: Because in my real world, I do meet with family offices, I do meet with PE, and some of them care about ROI above ego.
46:42
SPEAKER_01: And when you talk about making money in pro soccer, there's only one way, bro.
46:47
SPEAKER_01: It's this way that I just said.
46:49
SPEAKER_01: Now, has anyone launched it in the US successfully?
46:52
SPEAKER_01: Not yet.
46:54
SPEAKER_01: But who cares?
46:56
SPEAKER_01: Because if you can do what we are already doing, this isn't out of a book.
47:01
SPEAKER_01: And you can train on that field.
47:04
SPEAKER_01: And you can say, yeah, maybe you pay 10K a year to somebody else, or 80K and you're from an academy, or zero and you're from the inner city.
47:11
unknown: I don't care.
47:13
SPEAKER_01: Come try out.
47:15
SPEAKER_01: You can build a roster and not a customer service model.
47:20
SPEAKER_01: And your roster is never set because I cut players like it's a bodily function.
47:24
SPEAKER_02: Right.
47:24
SPEAKER_01: You know why?
47:25
SPEAKER_01: Because that's how that's how you make a player.
47:28
SPEAKER_02: That's how they do it over there.
47:30
SPEAKER_02: And I'm so sick.
47:31
SPEAKER_02: I'm so sick of the youth academies being like pumped up, like, oh, they develop so many players.
47:36
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they cut players every single day.
47:38
SPEAKER_02: Like, who what happened to the kid that Messi replaced?
47:43
SPEAKER_02: Nobody talks about that kid.
47:44
SPEAKER_02: Did he make it or did they cut him?
47:46
SPEAKER_02: Like, if it was all about the youth academies over there, if it was all about the youth academies over there, every kid that they get at eight would would make it.
47:56
SPEAKER_02: But instead, they cut kids, and that's what you're talking about.
47:59
SPEAKER_02: The culture and the and the livelihood of climbing that ladder, where our kids are middle class, middle to up.
48:11
SPEAKER_02: There's some cases, of course, of some players, you know, lower they got scholarshipped and and they help got helped, of course, and I support that.
48:21
SPEAKER_02: But for the most part, any kid that's gonna make it, those uh those MLS next kids, they're paying three thousand dollars.
48:29
SPEAKER_02: Where do the parents get that money?
48:31
SPEAKER_02: Are they either are they going into debt or they just have the money because they're middle class or upper upper class, right?
48:38
SPEAKER_02: And we just lack that culture of that suffering.
48:42
SPEAKER_02: We don't have suffering.
48:43
SPEAKER_02: There's no hunger in paradise.
48:45
SPEAKER_02: Have you ever read that book or seen that documentary?
48:48
SPEAKER_02: There's no hunger in paradise.
48:49
SPEAKER_02: When you're when you're born into a system like this where it is all pay to pay, the kids that can't afford it, you know what they do?
48:59
SPEAKER_02: They don't play soccer.
49:01
SPEAKER_02: They just they play they pick up a basketball, they pick up a football.
49:05
SPEAKER_01: You're you're you're clearly you're in love with this game like I am, and you're highly intelligent, and you just connected my Portuguese native speaking argument to youth soccer.
49:14
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
49:15
SPEAKER_01: There is your output right there.
49:17
SPEAKER_01: That is not designed to produce a player.
49:20
SPEAKER_01: You want to show me a player who's never succeeded, show me a player who's never been cut.
49:24
SPEAKER_01: Show me a player who's never failed.
49:26
SPEAKER_01: Show me a player who's never been on a field against superior opposition and had to figure it out.
49:31
SPEAKER_01: Right.
49:31
SPEAKER_01: We aren't even trying.
49:34
SPEAKER_02: Think about Messi, right?
49:35
SPEAKER_02: Messi was air quotes, a midget.
49:39
SPEAKER_02: He he had to get a human gross uh hormone.
49:43
SPEAKER_02: You don't think that's suffering?
49:44
SPEAKER_02: That's suffering.
49:45
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he was the best on the planet, but yeah, that's suffering.
49:48
SPEAKER_02: Didn't Cristiano Ronaldo had a heart attack when he was like 13.
49:52
SPEAKER_02: Like, that's suffering.
49:55
SPEAKER_02: And he didn't have a lot of money going up.
49:57
SPEAKER_01: Maybe I had fun when I tried out for Dina Mokiev.
50:00
SPEAKER_02: Did you have fun when you tried out for Dina Mokiev?
50:03
SPEAKER_01: No, I had something way better.
50:05
SPEAKER_01: I had an experience.
50:07
SPEAKER_01: I had heart problems because it is real.
50:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
50:10
SPEAKER_01: Their medical staff took every player's vitals the whole time.
50:16
SPEAKER_01: Let me tell you about the experience, bro.
50:17
SPEAKER_01: Because we started this earlier and we talked about the activity that I saw and the difference in level and all of that.
50:22
SPEAKER_01: Again, not out of a book.
50:23
SPEAKER_01: I wish it was.
50:24
SPEAKER_01: Dude, I wish the people on social were correct.
50:26
SPEAKER_01: These keyboard warriors, I love these people because it's entertaining.
50:29
SPEAKER_01: I mean, dude.
50:30
SPEAKER_01: I respond to every single comment.
50:32
SPEAKER_01: You know what?
50:32
SPEAKER_01: God bless you.
50:34
SPEAKER_01: So, dude, what was it like over there?
50:38
SPEAKER_01: I flew to Ukraine.
50:39
SPEAKER_01: I'm horrified, of course.
50:42
SPEAKER_01: I we left there, and now I'm going back.
50:45
SPEAKER_01: And back then, if I made the MLS$8,000 a year, living in an apartment shared with others.
50:53
SPEAKER_01: If I made Dinamo Kiev, the lowest paid guy, was half a million a year, lowest paid.
50:58
SPEAKER_01: Lowest paid.
51:00
SPEAKER_01: So with somebody who knew that they could finish U of M here and do whatever the hell he wanted after here, I wasn't gonna play for eight grand a year, bro.
51:11
SPEAKER_01: Right.
51:12
SPEAKER_01: I was gonna play if I was gonna play.
51:15
SPEAKER_01: Get off the plane.
51:17
SPEAKER_01: They don't train in Kiev.
51:20
SPEAKER_01: Do you know why?
51:21
SPEAKER_01: Because people care.
51:24
SPEAKER_01: They train at Concha Zaspa, a military base with four sentry towers and armed guards.
51:30
SPEAKER_01: The airspace is protected by the military because those games are televised and people care.
51:38
SPEAKER_01: You don't go and scout, it's designed like a prison, bro.
51:45
SPEAKER_01: But it's a prison with all of the tech from Rocky IV, cryogenic freezing.
51:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
51:52
SPEAKER_01: Everything that we now have in our academies, bro.
51:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know what we don't have?
51:59
SPEAKER_01: The actual way to get the product in that can develop.
52:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
52:04
SPEAKER_01: We have all the cool stuff.
52:06
SPEAKER_01: I see these kids taking selfies in their academies.
52:09
SPEAKER_01: They're beautiful, dude.
52:10
SPEAKER_01: We're investing great.
52:12
SPEAKER_01: Investing and creating an image, great.
52:16
SPEAKER_01: But Concha Zaspa is not fun.
52:20
SPEAKER_01: Not fun.
52:21
SPEAKER_01: They take care of you like a pro, they treat you like a pro, and they dismiss you like a pro.
52:28
SPEAKER_01: The feeling I got when they told me I don't belong there is one of my favorite wife memories, dude.
52:35
SPEAKER_01: I love cutting players because someone gave me a gift in Kiev.
52:40
SPEAKER_01: You know who didn't give me a gift in the US?
52:43
SPEAKER_01: Anybody, other than Jeff Shook.
52:45
SPEAKER_01: He built me, but no one made me feel like I don't belong.
52:49
SPEAKER_01: No one made me feel like I'm not good enough.
52:52
SPEAKER_01: The false hope in this country is incredible.
52:55
SPEAKER_01: Dude, back then, if you remember, they were selling tickets to try out with Beckham.
52:59
SPEAKER_01: 500 pop, ticket, ticket, ticket.
53:03
SPEAKER_01: That's our model.
53:05
SPEAKER_01: Let's extract from false hope.
53:09
unknown: Yeah.
53:09
SPEAKER_01: It's been our model for a while.
53:11
SPEAKER_01: You go there, you bad, you out.
53:14
SPEAKER_01: One touch.
53:15
SPEAKER_01: All these guys on social media think it's a joke.
53:18
SPEAKER_01: Go talk to a real player.
53:19
SPEAKER_01: You tell me what a real trial looks like.
53:22
SPEAKER_01: You think it's three weeks and you stay three weeks.
53:24
SPEAKER_01: Woo! No.
53:27
SPEAKER_01: It's three touches and get off my field.
53:29
SPEAKER_01: I'm busy.
53:31
SPEAKER_01: That's our trial at Detroit.
53:34
SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you this: you give me the same talent that is paying to play right now, and you give it to me young enough where I can teach them native Portuguese, we have a national team.
53:47
SPEAKER_01: And you take my model and you build it not only in Cali and New York and Texas, because, dude, in nine days, I've got a message from like 37 states already.
53:58
SPEAKER_01: You know what I'm not doing?
54:00
SPEAKER_01: I'm not productizing it.
54:02
SPEAKER_01: I'm not selling our model.
54:04
SPEAKER_01: I'm not trying to go give a speech.
54:06
SPEAKER_01: I'm fine, bro.
54:08
SPEAKER_01: I have a great life.
54:09
SPEAKER_01: I don't need more money.
54:10
SPEAKER_01: I want to watch our product compete in 2030.
54:17
SPEAKER_01: I have nothing else behind this entire vision than to watch the US men's national team start to create players that can compete.
54:27
SPEAKER_01: So I want my model to be copied by you in Detroit, and I want you to beat my team in Detroit.
54:37
SPEAKER_01: Because the more of us there are, the higher chance that rather than our model making its way over there, that theirs makes its way over here.
54:46
SPEAKER_01: Because the current federation and the current professional pyramid, I hate that word.
54:51
SPEAKER_01: There is no pyramid.
54:52
SPEAKER_01: Bro, how are we calling it a pyramid when there's no way to go up and down?
54:55
SPEAKER_01: It's not a pyramid.
54:56
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's not a pyramid.
54:58
SPEAKER_01: It's not a pyramid.
54:59
SPEAKER_01: It is a circle.
55:00
SPEAKER_02: Oh.
55:01
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, of course they are not going to change themselves.
55:07
SPEAKER_01: And if we simply underperform in the World Cup, they won't care.
55:12
SPEAKER_01: But if not just us, but enough people like us start starting their own clubs, we have a club, bro.
55:23
SPEAKER_01: And we don't have a youth club.
55:24
SPEAKER_01: And I never will.
55:25
SPEAKER_01: I don't want 12-year-olds playing 12-year-olds and paying me money.
55:29
SPEAKER_01: I want men who have no minimum age that could be a 12-year-old.
55:35
SPEAKER_01: You can be a man.
55:36
SPEAKER_01: In America, it's laughable in pay-to-play.
55:40
SPEAKER_01: But I'll tell you where it's not laughable, the inner cities.
55:42
SPEAKER_01: There are 12-year-old men.
55:44
SPEAKER_01: I've met them.
55:45
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
55:46
SPEAKER_01: I will sign that man tomorrow.
55:49
SPEAKER_02: Go more into your model and what you're doing with Detroit Metro.
55:53
SPEAKER_02: Give me everything.
55:54
SPEAKER_02: Everything give that.
55:56
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so why?
55:57
SPEAKER_02: Why no youth?
55:58
SPEAKER_02: Because you don't you weren't you're staying away from the pay-to-play.
56:01
SPEAKER_02: What are you guys playing in?
56:02
SPEAKER_02: What league?
56:03
SPEAKER_02: Just tell tell me.
56:05
SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is year two, right?
56:08
SPEAKER_02: Year two.
56:11
SPEAKER_02: What you're playing in, and just how you're finding players, how to find how players are finding you, and how you're I mean, everything costs money.
56:21
SPEAKER_02: How are you funding it and everything?
56:23
SPEAKER_01: Just go.
56:23
SPEAKER_01: I love your question.
56:25
SPEAKER_01: I love your question.
56:26
SPEAKER_01: I love your reframing.
56:29
SPEAKER_01: So we are in the American professional soccer circle.
56:36
SPEAKER_01: I guess.
56:37
SPEAKER_01: I mean, but it's like a the league that we play in is not a professional league.
56:42
SPEAKER_02: What was the thing that we did when we were in school where it was like, okay, MLS, and then you just had everything connected to it.
56:48
SPEAKER_02: But it's not it's no pyramid, it's a Venn diagram or whatever the hell that was.
56:53
SPEAKER_01: It would it would be that.
56:55
SPEAKER_01: However, it's not because the MLS intentionally doesn't pay transfer fees, solidarity, uh, training comp.
57:01
SPEAKER_01: They don't do a single legal mechanism that exists in Europe to anyone outside of its own system, of course.
57:05
SPEAKER_01: Why would they?
57:06
SPEAKER_01: Right, because that might strengthen the argument that someone might actually become a talent factory.
57:10
SPEAKER_01: You know, there's clubs that intentionally just make good players and sell them.
57:14
SPEAKER_01: You think that's fun to watch?
57:16
SPEAKER_01: I do.
57:17
SPEAKER_01: Because sometimes those clubs make runs as well.
57:20
SPEAKER_02: It makes development important.
57:21
SPEAKER_02: Correct.
57:22
SPEAKER_01: And I've seen those models.
57:24
SPEAKER_02: What do we get?
57:25
SPEAKER_02: What do we get for developing a great player to go to Nebraska or Wisconsin or whatever or make it to MLS?
57:32
SPEAKER_02: We get nothing.
57:33
SPEAKER_02: Correct.
57:34
SPEAKER_02: We get an Instagram post.
57:35
SPEAKER_02: We get an Instagram post that we get to post and say, come to my club, pay us more money.
57:40
SPEAKER_02: Correct.
57:41
SPEAKER_02: Instead of getting rewarded.
57:43
SPEAKER_02: Like in a perfect world, I would love in the day of NIL.
57:47
SPEAKER_02: How about these colleges start paying us?
57:49
SPEAKER_02: How about these, like, okay, you're taking a Jags kid that's been there since they were nine years old.
57:55
SPEAKER_02: Okay, how about they get a percentage of whatever that kid signs for?
57:59
SPEAKER_02: And there is money in college soccer, especially on the women's side, because I know of mid-majors paying kids on top of their scholarship at mid-majors.
58:09
SPEAKER_02: So I know that like if we send a kid to North Carolina on the women's side and she's getting a hundred thousand dollars, how about we kick back some of that to the club that developed her or helped her develop?
58:20
SPEAKER_02: Not developed her.
58:20
SPEAKER_02: I don't believe in that.
58:22
SPEAKER_01: No, it's a fun, it's a fun thought and a fun, a fun exercise.
58:25
SPEAKER_02: But it's not American.
58:27
SPEAKER_01: No, and also, once again, I am a licensed attorney.
58:30
SPEAKER_01: So NIL is an emergent field, it's a very well-paying field.
58:33
SPEAKER_01: It's it's great uh as far as a business model to get involved in it.
58:38
SPEAKER_01: So why are we different?
58:40
SPEAKER_01: We're different because I am a licensed attorney.
58:43
SPEAKER_01: Because how do clubs at our level generally operate in U.S.
58:46
SPEAKER_01: soccer on the bad side of things?
58:48
SPEAKER_01: They slip cash under the table.
58:49
SPEAKER_01: Hey, come play for us.
58:50
SPEAKER_01: Here's a hundred bucks, come play for us.
58:52
SPEAKER_01: We just played a game, here's 300 bucks.
58:53
SPEAKER_01: Hey, how do I head on our fee?
58:55
SPEAKER_01: You know how we operate, bro?
58:56
SPEAKER_01: Legally, legally.
58:59
SPEAKER_01: So we don't charge anyone anything, never will.
59:02
SPEAKER_01: And you show me a special player with an Instagram following, we'll pay them an N-I-L in conjunction with the NCAA, in compliance with the NCAA, because we're not out to just win games, we're out to change U.S.
59:23
SPEAKER_01: soccer.
59:24
SPEAKER_01: So we're doing it legally, we're telling the story, we're doing it well, and let me be completely honest, because I don't really know another way, it probably hurts my legal career.
59:36
SPEAKER_01: We are not good at soccer, Jason.
59:38
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I know.
59:39
SPEAKER_01: I'm well aware.
59:40
SPEAKER_01: It's not the same sport.
59:42
SPEAKER_01: No.
59:42
SPEAKER_01: But hold on.
59:43
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
59:44
SPEAKER_01: My team, oh Detroit Metro, is not competitive in our own level yet.
59:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
59:49
SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't bother me.
59:50
SPEAKER_01: You're in your two.
59:51
SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's coming.
59:53
SPEAKER_01: It's coming.
59:54
SPEAKER_01: So I don't want to give some sort of artificial, nonsensical answer that we are exceptional, we are elite, we are kill, dude.
1:00:03
SPEAKER_01: We are not yet good at soccer, but you fast forward five years of what I just said, yeah.
1:00:10
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna beat MLS teams in games that they can't hide from.
1:00:15
SPEAKER_01: The US Open Cup is the only actual enterprise in the country that is over a hundred years old that is in any way, shape, or form relevant in the global game.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_01: And that's why MLS is trying to get rid of it.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_01: Of course they are.
1:00:30
SPEAKER_01: Good job.
1:00:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because they're because they don't.
1:00:32
SPEAKER_01: So here's what they have.
1:00:33
SPEAKER_02: They don't want Detroit City FC beating the col of the Chicago fire on Wednesday or Tuesday.
1:00:40
SPEAKER_02: If that happens, that how does that make your product look?
1:00:43
SPEAKER_01: It's easy.
1:00:44
SPEAKER_01: They sit in rooms and they decide how it makes your product look.
1:00:47
SPEAKER_01: So sick of soccer.
1:00:48
SPEAKER_01: It's dictated by a boardroom.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_01: Let me tell you what happens.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_01: They simply make a couple statements and then they dismiss it.
1:00:55
SPEAKER_01: One, we did not try.
1:00:56
SPEAKER_01: Two, we did not play our best men.
1:00:59
SPEAKER_01: Three, we did not prioritize this tournament.
1:01:01
SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine this is a scrimmage for us?
1:01:05
SPEAKER_02: We have LL Galaxy on what Saturday.
1:01:08
SPEAKER_01: Somebody doesn't care about the FA Cup.
1:01:10
SPEAKER_01: You know why they care about the FA Cup?
1:01:12
SPEAKER_01: Because people watch it and you make money.
1:01:15
SPEAKER_01: You know who doesn't make money here?
1:01:17
SPEAKER_01: Anybody for actually competing on the field.
1:01:20
SPEAKER_01: Except for Detroit Metro FC.
1:01:22
SPEAKER_01: And we can't do it where we will make money.
1:01:26
SPEAKER_01: We flip the narrative.
1:01:28
SPEAKER_01: Why?
1:01:28
SPEAKER_01: Because again, everything we're out to do is exactly what I say we're out to do.
1:01:32
SPEAKER_01: So here's an event that we do called the Merit Cup.
1:01:35
SPEAKER_01: No entrance fee.
1:01:37
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:01:38
SPEAKER_01: You compete against each other.
1:01:41
SPEAKER_01: DCFC could enter, they won't, and they shouldn't.
1:01:43
SPEAKER_01: It would be stupid for them.
1:01:45
SPEAKER_01: Why?
1:01:45
SPEAKER_01: If Detroit City FC enters the Merit Cup, and God forbid they don't win, same exact argument, just a tier lower, right?
1:01:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:01:52
SPEAKER_01: They just lost to Metro.
1:01:53
SPEAKER_01: So they're not going to enter.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_01: I know that.
1:01:55
SPEAKER_01: I don't mind.
1:01:55
SPEAKER_01: I love DCFC.
1:01:57
SPEAKER_01: I want that to be clear.
1:01:58
SPEAKER_01: I love Detroit City FC.
1:02:00
SPEAKER_01: So do I.
1:02:01
SPEAKER_01: But whoever wants signs up free.
1:02:05
SPEAKER_01: Right now, for this upcoming Merit Cup, we have 20 all signed up, and they're all going to show up because we only have one standard that we learn from year one to year two, which is if you sign up and you don't show up, you are never allowed back.
1:02:20
SPEAKER_01: So all 20 will come.
1:02:21
SPEAKER_01: There's also going to be a 21st.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_01: I'm announcing it live on the air, baby.
1:02:25
SPEAKER_01: Social media.
1:02:26
SPEAKER_01: There's going to be a contest that we roll out shortly, where the most compelling social media entry to this thing, after a contest and a vote, not only enters the Merit Cup, but they get a benefit of a buy in the first round.
1:02:41
SPEAKER_01: Now, of those 21, whoever wins it, free, right behind you, brother, is going to play us.
1:02:49
SPEAKER_01: At the Livonia Spree, half a million visitors through the building.
1:02:54
SPEAKER_01: Think about that visibility for a sponsor.
1:02:58
SPEAKER_01: Half a million visitors watching the winner of 21 teams play my team.
1:03:03
SPEAKER_01: And if they beat my team, 10,000, we give them 10,000.
1:03:08
SPEAKER_01: Because the Federation sure won't.
1:03:10
SPEAKER_01: Because Major League Soccer sure won't.
1:03:13
SPEAKER_01: Now, imagine a corporation that is like-minded, that is forward-thinking, that is community first, decides that they would rather have a tax write-off by donating to us as a sponsorship play.
1:03:31
SPEAKER_01: I'd give a million.
1:03:33
SPEAKER_01: Come beat us.
1:03:34
SPEAKER_01: We just need the right company.
1:03:36
SPEAKER_01: Let's compete in this country, man.
1:03:40
SPEAKER_01: And I don't want that idea to be mine.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_01: I want it to be taken and done better by richer people, bro.
1:03:46
SPEAKER_01: Because the soccer tournament's dope.
1:03:48
SPEAKER_01: People watch it, but it's expensive to get in.
1:03:53
SPEAKER_01: Mine's free.
1:03:54
SPEAKER_01: But I am trying to change U.S.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_01: soccer because no one else has thought of how.
1:04:00
SPEAKER_01: No one else has run it in Europe and run it here and been an attorney and played it and lived it and immigrated from Ukraine to here and done all the stuff that I have.
1:04:09
SPEAKER_01: I'm doing it my way.
1:04:10
SPEAKER_01: And I'm giving it away for free because I think that my way with the right people can be done better, bigger, and I don't want a consultancy fee.
1:04:20
SPEAKER_01: I am not starting a league.
1:04:22
SPEAKER_01: I am not looking to get rich off of it.
1:04:24
SPEAKER_01: I just want to be here in 2030, seeing at least one player replicate the way Clint Dempsey got there.
1:04:32
SPEAKER_01: One.
1:04:32
SPEAKER_01: Show me one in 2030.
1:04:35
SPEAKER_01: Give me a real hard upbringing made into a real soccer player.
1:04:42
SPEAKER_02: Do you think that okay, you do you think that's possible with being on Detroit Metro the entire time?
1:04:49
SPEAKER_02: Or are you talking about starting at Detroit Metro and then maybe going to DCFC and then maybe going to Europe or however?
1:04:56
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_02: However.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_02: Just say that kid play he's playing in a World Cup.
1:05:00
SPEAKER_01: I would kill to see a kid come here at 13.
1:05:05
SPEAKER_01: And again, bro, if pay to play is going to give him a scholarship, he's not a bad person for taking it.
1:05:09
SPEAKER_01: Pay to play is subsidized by the bad players.
1:05:11
SPEAKER_01: We get it.
1:05:12
SPEAKER_01: So the top is going to give a scholarship.
1:05:15
SPEAKER_01: Cool.
1:05:16
SPEAKER_01: Do both.
1:05:17
SPEAKER_01: They might not let it happen.
1:05:18
SPEAKER_02: Right.
1:05:19
SPEAKER_01: Whichever club.
1:05:20
SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't.
1:05:20
SPEAKER_01: If I were in soccer and only soccer for a living, no one's a bad person.
1:05:25
SPEAKER_01: Everything's about incentive design.
1:05:27
SPEAKER_01: That's all it is.
1:05:29
SPEAKER_01: So why would you let your best player play somewhere else that could appear to be helping them?
1:05:35
SPEAKER_01: God forbid.
1:05:36
SPEAKER_01: Right?
1:05:36
SPEAKER_01: That's the whole point of pay to play.
1:05:38
SPEAKER_01: How much like, hey, don't go there.
1:05:41
SPEAKER_01: Hey, don't go there.
1:05:42
SPEAKER_01: The deceptive, the bad pay to play, they don't even let them play in the games or the MLS Academies play against you because they don't want them to get poached by an MLS Academy.
1:05:49
SPEAKER_02: Right.
1:05:50
SPEAKER_01: It's wild.
1:05:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:05:51
SPEAKER_01: It's a wild, wild world we've seen created.
1:05:54
SPEAKER_01: But it's been created systematically, intelligently, by people with the means to do it.
1:06:00
SPEAKER_01: And the forward thinking to turn it into a business that has an almost 100% chance of financial success, but the equal 100% chance of failure from actually ever producing a real soccer player.
1:06:12
SPEAKER_01: It's a guaranteed failure.
1:06:14
SPEAKER_01: So we would sign a kid at 13, we would grow them to 17, and we would let DCFC have them whenever they wanted.
1:06:21
SPEAKER_01: Take them at 13, take them a week later.
1:06:23
SPEAKER_01: I don't care, bro.
1:06:24
SPEAKER_01: But take them.
1:06:26
SPEAKER_01: Take them.
1:06:28
SPEAKER_01: We've already moved a guy to Germany.
1:06:30
SPEAKER_01: We've already moved a guy to Australia.
1:06:32
SPEAKER_01: We don't keep our best players.
1:06:34
SPEAKER_01: Why would we?
1:06:37
SPEAKER_02: Did you guys get solidarity payments for that?
1:06:39
SPEAKER_01: Of course not.
1:06:40
SPEAKER_01: We are in the United States of America.
1:06:43
SPEAKER_01: So the way that the Federation is built here, due to the laws, we would then have to declare as a pro team.
1:06:51
SPEAKER_01: Pro teams are under what's called PLS, pro league standards.
1:06:54
SPEAKER_01: Good luck, bro.
1:06:55
SPEAKER_01: You're guaranteed to be bleeding capital, right?
1:06:58
SPEAKER_01: So, no, that makes no financial sense.
1:07:00
SPEAKER_01: You know what makes financial sense?
1:07:01
SPEAKER_01: What we're doing.
1:07:02
SPEAKER_01: We're taking the model, and they're probably going to try to block what we're doing too, because why wouldn't they, right?
1:07:08
SPEAKER_01: But we're playing soccer that people want to watch.
1:07:11
SPEAKER_01: Our fans enjoy the football.
1:07:15
SPEAKER_01: That's rare.
1:07:16
SPEAKER_01: People aren't coming to our games for a beautiful stadium only.
1:07:21
SPEAKER_01: We do that too.
1:07:23
SPEAKER_01: But our football is real.
1:07:26
SPEAKER_01: We have people that come and watch our guys play soccer against other guys who play soccer.
1:07:32
SPEAKER_01: And I'll tell you, the UPSL pound for pound, if you were to take just this little Detroit division that we're in, that then does scale out nationally, right?
1:07:40
SPEAKER_01: We're just not good enough.
1:07:41
SPEAKER_01: The other teams are.
1:07:42
SPEAKER_01: And you were to take the best players, we'd crush an MLS team.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_01: Better players are here.
1:07:49
SPEAKER_01: These are hardened men that already played in Europe and now they're over here painting, or they're over here, you know, running a PE firm themselves, or they're over here doing some other job and they still ball.
1:07:59
SPEAKER_01: They're better.
1:08:01
SPEAKER_01: They're better.
1:08:03
SPEAKER_01: But they don't want that game.
1:08:04
SPEAKER_01: Why would they?
1:08:05
SPEAKER_01: It makes their product as obviously weak as it actually is obviously weak.
1:08:10
SPEAKER_01: So, in my view, is my circular tier four club better than one in one of the other alphabet soups?
1:08:18
SPEAKER_01: No.
1:08:19
SPEAKER_01: Of course not.
1:08:20
SPEAKER_01: This is American soccer from youth soccer with the whole bro.
1:08:25
SPEAKER_01: There's a league, if I'm not mistaken, called like Nuco.
1:08:29
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:08:29
SPEAKER_01: It's literally amazing.
1:08:31
SPEAKER_01: It's working.
1:08:32
SPEAKER_01: All you have to do is market that your league's better than the other one and then not play the other one.
1:08:38
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
1:08:39
SPEAKER_01: And then it transfers to the pro game.
1:08:44
SPEAKER_01: You think there's not a Nuco?
1:08:46
SPEAKER_01: There is.
1:08:46
SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to say the name because I'm too embarrassed, but dude, there's eight leagues in Detroit right now of our level of teams that won't play us in our own Merit Cup, bro.
1:08:56
unknown: Yeah.
1:08:56
SPEAKER_01: This is America.
1:08:57
SPEAKER_02: This is how we have done it.
1:08:59
SPEAKER_02: It's so funny, dude.
1:09:00
SPEAKER_02: Because, okay, especially in in a smaller market like Buffalo, where I've been the last 10 years, right?
1:09:06
SPEAKER_02: There's only one ECNL club and only one MLS Net slash GA club.
1:09:11
SPEAKER_02: And they all just like crap on each other.
1:09:13
SPEAKER_02: It's like you're never able to prove that you're right or you're better because it's closed.
1:09:19
SPEAKER_02: Why are we closed at the youth level?
1:09:21
SPEAKER_01: I will tell you that if there's ever a World Cup where there's a monsu and you can't actually play the games, we will win.
1:09:30
SPEAKER_01: We will write the best argument about why we're good of any country in the world.
1:09:36
SPEAKER_01: We are excellent at litigating soccer, appealing, blocking others.
1:09:45
SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
1:09:46
SPEAKER_01: Arguing, dude, some of the uh, so there's great parents and then there's bad parents.
1:09:51
SPEAKER_01: And dude, some of the stuff that you see in youth soccer is some of the best sociopathic behavior I've ever seen.
1:09:58
SPEAKER_01: I watch Dexter, I love Dexter.
1:10:00
SPEAKER_01: But dude, the bribery, the the nepotism, the it's awesome.
1:10:06
SPEAKER_01: Dude, they actually think they're producing a player that way.
1:10:10
SPEAKER_01: It's magical to watch from the outside and not be part of it.
1:10:14
SPEAKER_01: Thank God.
1:10:14
SPEAKER_02: My favorite, my favorite thing to hear about is when clubs block other clubs from entering their league because they're threatened or because they just don't like the person.
1:10:25
SPEAKER_02: I get a kick at it.
1:10:26
SPEAKER_02: Wonderful.
1:10:26
SPEAKER_02: And they're correct.
1:10:27
SPEAKER_02: It's hilarious.
1:10:28
SPEAKER_01: And this is why the monsoon World Cup of 2034 is our moment.
1:10:33
SPEAKER_01: We got a real chance.
1:10:35
SPEAKER_01: I have so many stories.
1:10:37
SPEAKER_01: I've been in this for my whole life.
1:10:38
SPEAKER_01: I got so many, I got Buffalo stories, bro.
1:10:40
SPEAKER_01: I got a million stories.
1:10:42
SPEAKER_01: I've been in Europe shopping a club where a dude played soccer in the American circle in Buffalo.
1:10:49
SPEAKER_01: So when you go to Europe, here's what's fun.
1:10:53
SPEAKER_01: Some of them have come over here, and it's like the most incredible confusion you could ever imagine.
1:11:01
SPEAKER_01: I mean, seriously, they're trying to wrap their head around how this whole thing works.
1:11:06
SPEAKER_01: I mean, go tell a European that going at 13 across their domestic country to another part of it, and staying inside of a five-star resort for a year costs$85,000, and that's development.
1:11:30
SPEAKER_01: They will laugh, and they do.
1:11:33
SPEAKER_01: And I've been on podcasts in Europe, and the host is floored.
1:11:38
SPEAKER_01: I'm bilingual.
1:11:39
SPEAKER_01: I love talking to Russians, Ukrainians, all that regional.
1:11:43
SPEAKER_01: Some of the most fun I've ever had in my life is not the translation from the two languages, but just the explanation.
1:11:51
SPEAKER_01: Because these people have actually seen a soccer player.
1:11:54
SPEAKER_01: We haven't.
1:11:55
SPEAKER_01: Here it's a unicorn, but they've seen it.
1:11:58
SPEAKER_01: And our model is the laughing stock of Europe.
1:12:02
SPEAKER_01: So, of course, when you get the opportunity to go and run a club there at whatever level, literally, Jason, any.
1:12:11
SPEAKER_01: I'm not talking you gotta be at Man You.
1:12:13
SPEAKER_01: Just go take a team over there.
1:12:16
SPEAKER_01: You can't, with a straight face, force an American on it because the whole team will revolt.
1:12:24
SPEAKER_02: Do you think, okay, and I just brought this up the uh the other day.
1:12:28
SPEAKER_02: It's like have everybody's talking about how this is our best national team and all the bullshit because it's not true.
1:12:36
SPEAKER_02: And everybody and I'm like, is it though, or is some European clubs finally allowing Americans to play?
1:12:45
SPEAKER_02: And it's not like we're tearing it up in the EPL or La Liga.
1:12:50
SPEAKER_02: We can't play in La Liga.
1:12:52
SPEAKER_02: Why talk to me when we have an American on Real Madrid?
1:12:58
SPEAKER_01: Everything's a business.
1:13:00
SPEAKER_01: Why might you sign a player from one of the wealthiest nations on earth?
1:13:07
SPEAKER_01: Might they sell some jerseys over there?
1:13:09
SPEAKER_01: Might some of those human beings that are so starved for an actual soccer match watch your club play?
1:13:17
SPEAKER_02: Right?
1:13:17
SPEAKER_01: I believe the answer is yes.
1:13:19
SPEAKER_01: So, I completely rationally understand why you would sign an American.
1:13:26
SPEAKER_01: We've had some Americans sign.
1:13:27
unknown: Okay.
1:13:28
SPEAKER_01: I get it.
1:13:30
SPEAKER_01: But have we made an impact over there in a meaningful way?
1:13:35
SPEAKER_01: Have we competed for Balon d'Or like Andrey Shepchenko won, by the way?
1:13:40
SPEAKER_01: No.
1:13:40
SPEAKER_01: No.
1:13:41
SPEAKER_01: Nor could we.
1:13:43
SPEAKER_01: It's not possible.
1:13:45
SPEAKER_01: You cannot possibly have a customer service pyramid built around this circular logic and then create an actual generational wealth-making professional athlete.
1:13:59
SPEAKER_01: You know who makes generational wealth-making professional athletes?
1:14:02
SPEAKER_01: The National Basketball Association.
1:14:05
SPEAKER_01: Because we have a league worth watching, and it is a closed system, and there is a cap, but it's the best players in the world.
1:14:15
SPEAKER_01: And we haven't yet productized the youth side to the level that soccer has.
1:14:22
SPEAKER_01: They, as you so astutely identified, are also now suffering the fate of Americans are rarely the best players.
1:14:32
SPEAKER_01: The NFL is next.
1:14:33
SPEAKER_01: Just wait.
1:14:34
SPEAKER_01: I'm scared.
1:14:36
SPEAKER_01: Just wait.
1:14:37
SPEAKER_01: Because we do not have unique talent.
1:14:42
SPEAKER_01: Talent is global.
1:14:44
SPEAKER_01: And this is the inverse as well.
1:14:47
SPEAKER_01: We don't have a lack of talent in soccer.
1:14:49
SPEAKER_01: We have talent.
1:14:50
SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't mean that the best athletes are the best soccer players.
1:14:54
SPEAKER_01: No, that's not the argument either.
1:14:55
SPEAKER_01: It's that talent needs to be hardened, talent needs to be cut, talent needs to be forged, and our system is an extraction model only.
1:15:09
SPEAKER_01: There is no way on earth that we can produce talented output.
1:15:16
SPEAKER_01: We can have talented input, but we are softening those men.
1:15:21
SPEAKER_01: And they're not men most of the time, but those are kids.
1:15:26
SPEAKER_01: We have kids, they have men, same age.
1:15:29
SPEAKER_01: Same age, Jason.
1:15:32
SPEAKER_01: We have kids and they have men and they're the same age in every sport.
1:15:41
SPEAKER_02: I mean and what you said about like we do have good players.
1:15:47
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
1:15:48
SPEAKER_02: But there's there's too much it's like a it's like a wall.
1:15:56
SPEAKER_02: It literally is a wall where you can't climb it and you can't attack it because of the closed system.
1:16:05
SPEAKER_02: Because everybody there's a power there might not be a pyramid, but there is a power structure that might be a pyramid of like this is the top dog, and they make all of the decisions and they keep everybody down here where they belong because they they don't want anybody else to rise.
1:16:24
SPEAKER_02: It's like how and you say the four years and you say 2030, how quick do you think it could happen that quickly?
1:16:32
SPEAKER_02: Or is it more like because I remember Project 2010 when they were like, oh, let's win the World Cup in 2010, and then it's like whatever happened to that because it just didn't happen.
1:16:45
SPEAKER_02: How how is that going?
1:16:47
SPEAKER_02: How are you gonna do it?
1:16:48
SPEAKER_01: Four years, and I'm not saying we're gonna win a World Cup.
1:16:51
SPEAKER_01: Jason, if nothing changes, I don't think we're ever winning even with the expanded World Cup and potentially an even more expanded one, we will struggle to qualify.
1:17:02
SPEAKER_01: We did great.
1:17:03
SPEAKER_01: I don't think we would have great earning a bid with our business acumen.
1:17:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:17:09
SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
1:17:10
SPEAKER_01: That saved us.
1:17:11
SPEAKER_01: That saved us.
1:17:12
SPEAKER_01: At this point, we either need a monsoon or we need to host.
1:17:17
SPEAKER_01: We are not built to earn.
1:17:20
SPEAKER_01: Think about that.
1:17:22
SPEAKER_01: We are not built to earn, we are built to extract.
1:17:26
SPEAKER_01: That's what's up.
1:17:28
SPEAKER_01: And we're extracting at the highest possible level.
1:17:32
SPEAKER_02: I mean it's so upsetting.
1:17:37
SPEAKER_02: Like, where is the hope?
1:17:39
SPEAKER_02: Right?
1:17:39
SPEAKER_02: And where is the hope?
1:17:41
SPEAKER_02: Is it more again go into your uh funding and is it sponsorships, or is it your own dime, or is it money?
1:17:51
SPEAKER_02: Uh is it everybody's so scared of private equity.
1:17:56
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, is it though but then there's bad parts too, because I heard I just found out that like one of the league runners in the United States, one of the youth league runners, is also part of a private equity group that owns two clubs that are nationwide.
1:18:14
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
1:18:14
SPEAKER_02: It's like, hmm, is this on the up and up?
1:18:18
SPEAKER_01: And obviously it's not.
1:18:19
SPEAKER_01: We are privately funded.
1:18:21
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:18:22
SPEAKER_01: We have an owner, it is not me.
1:18:24
SPEAKER_01: I am the operator.
1:18:25
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:18:26
SPEAKER_01: Ever since I was in my early 20s, I've never struggled to attract investment into my enterprises.
1:18:34
SPEAKER_01: I've probably started over 25 of them.
1:18:37
SPEAKER_01: And all of them have been fully transparent, and all of them have been the best experiences of my adult life.
1:18:45
SPEAKER_01: This is just another one.
1:18:47
SPEAKER_01: So we have a private owner.
1:18:50
SPEAKER_01: We, in only one year, have 25 corporate sponsors.
1:18:54
SPEAKER_01: We started with zero.
1:18:55
SPEAKER_02: I love that.
1:18:56
SPEAKER_01: We sell tickets, we sell food and beverage, we have tremendous sports attainment.
1:19:06
SPEAKER_01: So we hire a DJ, drummers, bounce houses for the kids.
1:19:11
SPEAKER_01: Our games are like a carnival for families.
1:19:14
SPEAKER_01: They're amazing.
1:19:15
SPEAKER_01: They're in Brighton.
1:19:16
SPEAKER_01: There is not a dollar for dollar better entertainment experience within soccer within four hours of here.
1:19:22
SPEAKER_01: Not close.
1:19:24
SPEAKER_01: DCFC used to be.
1:19:26
SPEAKER_01: Unfortunately, they're chasing something a little different.
1:19:28
SPEAKER_01: I hope and I pray that it works.
1:19:31
SPEAKER_01: I hope and I pray that it works.
1:19:32
SPEAKER_01: But I've been in those rooms.
1:19:35
SPEAKER_01: I know what that league is doing, and I am really worried.
1:19:39
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, we play in Brighton.
1:19:42
SPEAKER_01: We play in Brighton.
1:19:44
SPEAKER_01: So that is generating revenue.
1:19:48
SPEAKER_01: You start comparing dollar for dollar what we can achieve outside of the system worse we could achieve by acquiring a franchise inside of it.
1:19:58
SPEAKER_01: If you actually are out to make money, you have to do what we're doing.
1:20:04
SPEAKER_01: There's no other choice.
1:20:05
SPEAKER_01: You couldn't possibly look at our PL and that PL and make a rational decision that said that.
1:20:11
SPEAKER_01: You really couldn't.
1:20:12
SPEAKER_01: They're great at selling.
1:20:14
SPEAKER_01: As I said, I've met a lot of great salesmen in my life, and those are fantastic salesmen.
1:20:20
SPEAKER_01: So our model is our model.
1:20:22
SPEAKER_01: It does not come from extraction of youth players and their wallets and their false hope.
1:20:28
SPEAKER_01: Our model is real football for free, and people want to see it, and they do.
1:20:35
SPEAKER_01: Our home games get attendance, they get crowds, we're doing cool stuff.
1:20:39
SPEAKER_01: We're playing at one of the coolest venues in the state this fall.
1:20:42
SPEAKER_01: We haven't even announced it yet.
1:20:43
SPEAKER_01: We're doing stuff that nobody knows about, and only I do.
1:20:46
SPEAKER_01: And because of life experience, I refuse to tell a single person until we do it, not before.
1:20:52
SPEAKER_01: And I can't wait until people see this.
1:20:56
SPEAKER_01: But if anybody wants to have a conversation with me about actually not only sponsoring for the sake of sponsoring because it's part of your business, but because you want to actually help, it's a no-brainer.
1:21:08
SPEAKER_01: Our sponsors win, bro.
1:21:10
SPEAKER_01: Our sponsors get every value out of their sponsorship that you could ever want.
1:21:16
SPEAKER_01: Our investor loves this, loves it, goes to every game.
1:21:22
SPEAKER_01: Our home games are insane.
1:21:24
SPEAKER_01: Electric, fun, great football.
1:21:27
SPEAKER_01: Our away games are with two fans.
1:21:30
SPEAKER_01: And guess what?
1:21:31
SPEAKER_01: Our owner goes.
1:21:32
SPEAKER_01: MLS owners don't go to their own home games, bro.
1:21:35
SPEAKER_02: That's true.
1:21:36
SPEAKER_01: It is just a write-off.
1:21:38
SPEAKER_02: Go into go into the USL and what your thoughts are about the health of the league.
1:21:44
SPEAKER_02: Because I'm worried too.
1:21:45
SPEAKER_02: Because you see, you see all these clubs folding.
1:21:48
SPEAKER_02: Of course you do.
1:21:48
SPEAKER_02: I said, wait a minute.
1:21:49
SPEAKER_02: Why are you guys folding?
1:21:50
SPEAKER_02: And I thought you guys were getting promotion and relegation in two years.
1:21:53
SPEAKER_02: I thought everything was going to be hunky-dory.
1:21:55
SPEAKER_02: How much is it to get into the USL?
1:21:57
SPEAKER_02: I asked this question to somebody yesterday and they didn't know the answer.
1:22:00
SPEAKER_01: I know the answer and I'm very sensitive about it.
1:22:02
SPEAKER_01: I will not say.
1:22:03
SPEAKER_01: Will you tell me off air?
1:22:04
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
1:22:05
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:22:06
SPEAKER_02: Because uh I I interviewed somebody that came out, I think the episode came out today, actually.
1:22:11
SPEAKER_02: Uh they play in the UWS and it's like$2,000 buy-in, right?
1:22:15
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:22:15
SPEAKER_01: So here's the deal.
1:22:16
SPEAKER_01: What do you do if your buy-in is extremely high and their buy-in is almost nothing?
1:22:21
SPEAKER_01: By the way, I'm not trying to look cool, nor is my owner.
1:22:24
SPEAKER_01: I'm not trying to say that I'm keeping you out of my league.
1:22:26
SPEAKER_01: I don't have a territory, I don't have a franchise.
1:22:28
SPEAKER_01: This is not what that is.
1:22:30
SPEAKER_02: And why would you try to keep people out?
1:22:32
SPEAKER_01: I want you in, baby.
1:22:33
SPEAKER_01: I want you in.
1:22:34
SPEAKER_01: You have a podcast.
1:22:37
SPEAKER_01: You can afford it.
1:22:39
unknown: Yeah.
1:22:39
SPEAKER_01: How cool is that?
1:22:42
SPEAKER_01: This you could do.
1:22:46
SPEAKER_01: And you should.
1:22:48
SPEAKER_01: But don't join the other alphabet soup.
1:22:52
SPEAKER_01: Just join and play, bro.
1:22:54
SPEAKER_01: Let's play.
1:22:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:22:56
SPEAKER_01: Stop switching leagues.
1:22:57
SPEAKER_01: They're all pennies.
1:22:58
SPEAKER_01: We're all we're talking my league versus that league versus that league.
1:23:02
SPEAKER_01: I mean, are you really going to switch leagues because of$2,000 difference?
1:23:05
SPEAKER_01: What a joke.
1:23:06
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:23:07
SPEAKER_01: But then invest in what you want.
1:23:12
SPEAKER_01: So if we want to invest millions, we can.
1:23:16
SPEAKER_01: It just won't go to the franchise fee.
1:23:19
SPEAKER_01: It'll go to our game day or it'll go to our NIL budget.
1:23:23
SPEAKER_01: So you want to tell me the best 14-year-old kid in this state who might actually be good enough isn't worth money?
1:23:29
SPEAKER_01: They are.
1:23:30
SPEAKER_01: They're not going to get it from them.
1:23:31
SPEAKER_01: They're going to get it from us.
1:23:33
SPEAKER_01: We will pay.
1:23:34
SPEAKER_01: But don't waste my goddamn time with your crappy pay-to-play youth player.
1:23:38
SPEAKER_01: I want one kid and I will pay them super well.
1:23:42
SPEAKER_01: One.
1:23:42
SPEAKER_01: And he's going to try out like an animal.
1:23:45
SPEAKER_01: And he's going to develop with men, and we'll cut them day two.
1:23:48
SPEAKER_01: You're not getting a 10-year deal.
1:23:49
SPEAKER_01: You're getting a tryout daily, a senior environment.
1:23:56
SPEAKER_01: No kitty gloves.
1:23:58
SPEAKER_01: Come develop like they do in Europe, in the U.S., in Detroit, with people that can just do it because they care, and you should do it too.
1:24:07
SPEAKER_01: You should start a team here too.
1:24:09
SPEAKER_01: Go to an MLS or a USL sales meeting.
1:24:12
SPEAKER_01: You know how you justify fees?
1:24:15
SPEAKER_01: You cut people out, bro.
1:24:17
SPEAKER_01: Not us.
1:24:19
SPEAKER_01: Come start a team.
1:24:20
SPEAKER_01: You can.
1:24:22
SPEAKER_01: Anybody can, and everybody should.
1:24:24
SPEAKER_01: Because only then can the U.S.
1:24:26
SPEAKER_01: have a prayer of competing.
1:24:28
SPEAKER_01: This, it works temporarily.
1:24:32
SPEAKER_01: This, it works forever.
1:24:34
SPEAKER_01: We do this, and you clone us, and a hundred more do, and the 37 states that in nine days have hit me up with interest.
1:24:42
SPEAKER_01: Guess who's gonna watch?
1:24:46
SPEAKER_01: That side's interesting to watch.
1:24:48
SPEAKER_02: So some of your players are going to be the pay-to-play model, like or are from it.
1:24:54
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
1:24:54
SPEAKER_00: And I have no exclusivity.
1:24:56
SPEAKER_00: I don't mind.
1:24:56
SPEAKER_00: You can still play in pay to play.
1:24:58
SPEAKER_00: I don't care.
1:24:59
SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about the youth player.
1:25:00
SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about like 18-year-olds.
1:25:03
SPEAKER_01: I'll sign one of those kids and pay them NIL.
1:25:07
SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
1:25:08
SPEAKER_01: I will not extract from them, I will pay them.
1:25:10
SPEAKER_02: Right.
1:25:11
SPEAKER_01: Compliant with the NCAA.
1:25:13
SPEAKER_01: And why compliant with the NCAA?
1:25:15
SPEAKER_01: Because they're Americans.
1:25:18
SPEAKER_01: And if you have a brain as well, and you have what I had as a kid, you're an idiot if you try to go to college for soccer.
1:25:25
SPEAKER_01: Go to college to make money after.
1:25:28
SPEAKER_01: So I'm not going to take that away from you.
1:25:31
SPEAKER_01: I will help you through it.
1:25:33
SPEAKER_01: I would love our graduates to do the one thing I believe to be a value proposition in the United States, which is use soccer to get into the Ivy League.
1:25:42
SPEAKER_01: They don't give soccer scholarships.
1:25:44
SPEAKER_02: No, they do not.
1:25:45
SPEAKER_01: But if you actually can ball and you actually can think, you go to Harvard and you come out and you meet seven senators and you start your own PE firm, and then you start funding your own club and you come beat my club.
1:26:02
SPEAKER_01: I want my players to leave here and kick our asses with their own team.
1:26:08
SPEAKER_02: One of my girls, I have two girls at Cornell.
1:26:10
SPEAKER_02: One of them is the captain, and you're exactly right.
1:26:13
SPEAKER_01: Like, dude, she's getting a job in New York City, and she's like gonna be Why did my University of Michigan 20 years ago college club team beat the shit out of virtually every Division I varsity team?
1:26:26
SPEAKER_01: Because it's the University of Michigan, dog.
1:26:28
SPEAKER_01: The University of Michigan is essentially an Ivy League school that is public.
1:26:31
SPEAKER_01: That is what we are.
1:26:33
SPEAKER_01: We have presidents, we have real alumni, we have an endowment.
1:26:37
SPEAKER_01: You want to tell me it makes more sense to go and get a fake scholarship at a school that's completely predicated on 99% athletes and they're all going bankrupt since COVID, you're nuts.
1:27:02
SPEAKER_02: Yes?
1:27:03
SPEAKER_01: I wish you were right, but not yet.
1:27:04
SPEAKER_01: You know why not yet?
1:27:05
SPEAKER_01: Because they very astutely believe us to be a scam.
1:27:09
SPEAKER_01: Wouldn't you?
1:27:10
SPEAKER_01: Wouldn't you think that somebody that is doing something outside of the pyramid and hits you up and is like, yo, you can ball, why don't you come try out?
1:27:20
SPEAKER_01: Wait, who's saying that you're a scam?
1:27:22
SPEAKER_01: You ever go on Soch?
1:27:24
SPEAKER_01: Nope.
1:27:24
SPEAKER_02: Like hold on.
1:27:26
SPEAKER_02: Hold on.
1:27:27
SPEAKER_02: So they okay, hold on.
1:27:30
SPEAKER_02: So you are having trials and tryouts every single day, and you're uh you're allowing players and college players, some big ten players, some uh whatever.
1:27:42
SPEAKER_01: I'd go play for the Bucks too.
1:27:43
SPEAKER_02: Horizon and whatnot.
1:27:45
SPEAKER_01: The Bucks are badass D.
1:27:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and they've proven and you're just gonna choose that.
1:27:49
SPEAKER_01: And why wouldn't you?
1:27:51
SPEAKER_02: Because it's USL2 and it has a USL badge.
1:27:53
SPEAKER_02: Correct.
1:27:54
SPEAKER_02: And it has that thing on the screen.
1:27:55
SPEAKER_01: Correct, correct.
1:27:56
SPEAKER_01: Correct.
1:27:57
SPEAKER_01: But I don't know.
1:27:58
SPEAKER_01: Until I wish more people could do that.
1:28:00
SPEAKER_01: This podcast, and enough people look at my social media, and enough people go, That guy's not only insane, but he's right.
1:28:08
SPEAKER_01: Why don't why don't we start attracting trilists?
1:28:11
SPEAKER_01: And by the way, you could be the Herman winner.
1:28:14
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:28:15
SPEAKER_01: I am not giving you anything.
1:28:17
SPEAKER_02: You got to come and prove it out.
1:28:19
SPEAKER_02: You gotta come and prove it.
1:28:20
SPEAKER_01: And then we talk, but virtually nobody wants to put them through that because we are now looking at a generation that has never had to earn anything.
1:28:30
SPEAKER_01: So they don't want to try out.
1:28:32
SPEAKER_02: Why don't more clubs, why don't more clubs do the NIL route?
1:28:35
SPEAKER_02: Or do they?
1:28:36
SPEAKER_02: And we just don't know.
1:28:37
SPEAKER_02: You tell me.
1:28:38
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
1:28:39
SPEAKER_02: I know I know a lot of these like USL2 clubs, they just they put them up in a in a dorm room or they're coming from uh somewhere else and they put them up for the summer.
1:28:50
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I know my hourly rate in my regular job.
1:28:52
SPEAKER_01: People don't want to pay that.
1:28:54
SPEAKER_01: I don't need to pay it.
1:28:55
SPEAKER_01: It's my hourly rate.
1:28:58
SPEAKER_01: I'll go the actual route.
1:28:59
SPEAKER_01: I'll go the legal route.
1:29:01
SPEAKER_01: I'll go above board.
1:29:03
SPEAKER_01: I don't need to slip you anything, bro.
1:29:05
SPEAKER_01: I'm not paying myself fees to just do work that is easy for me.
1:29:10
SPEAKER_01: That's why.
1:29:11
SPEAKER_03: Oh my god.
1:29:14
SPEAKER_01: Do you know what an NIL attorney costs, dude?
1:29:16
SPEAKER_02: No.
1:29:17
SPEAKER_01: It's not cheap.
1:29:18
SPEAKER_02: Really?
1:29:18
SPEAKER_01: I don't blame anybody for anything.
1:29:21
SPEAKER_01: And I don't blame anybody.
1:29:22
SPEAKER_01: The entire world is built on incentives.
1:29:27
SPEAKER_02: I don't I don't have an issue with athletes getting paid either.
1:29:31
SPEAKER_02: No.
1:29:31
SPEAKER_02: Why would you?
1:29:32
SPEAKER_02: Why?
1:29:33
SPEAKER_02: Like some of these, and somebody pushed back on me on this.
1:29:36
SPEAKER_02: Like, I I basically said Alabama's football program built their library.
1:29:43
SPEAKER_02: It built their medical school.
1:29:47
SPEAKER_02: It built their law school.
1:29:49
SPEAKER_02: And people are like, do you know the finances of University of Michigan?
1:29:52
SPEAKER_02: I'm not talking about University of Michigan, dude.
1:29:54
SPEAKER_02: I'm talking about everything else.
1:29:56
SPEAKER_02: It's like you're talking about endowment at Michigan.
1:29:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the endowment pays for that stuff at Michigan, but not every school has that, right?
1:30:04
SPEAKER_02: And so the they're there, you think Auburn has a great endowment?
1:30:10
SPEAKER_02: Probably not.
1:30:10
SPEAKER_02: But you know who what makes that institution money?
1:30:14
SPEAKER_02: They're a football program.
1:30:16
SPEAKER_01: If you want to hear a funny one, Jay.
1:30:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:30:19
SPEAKER_01: Always.
1:30:20
SPEAKER_01: And you gotta go soon.
1:30:22
SPEAKER_01: I do.
1:30:22
SPEAKER_01: In this fine country, with the absence of our model, college sports are closer to European football than our soccer is.
1:30:35
SPEAKER_01: College sports are on the brink of having transfer fees.
1:30:40
SPEAKER_01: College sports are on the brink of low-level universities trying to monetize talent so that when they do go play at U of M and they do go win the natty in basketball, they get a cut.
1:30:54
SPEAKER_01: That is the European model, and it's not a crime, bro.
1:30:58
SPEAKER_01: It's a logical, rational, hundred-year-old ecosystem that incentivizes development and feeds people.
1:31:07
SPEAKER_01: I have no problem with it.
1:31:08
SPEAKER_01: You know who's not doing that?
1:31:10
SPEAKER_01: Major League Soccer.
1:31:12
SPEAKER_01: Major League Soccer is the most anti-football model I have ever seen.
1:31:20
SPEAKER_01: College basketball is way closer.
1:31:25
SPEAKER_01: And you know what's fun?
1:31:27
SPEAKER_01: The University of Michigan might lose a game.
1:31:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:31:31
SPEAKER_01: Dude, if I'm Eastern Michigan and I go and I pull an upset or Appalachian State, that's fun.
1:31:38
SPEAKER_01: Exactly like it's fun watching Leicester City win the Prem.
1:31:44
SPEAKER_01: Exactly like I find it academically interesting that Indiana football pulled it off.
1:31:49
SPEAKER_01: They're not the only ones.
1:31:50
SPEAKER_01: And here's what's really fun about it.
1:31:52
SPEAKER_01: It's not in a brown paper bag like it used to be.
1:31:55
SPEAKER_01: It's above board.
1:31:57
SPEAKER_01: Let's compete.
1:31:59
SPEAKER_01: Let's pay players more than other programs so that we can compete and that we can develop intellectual solutions to that problem.
1:32:08
SPEAKER_01: Everybody's bitching about Mitchell.
1:32:09
SPEAKER_01: What do you want, dude?
1:32:10
SPEAKER_01: You want to watch two identical teams play each other?
1:32:13
SPEAKER_01: It's not fun.
1:32:14
SPEAKER_01: There needs to be a hero, there needs to be a villain, there needs to be a rich club, a poor club.
1:32:20
SPEAKER_01: There needs to be an open system in all sport in this country to give us a prayer.
1:32:26
SPEAKER_01: Dude, you fast forward 10 years, the NFL is no longer American.
1:32:30
SPEAKER_01: And why would it be?
1:32:32
SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be countries that invested in the development of athletes.
1:32:38
SPEAKER_02: Especially with this flag football and now being a part of the Olympics, that means that other countries are going to adopt football.
1:32:44
SPEAKER_02: And that's football, NFL wants to be such a global game.
1:32:47
SPEAKER_02: They want to take over that mantle of being the world's game.
1:32:52
SPEAKER_02: And I was like, dude, you're you're going down a slippery slope because the rest of the world is better at developing players than us because they have culture that they have to build themselves out of versus silver spoons over here.
1:33:06
SPEAKER_02: Real quick, women.
1:33:09
SPEAKER_02: Have you ever thought about doing a women's side too?
1:33:13
SPEAKER_01: Have not.
1:33:35
SPEAKER_01: Because of Title IX, you actually can logically and rationally tie youth women's participation to college scholarships.
1:33:45
SPEAKER_01: Men's, it's all internationals, bro.
1:33:48
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
1:33:48
SPEAKER_01: Women's, because of the number that they have, as far as the way that everything's structured, you might actually have an ROI on pay-to-play youth on the women's side.
1:33:58
SPEAKER_01: The pro side, you got the exact same system, the exact same structure.
1:34:03
SPEAKER_01: Um it's just it's just not something that we're doing.
1:34:09
SPEAKER_01: That's all.
1:34:10
SPEAKER_02: Uh we'll wrap this up.
1:34:12
SPEAKER_02: Tell people how to find like uh how to find you.
1:34:16
SPEAKER_02: Uh obviously the club, but also you personally, because you're you're good.
1:34:20
SPEAKER_01: I'm nine days in nine days in, yeah.
1:34:22
SPEAKER_01: Uh Alex Lubjanski on everything.
1:34:24
SPEAKER_01: Um I now I'll tag you and everything that I have it all.
1:34:28
SPEAKER_01: TikTok, Insta, YouTube, uh Twitter.
1:34:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:34:34
SPEAKER_01: My Twitter sucks.
1:34:34
SPEAKER_01: I need more followers.
1:34:35
SPEAKER_01: Please God, someone follow me on Twitter.
1:34:37
SPEAKER_01: Um that's a hard one to start.
1:34:39
SPEAKER_01: LinkedIn.
1:34:40
SPEAKER_01: I got them all, bro.
1:34:41
SPEAKER_01: And then what about the club?
1:34:42
SPEAKER_01: Club, Detroit, Metro FC, for the most part.
1:34:45
SPEAKER_01: A few of them we couldn't get the exact, so we got dots, but we have everything.
1:34:51
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:34:51
SPEAKER_01: Facebook, Insta, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube.
1:34:56
SPEAKER_01: Do we have it all?
1:34:57
SPEAKER_02: Dude.
1:34:58
SPEAKER_02: And when is first game?
1:34:59
SPEAKER_02: Do you have the schedule yet or not?
1:35:01
SPEAKER_01: The first game that I would like people to attend is on April 25th.
1:35:04
SPEAKER_02: April 25th.
1:35:05
SPEAKER_01: Our home games are unreal.
1:35:06
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:35:07
SPEAKER_01: Our away games are exactly what I described, and I just don't know that that would be fun for someone unless truly a soccer addict.
1:35:13
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:35:13
SPEAKER_01: But our home games are unreal.
1:35:15
SPEAKER_01: So yes, come to our home games.
1:35:17
SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
1:35:17
SPEAKER_02: April 25th.
1:35:18
SPEAKER_02: And then the announcement of where it'll be will be announced.
1:35:22
SPEAKER_01: It's already out there.
1:35:23
SPEAKER_01: Uh we're already selling tickets to that game.
1:35:25
SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's a home game.
1:35:26
SPEAKER_01: I'm the 25th at the Legacy Center.
1:35:28
SPEAKER_01: Legacy Center.
1:35:29
SPEAKER_01: Uh, the Field House.
1:35:30
SPEAKER_01: And truly, I mean, it is beautiful what our organization aligned from top to bottom, such passionate people.
1:35:39
SPEAKER_01: We generally have a game day crew of over 30 people working.
1:35:44
SPEAKER_01: You come in there and we paint it, man.
1:35:46
SPEAKER_01: We paint it with our sponsors, we paint it with our branding.
1:35:50
SPEAKER_01: We put up completely new banners, flyers, field boards, everything.
1:35:55
SPEAKER_01: It looks like a professional soccer game every single time.
1:35:58
SPEAKER_01: Love it.
1:35:58
SPEAKER_01: It is gorgeous.
1:36:00
SPEAKER_01: So come check it out.
1:36:01
SPEAKER_01: Great food, great alcohol, great fun areas for the kids.
1:36:06
SPEAKER_01: Our sponsors have some of the most tasty dishes you've ever seen, and it's fun, man.
1:36:12
SPEAKER_01: It's not just fun off the field, but on the field.
1:36:14
SPEAKER_01: You're gonna see guys that have been forged here.
1:36:17
SPEAKER_01: Love it.
1:36:18
SPEAKER_02: Awesome, man.
1:36:19
SPEAKER_02: We'll have to do this again.
1:36:20
SPEAKER_02: We'll do this again in a year.
1:36:22
SPEAKER_02: And then uh, and then we'll just catch up and everything.
1:36:24
SPEAKER_02: Hopefully, by then I'll have a studio somewhere.
1:36:27
SPEAKER_02: All right, brother.
1:36:28
SPEAKER_01: Let me know if I can help, dude.
1:36:29
SPEAKER_01: I love you.
1:36:29
SPEAKER_01: You need a studio.
1:36:30
SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm so happy.
1:36:31
SPEAKER_02: I'm so happy to be home and like talk to guys like you.
1:36:35
SPEAKER_02: Dude, we need more people like you.
1:36:37
SPEAKER_02: Thanks, brother.
1:36:38
SPEAKER_01: I can't wait till we get them.
1:36:39
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, oh yeah.
1:36:40
SPEAKER_00: I hate soccer.
1:36:44
SPEAKER_02: How long does it take your players to send out an email to a college coach?
1:36:49
SPEAKER_02: How long would it take to send out a hundred?
1:36:52
SPEAKER_02: This is why I partnered with Athlete Narrative.
1:36:55
SPEAKER_02: They have developed an app with the help of AI to streamline the process of emailing coaches.
1:37:03
SPEAKER_02: Imagine being able to send an email to every single coach that is at your upcoming showcase.
1:37:13
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1:37:18
SPEAKER_02: Download the app in the bio, and you'll be able to email every single coach in just minutes.
1:37:26
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1:37:32
SPEAKER_02: Coaches aren't going to know you exist if you've never reach out.
1:37:36
SPEAKER_02: Get notice.
1:37:37
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1:37:42
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