Don Garber is a storyteller.
Over lunch at a Midtown Manhattan rooftop restaurant final month, as he chronicles his journey from Bayside, Queens to the NFL workplaces on Park Avenue to MLS commissioner, it’s clear he is aware of it’s the little particulars that make a narrative sing.
He didn’t simply work at a fuel station in highschool, it was Barney’s Gulf, a sponsor of the Tony DePhillips Little League baseball group he performed for. He didn’t simply ship newspapers, he realized find out how to correctly fold up the Lengthy Island Press to toss whereas driving his Stingray bike. He reels off the names of characters he has met alongside the best way, like his spouse Betsy’s boss at public relations agency Ruder and Finn, who instructed her she may discover Betsy a greater match “than this knucklehead”. “We’ll be married 39 years,” he notes. Or the person who ran the farmstand he labored at throughout summer time break whereas a pupil at SUNY Oneonta.
He drops just a few surprises, too. Garber’s resume might begin at a vocational college close to LaGuardia Airport, however his first 12 months and a half after school was spent sleeping in a Ford van, working at bars and putting in irrigation traces to pay his method throughout the U.S. and Mexico with some buddies.
“Outdated guys have nice tales,” Garber says, with a smile.
Subsequent month will mark 25 years for Garber as MLS commissioner, and his skill to inform a narrative — and to promote it — make him one of the vital impactful figures in American soccer historical past.
Garber, 66, joined a fledgling MLS in 1999 from the NFL. His background in public relations, advertising and gross sales was important to retaining MLS afloat. Garber needed to promote soccer — to the general public, to sponsors and, finally, to traders. He navigated MLS via close to chapter and dissolution in 2001, ushered it into solvency with the creation of Soccer United Advertising, the industrial arm of the league that leveraged the rising recognition of the game to maintain the league afloat, after which led its enlargement and foundational development over the following twenty years.
MLS has a permanence now that by no means beforehand existed within the sport’s historical past within the U.S. and Canada. Whereas previous professional soccer leagues got here and went, an alphabet soup of makes an attempt to make soccer “the game of the longer term,” MLS now has 30 groups, 22 soccer-specific stadiums in markets throughout the U.S, with one other two underneath development and two extra not in use, and membership valuations that proceed to rise at a head-spinning price.
“I can confidently say we wouldn’t be the place we’re right this moment, actually, the league might not nonetheless be in enterprise, with out Don’s management,” mentioned FC Dallas proprietor Clark Hunt, who additionally owns the NFL’s Kansas Metropolis Chiefs.
Garber’s legacy is that basis however, two and a half many years later, the job is hardly executed.
Whereas he as soon as sat throughout the desk in a convention room with three house owners, on Wednesday Garber will sit on a dais in a resort ballroom for a board of governors assembly with almost 100 folks representing all 30 possession teams. His job is to construct consensus in that group at a time during which soccer has continued to develop in recognition within the U.S. and Canada, however the place MLS continues to be preventing for its place within the sports activities panorama.
MLS is confronting a second in time as consequential as when Garber first offered the concept stored the league alive in 2001. The World Cup is coming in two years, and everybody needs a chunk on the market Garber has known as the game’s ATM. The best participant of all time, Lionel Messi, performs for Inter Miami and has introduced extra eyeballs to MLS than ever earlier than. The league introduced this week it has set midseason information in attendance and in sponsorship gross sales. However how they absolutely reap the benefits of the second stays very a lot up for debate, even inside their very own board.
As soon as once more, Garber — who’s within the remaining phases of a contract extension to stay as commissioner — is tasked with seeing the precise path ahead; of understanding the dangers, but additionally recognizing the chance.
Don Garber talks to The Athletic’s Paul Tenorio (MLS)
Garber shakes his head on the query: How a lot is Queens nonetheless part of who he’s?
“You can’t take the Queens out of anyone who really was born and bred there,” he says. “It is part of your DNA.”
Garber grew up in Bayside within the Nineteen Sixties and 70s, a middle-class group constructed round immigrant households. Your popularity was constructed enjoying basketball and stickball, and also you had been judged not simply by how good you had been on the fields, but additionally how good of a dangle. Garber didn’t battle in both space.
“He was the glue, he was the man who created quite a lot of the enjoyable,” mentioned New York Islanders proprietor Jon Ledecky, who went to grade college with Garber in Queens. “He was a ringleader, if you’ll, however not in a mischievous method, a really optimistic method of organizing all the things, from being on the sandlot to hoops and simply hanging out and having enjoyable. As little children, there are guys you look as much as. Don was a type of guys.”
For Garber, being from Queens is about deep loyalty, but additionally “actual ambition to wish to be in an surroundings that also has the connectivity and the loyalty and the friendships from the place you got here from, however kind of aspires to be throughout the river.” It was a starvation that constructed up in his group of buddies, a lot of whom went on to nice success. The group features a billionaire, a sports activities group proprietor and a commissioner, in addition to a number of others who’ve risen to the highest of their subject.
Ledecky, a Harvard grad, mentioned the cohort could be the smartest group of individuals he has been with in a concentrated vogue. There’s a group of them, about 15 or 20, that also get collectively at a bar again within the outdated neighborhood across the holidays.
“We had been all a part of a bunch of fellows who had drive and ambition burned into us by immigrant dad and mom,” Ledecky mentioned.
Garber left house to attend SUNY Oneonta, after which, after dwelling in a van for about 18 months, acquired a letter from his mother making an attempt to lure him again house with a job commercial clipped from the newspaper. It was for a PR job on the Bulova Faculty of Watchmaking, a tuition-free program for veterans. Garber moved again to the outdated neighborhood and set to work, teaching a wheelchair basketball group on the college.
Finally, his aunt really useful he get an internship at Rudder and Finn, a PR agency, which was beginning a sports activities division. There, Garber labored on accounts for 7Up, Miller Lite and Kinney’s Foot Locker. He finally parlayed his PR work right into a job with NFL Properties.
In an workplace stuffed with MBAs from Ivy League colleges, the child from Queens felt he always needed to show himself. Garber put his head down and labored in what was an unforgiving surroundings. It was there he realized find out how to promote and to “chart via uneven waters.” It was additionally there that Garber realized to belief his imaginative and prescient for what others won’t be capable of see.
When NFL Properties determined to maintain only one gross sales exec to run the group, Garber remembers a colleague, Rick Dudley, coming into his workplace.
“Hey Don, you’re out,” he mentioned.
As a VP of enterprise growth, Garber oversaw areas that got here at a value for the NFL. The opposite worker who labored in media gross sales was bringing in cash. Garber, although, couldn’t fathom the concept he was out.
“I mentioned to Rick, ‘Why don’t you let me go house and I’m going to create a division for all these items that we’ve been engaged on,’” Garber mentioned. “We will do an occasion on the Tremendous Bowl. I feel we will do TV reveals. I feel we must always change the halftime present. There’s an entire occasions enterprise… I went house and I got here up with a plan.”
Garber returned and took the plan to the gross sales group. He was requested a easy query: May they discover sponsors to fund these concepts? In the event that they did, it might get moved up the chain to NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue. Over the following few months, they offered the plan.
“We went to Coke, went to Amex, went to Frito Lay on the halftime present,” Garber mentioned.
The NFL Expertise launched in 1992, drawing 100,000 followers. Three years later, the success of NFL Expertise led Tagliabue to tab Garber, then 37, to run the NFL worldwide enterprise. Garber constructed out a profitable group there, too.
His success promoting American soccer to the world prompted New England Patriots proprietor Robert Kraft to method Garber to see if he can be keen to take over as MLS commissioner and check out promoting soccer within the U.S. Newspapers across the nation panned the choice to rent an NFL government with no soccer data to run the league. For Garber, it felt like an analogous pitch to the one he made across the NFL Expertise. He understood the potential.
“There was a lot alternative,” Garber mentioned. “They weren’t actually doing all the things they wanted to do. And it’s important to have the type of thoughts to see that, and that was my talent set. I noticed one thing in soccer that I feel a bunch of householders noticed, however I don’t suppose quite a lot of different folks noticed. It’s a must to look and see what could possibly be versus what’s proper in entrance of you.”
It wouldn’t take lengthy till that talent set was examined.
Garber was simply over one 12 months into his tenure as MLS commissioner however, as he sat across the eating room desk at Phil Anschutz’s ranch in Colorado with a handful of householders in December 2000, the existence of the league was in jeopardy.
A number of groups had been struggling on the gates. The league was shedding cash and chapter attorneys had been on retainer. MLS’s handful of householders gathered to debate whether or not there was a path ahead. Garber and then-deputy commissioner Mark Abbott offered two plans. The primary was to proceed doing enterprise as normal.
“We’re going to lose more cash and I can’t sit right here right this moment and inform you that, three years from now, we might suggest going ahead,” Garber recalled saying. “We don’t suppose it’s a viable plan for an expert sports activities league.”
Plan B was extra concerned: “Quadruple down, take some massive dangers,” Garber mentioned. Fold two groups, construct stadiums and make investments tens of tens of millions into a brand new enterprise centered on rising the industrial market round soccer. Garber mentioned the concept was to show there was, certainly, an urge for food for the game — and thru that, a marketplace for MLS.
“We would have liked to create a industrial engine that might increase the general industrial worth of soccer in America, as a result of that hadn’t existed,” Garber mentioned. “You couldn’t discuss to a sponsor about investing in soccer. They didn’t know what soccer was. They couldn’t see any worth in soccer.”
It wasn’t a straightforward promote to the house owners.
“Once we offered that plan, a lot of house owners mentioned ‘I’m out’,” Garber mentioned. “I don’t like Plan A, which is gonna lose more cash and the league goes to fold, and I don’t wish to put in any more cash (for Plan B). And we would have liked to sit down in that well-known eating room and never depart till we had at the very least provide you with an iteration of the plan which stored the unique house owners collectively. And that was backroom negotiations and a few actually enjoyable discussions that acquired heated at instances, that had all people wanting one another within the eye and saying: ‘Are you in? When you’re in, I’m in.’”
Three house owners, Anschutz, Kraft and Lamar Hunt, dedicated to remain in. Hunt and Anschutz took on possession of a number of groups. Groups in Miami and Tampa Bay had been contracted after the 2001 season. Most crucially, the house owners launched Soccer United Advertising, buying the American tv rights to the 2002 and 2006 males’s World Cups and 2003 Ladies’s World Cup — which had no purchaser on the time — for round $40 million, masking all manufacturing prices and promoting promoting for ESPN.
“Don’s an ideal salesman and he was in a position to persuade us that there was a chance to create an financial mannequin that went past the league, that Main League Soccer may take part in, that might assist maintain the game,” Clark Hunt mentioned. “The creation of SUM was pivotal at the moment. I feel right this moment, you look again at it and know that was a type of seminal moments within the historical past of the league.”
The choice round that desk set the stage for the following section of MLS: stabilize the league after which, just some years after contracting groups, increase once more. That Garber carved the trail there was no shock to those that had watched him ascend to the job.
“I feel the explanation they employed Don is that they noticed what I noticed when he was a child,” Ledecky mentioned. “They noticed that present of with the ability to deliver folks collectively and to say, ‘Look, we’re gonna go from A to B, and we’re gonna be OK doing it.’ That’s certainly one of his superpowers.”
The photographs have change into ubiquitous over the previous decade in MLS. Garber on a stage carrying the headband of a brand new enlargement metropolis, or in a tough hat holding a shovel in entrance of a stadium website.
If Garber’s legacy in his first decade and a half in MLS was retaining the league afloat and serving to it discover a point of stability, the previous 10 years have been in regards to the league’s development, each throughout the continent and vertically within the stadiums and services it has constructed.
The turning level got here in 2009, when Garber stood on the sector in Seattle in awe of the 32,000-plus in attendance. The league began to increase once more in 2005, welcoming franchises into Los Angeles — one of many league’s largest errors, Chivas USA, which it dissolved in 2014 — in addition to Salt Lake, then relocating a group to Houston in 2006 and welcoming Toronto in 2007.
David Beckham’s arrival with the LA Galaxy in 2007 additionally gave the league a stage of credibility it had lengthy sought. However the photos of packed stadiums in Seattle grew to become the promoting level on which the trajectory of the league flipped.
Don Garber and David Beckham, two massively influential figures in MLS historical past (MLS)
“That was the shot heard around the globe,” Garber mentioned. “Like, ‘Hey, there’s one thing right here that everyone’s lacking.’”
Soccer was out of the blue sellable. The Seattle Sounders had been the fifteenth group in MLS. Ten years later, the league had grown to 24 groups, with enlargement franchises in Philadelphia, Portland, Vancouver, Montreal, New York, Orlando, Atlanta, Minnesota, Los Angeles and Cincinnati. 5 extra groups would be a part of from 2019-23.
“It was very laborious to get folks within the league with no payment to hitch (in the beginning),” Clark Hunt mentioned. “And Don stored working at it and began nurturing some relationships that he had and constructing new relationships with individuals who had been within the sport, and slowly however certainly we had been in a position to begin attracting traders and in addition gaining traction with metropolis leaders in numerous elements of the nation who had been concerned with probably bringing a Main League Soccer group to their metropolis and serving to construct a stadium the place that new group may play.”
Because the league grew, Garber pushed house owners to spend money on services. Billions of {dollars} had been spent on coaching services and stadiums across the nation. The photographs of these soccer-specific stadiums, and the atmospheres in them, have change into arguably the league’s biggest asset.
“One of many largest accomplishments that our house owners have achieved, which takes blood, sweat, monumental planning, intense lobbying municipalities and actual braveness, is the actual fact we constructed 26 soccer stadiums,” Garber mentioned. “Once I stroll into this workplace every single day and I stroll previous an extended wall of (footage of) stadiums, I discover it’s nonetheless extremely inspiring. We did that one brick at a time.”
Don Garber surveys St Louis’ CityPark stadium in 2022, shortly earlier than it formally opened (MLS)
Because the league’s infrastructure and real-estate portfolios have grown, so too have valuations across the golf equipment. Forbes ranked LAFC as MLS’s most dear membership at $1.2 billion this 12 months, simply forward of Messi and Miami’s $1.03 billion valuation. Forbes estimates the typical worth of an MLS membership is round $658 million.
It’s a exceptional quantity, contemplating Forbes’ estimates that MLS groups common round $66 million in income and the league lately locked right into a 10-year media rights cope with Apple for $2.5 billion, a deal during which the league covers the entire manufacturing prices. The Apple deal is taken into account one of many league’s largest bets, shifting the whole lot of its product — native, nationwide and worldwide media rights — behind a paywall on a streaming service, but additionally in partnership with one of many world’s strongest corporations.
The market has remained bullish on MLS, particularly with the World Cup across the nook. San Diego lately paid a $500 million enlargement payment and can start play subsequent 12 months, whereas Indianapolis is now lobbying for its personal enlargement group.
On Monday, the league introduced will increase in league and membership sponsorship income by about 10 % 12 months over 12 months, in addition to will increase in jersey gross sales and social engagement.
“It was a mean (group) worth of $10 million 20 years in the past,” LAFC proprietor Bennett Rosenthal mentioned. “You’ve acquired near $20 billion of enterprise worth (now). That’s a legacy of itself, that you simply’ve created one thing of such financial worth.”
Garber, in the meantime, has grown into probably the most highly effective determine in American soccer. Along with operating MLS, he has sat on the board of U.S. Soccer for greater than twenty years, a seat that drew the ire of followers this 12 months when MLS tried to drag its group out of the U.S. Open Cup. In the long run, solely eight MLS groups participated within the 110-year-old event. Garber has been accused of wielding his affect an excessive amount of to favor MLS over different skilled leagues and of placing the great of the league’s enterprise over that of the game itself. The connection between MLS and U.S. Soccer was additionally lengthy thought-about too cozy, with a shared media-rights deal brokered by SUM, although the U.S. Soccer and SUM relationship led to 2021 after almost 20 years of partnership.
Garber, nonetheless, has lengthy pushed again on the concept he has an excessive amount of energy, as a substitute saying it falls on the professional leagues to have that kind of affect on rising the sport.
“There is no such thing as a doubt we take it very critical that we have now an obligation to construct this sport,” Garber instructed The Athletic earlier this 12 months. “And that’s one thing we take into consideration every single day. I’ve been on the board of U.S. Soccer for many years, I’ve by no means missed an (annual common assembly), and I take that duty passionately and significantly. However all of us have to consider our evolving world of soccer as one thing that may’t simply be primarily based on what was — however has to evolve in a world of what it’s and what it must be. And that requires rethinking issues.”
That concept applies to extra than simply the U.S. Open Cup or U.S. Soccer, nonetheless. With the urge for food for the game persevering with to extend, MLS should now decide one of the simplest ways ahead. Garber once more can have a massively influential influence on that route.
Messi’s arrival in Miami final summer time turned a good larger highlight on MLS and highlighted areas the place the league nonetheless has large alternative. Whereas the enterprise metrics are optimistic and the valuations have soared, the sporting facet of the league nonetheless lags behind a lot of its world competitors.
For therefore lengthy, MLS has been about regular, focused development. However whether or not that method continues to be the precise one could be very a lot up for debate in a boardroom that has had an injection of recent personalities and opinions throughout the league’s increase period of enlargement. Some house owners need the league to push ahead extra aggressively. Others favor the continuation of the extra conservative method.
“Previously, we had 100% unanimity on each vote. We don’t anymore. Now, there’s heaps extra debate,” Garber mentioned. “And that’s OK. It requires us to do some extra work on making certain all people understands the choices they’re making and what influence that’s going to have on the enterprise. However that’s the fact of a maturing sports activities league. It occurs in each different league. You’re going to have massive markets and small markets. You’re going to have legacy house owners and new house owners… I must be centered and the league workplace must be centered on enterprise success on behalf of all. That’s a really, very, very completely different job than it was 10 years in the past.”
Garber’s skill to navigate the boardroom has change into an more and more vital — and troublesome — job. Many of those house owners are billionaires who’ve constructed ultra-successful companies. All of them have sturdy opinions.
“These are usually not 30 shrinking violets — and, by the best way, it’s not essentially 30 (house owners), it’s 60 or 80 personalities,” Sounders proprietor Adrian Hanauer mentioned, “Don has a superpower of regarding folks in the best way they must be associated to. He has a breadth of data but additionally only a humanity about him that enables him to have empathy, to know what persons are going via and what they want.”
Nashville proprietor John Ingram mentioned: “He generally is a powerful New Yorker when he must be, however he’s additionally only a beautiful individual too.”
Garber mentioned he acquired one final piece of recommendation from Tagliabue when he left the NFL: “Preserve the house owners who hate you away from those who’re undecided.” Because the quantity and number of opinions have elevated, that activity might be put to the check extra usually. Whereas his skill to inform a narrative and promote a sport might have been his most vital talent when he first took over as commissioner, it’s the talent set of the child from Bayside, that skill to deliver folks collectively, that grew to become his most vital attribute over the previous decade.
“As a commissioner, it’s not simply having the concepts; it’s with the ability to get folks to rally round them and be a part of arms,” LAFC co-owner Larry Berg mentioned. “And he’s superb at that.”
Don Garber meets Nelson Mandela in 2010, with President Clinton additionally current (MLS)
As Garber now strikes into the again half of his third decade accountable for MLS, nonetheless, he has to find out the very best path for house owners to rally round. The league’s success with a deliberate method over the previous 25 years undoubtedly nonetheless informs the technique right this moment.
Garber clearly understands that, as the worldwide market evolves, MLS’s skill to evolve with it’s important to its continued development. What was achieved in his first 25 years as commissioner has set the league as much as be prepared for what comes subsequent, he mentioned.
“The place it was a major deal with constructing long-term stability and viability up to now and having to make some actually inventive or powerful selections to realize that, right this moment we’ve achieved that long-term viability and stability,” Garber mentioned. “And now we have to flip quite a lot of our vitality into interested by: How can we take all the things that we constructed and switch it into one thing that can really obtain our aim of being one of many prime soccer leagues on the planet?
“What does that imply to our participant signing technique? What does it imply to our deal with aggressive steadiness? What does it imply to our aggressive schedule and competitors format? What does it imply to how we centralize quite a lot of our industrial rights? We have to undergo a course of to find out: Are the issues that we’ve executed which have pushed us to the place we’re right this moment the identical issues that can drive us to the place we have to go tomorrow? And I’m not satisfied they’re.
“I feel we do must take a giant step again so we will take 5 steps ahead.”
The numerous questions Garber posed stay unanswered as he and MLS decide what these 5 steps ahead seem like. At its core, Garber believes the duty continues to be the identical one he signed up for 25 years in the past. Promoting a dream about what top-division soccer can seem like within the U.S. and convincing folks to care.
“We will likely be one of many dominant leagues on the planet,” he mentioned. “The query isn’t if, it’s when. We will likely be. Nothing however time will cease that. And we simply need to be good sufficient to not be lazy and suppose we will get there too rapidly. Now we have to earn it.”
It’s a narrative Garber’s not fairly executed telling but.
(Prime photographs: Getty Pictures and Austin FC; design Eamonn Dalton)