After about a year as president of Major League Soccer club New York City FC, Tom Glick is back in the U.K. as chief commercial officer of City Football Group, owner of Premier League side Man City. He is also the managing director of City Football Marketing. The group currently operates four top-tier football clubs in N.Y., Melbourne, Yokohama and Manchester. Glick spoke with SBD Global about CFG's plans for the Chinese market, preserving the club's local identities and youth development.
Q: How does CFG coordinate its global football operations?
Tom Glick: Each of our clubs has their own local identities and operates as clubs for the fans of each of their cities. We are lucky to be part of this group and to have this common DNA in the way of playing, interacting with our fans, investing in our communities. But at the end of the day NYC FC is a club for New York and New Yorkers, which we are building with the city of New York and with New Yorkers, so it maintains its local identity. The same is true in Melbourne and for the club that we co-own in Yokohama. There are great opportunities for knowledge sharing and resource sharing both in running the businesses of our clubs and our football operations, but each of our clubs has its local identity and this is very important … We are very conscious of letting each of our clubs establish their own identity and have their own role within the cities where they play.
Q: What are the benefits of competing in the EPL?
Glick: There are more people watching the Premier League around the world, and it is the most favored league of any league around the world, so it’s our great fortune to be able to play in the Premier League. It’s highly relevant. It’s the league of choice. One of the proof points of that is the continuing escalation of the revenues that are coming in from around the world in terms of the league that people are willing to pay the most to watch. The Premier League has done a great job of continuing to invest in a number of things: investing in the product in terms of attracting the best players from around the world; investing it in the television product, so that what we are putting out there around the world for our fans to watch continues to get better and stronger, giving more and more insight and access to our fans and also investing in our infrastructure. … As a partner in the Premier League we are continuing to work with our other clubs in the league office to continue to invest, so we can continue to strengthen and become more and more watched and more and more relevant.
Q: How does having a Middle Eastern owner, Sheikh Mansour, impact the group?
Glick: We are very fortunate to have a great owner, a great board and a great leadership team. We are very long-term-minded and very consistent, and as an operator, to have a long-term-minded and a consistent owner is a great strength. We have a clear vision of what we want to do, which is to create a group of football clubs that operate in a sustainable way at a very high performance level and to win trophies. To play in a certain way, invest in our communities and the cities where our clubs are located, as well as in other cities around the world to improve lives through football. We are working very hard on doing that right and doing it more and more broadly.
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| The City Football Academy in East Manchester opened its doors in late '14. |
Q: What are CFG's goals in terms of youth development?
Glick: The academy in Manchester is an amazing place, but it’s amazing for a number of reasons. Clearly it’s a world-class facility. It’s a great training environment for young players, boys and girls, as well as a training environment for our first teams, men’s and women’s. It also is about community investment. That campus that we built, we have some of the facilities that by design exist so they can be used on our campus by people in the community for soccer development, coaching, life skills development and physical fitness development that our coaches are providing for those members of the community that are not part of the academy program. It’s also an urban regeneration story in East Manchester, where we completely turned around a neighborhood. We employed local people to build it who are there now to help us to run it. In addition to having this training facility, we have a sixth-form college, also known as a high school in the U.S., a university-track high school, which didn’t exist in the neighborhood for a couple of decades, with 600 students. … An institute for health and performance that we have done in partnership with the city council of Manchester and Sport England, which is an R&D facility for elite sport and public sport, as well as a public leisure center … To get back to youth development, our mission is to identify and develop boys and girls into top performing young men and women, some eventually as professional football players and some go on to other careers … Our expectation is that many of them will develop into football players who will play in our first teams in our clubs around the world. … The same is true in New York. The same is true in Melbourne. We’ve actually built a facility in Melbourne, we are getting ready to build one in New York. Manchester and Melbourne have provided a great template for what we now do in New York.
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Q: How does CFG want to take advantage of China's emphasis on football?
Glick: We would love to have a Chinese player playing for [one of our clubs.] I think this will be a natural evolution. The real ethos is a root and branch overhaul and development of the sport of soccer in China, which is being led by President Xi Jinping and the central government. This is about teaching every boy and every girl how to play soccer, all of the PE teachers how to coach the sport of soccer. To develop a love and affinity for it and really develop a grassroots level as widely as possible as well as to work on the elite game. There is so much excitement going on around the sport of soccer in China. The Premier League is on state TV, the Super League is enjoying huge investment … but on the grassroots level there’s an unprecedented push around the sport of soccer and this is the part that we are working on that perhaps is most significant. What we aim to do more than anything else is to help China in its mission to develop the sport of soccer. A very important way that we have already started to do that over the last year is in our partnership with the Ministry of Education, where we have coaches on the ground in schools in nine cities coaching more than 12,000 boys and girls every week. We are the only club that has such a relationship with the Ministry of Education.
