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| ChampionsWorld’s Charlie Stillitano will fill Giants Stadium with soccer fans twice in the next two weeks. |
Tuesday's Manchester United contest in Seattle kicks off the most intense period of international men's soccer in this country since the World Cup lapped up on these shores almost a decade ago.
Seven global soccer giants, including brand dynamo Man U, will showcase their skills to largely sold-out stadiums over the next 14 days.
Who is behind this flurry of eight blockbuster games? The U.S. Soccer Federation, charged with promoting the sport in America? Major League Soccer, the U.S. men's professional league?
Neither.
Instead, it's a 15-person upstart soccer marketer and promoter, ChampionsWorld LLC (ChampionsWorld Series facts), which has the ear of some of the world's leading sports franchises. Launched in 2000 by the gregarious Charlie Stillitano (Snapshot: Charlie Stillitano), the ex-general manager of MLS' New York/New Jersey MetroStars, ChampionsWorld is calling the shots in the latest bet that Americans will buy into top-flight soccer.
"The magnitude of these games this summer, no one has done that in a period of time like this," said Stillitano, 43, who ran Giants Stadium during the 1994 World Cup. "The view out there is we have hit on an untapped market: high-level international soccer here in the U.S."
High risk, high return
ChampionsWorld is footing $15 million of costs for the eight games but expects a 20 percent return, or $3 million profit, a rarity in the chronically red-ink-stained American soccer universe. The money flows from a revenue-sharing pact with Fox Sports World, which will televise the tour in the United States and in more than 130 other countries; several major sponsors, including MasterCard and Budweiser; as well as ticket sales.
ChampionsWorld's growing success has fed a view that it is at odds with the U.S. soccer establishment because the company's games are competition. MLS, which has always tried to build a distinct American soccer product, sued Giants Stadium last year just as ChampionsWorld was ready to stage a Real Madrid match, contending the stadium did not have the right under the MetroStars' lease to host other major soccer games. The sides have since settled, and the game took place, though not without first significantly increasing ChampionsWorld's costs.
"Charlie at this point is somewhat competitive with MLS," said Stuart Subotnick, who owned the operating rights to the MetroStars between 1996 and 2001 and was Stillitano's boss. "It would have been better if MLS and Charlie had worked together from the get-go, but MLS wasn't up to doing that."
MLS Commissioner Don Garber charges that perspective is phony. The 8-year-old soccer league stages dozens of international matches, he said, including more than 20 already this year.
"There is the perception that ChampionsWorld invented the international game business," Garber said. "ChampionsWorld had been very successful with a handful of big clubs, and that has created the perception that MLS has been left behind."
The reality, Garber continued, is MLS and Stillitano are friendly. The two sides are co-hosting a kids soccer clinic with Manchester United next week, and Garber said he would sit near Stillitano at Man U's July 31 game at Giants Stadium, citing it as an example of their goodwill.
Jim Chambers, a ChampionsWorld board member and the president of spirits purveyor Remy Amerique, disagreed. "We have always looked for a way to work with MLS and may one day find that way," he said. "Up to this point, we haven't."
Soccer fan at early age
Stillitano publicly wants no part of an MLS feud, real or imaginary, stressing his relations with the league are solid.
His father, who died in a car crash driving home from a youth soccer match just prior to the 1994 World Cup, was an Italian-American immigrant who instilled in young Charlie a love of the sport. So he doesn't want to muddy the waters.
"There are a lot of misconceptions about soccer," Stillitano said. "Sometimes people say if you do a big international game, will [people also] go to MLS? The short answer is they will, as long as they are excited about both products."
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| Stillitano |
One of Stillitano's earliest soccer memories was working as a ball boy in 1973 when clubs Lazio and Pele's Santos skirmished in Jersey City. Fans stormed the field after the game to beg for Pele's autograph, and Stillitano recalls riot police ordering him to take refuge in the goal. One of the Lazio players that day, Giorgio Chinaglia, is now ChampionsWorld's senior vice president of business development.
A college soccer player, Stillitano declined a chance in 1981 to compete for a spot on a North American Soccer League team to instead return to Princeton to complete his thesis on Italian fascism.
He later toiled for a year in a minor soccer league before returning to school to secure a law degree. He worked as a lawyer in the late 1980s and early '90s, but he kept his finger in the sport, coaching junior teams and as an assistant coach for the Princeton men's squad.
His break came in 1992 when he landed the deputy venue director's job for the World Cup site in New Jersey. Within months, the executive director resigned, leaving Stillitano in charge of what would emerge as a stunning success.
"I got to see the power of international soccer firsthand," he recounted with relish while sitting in his memento-cluttered office, just a stone's throw from Giants Stadium in northern New Jersey.
Later, when he managed the MetroStars, he staged international games, recalling: "I would see every time we did a big event, it was a big game, people felt it was more than just a soccer match, it was something they had to be at. That always stuck in my head."
YankeeNets woes big break
When Stillitano left MLS, which owns all its teams, in 1999, he ran a short-lived company called Metromedia Soccer for Subotnick and his partner, John Kluge. Metromedia Soccer unsuccessfully looked at investing in overseas teams but found the conflicts with MLS too great. Because Subotnick and Kluge owned the operating rights to the MetroStars, foreign clubs wanted a pipeline to the team's players. But with MLS owning the team, Metromedia couldn't guarantee transfers.
So Stillitano left, scrabbled together savings with a second mortgage, and opened ChampionsWorld for business on June 30, 2000. YankeeNets was his first client, and he helped bring in Manchester United as a marketing partner in 2001, a landmark agreement that included the promise of a 2003 tour.
But when YankeeNets dissolved in all but name, eliminating the possibility it would manage Man U's first tour of the United States in more than 40 years, tiny ChampionsWorld found itself facing what amounted to an open goal.
"We liked his choice of restaurants," said Peter Draper, Manchester United's marketing director, joking about why he chose Stillitano, well-known in soccer circles as an aficionado of Italian cooking. Man U did talk to several other promoters when it became clear YankeeNets was no more, but took ChampionsWorld when Draper said it became clear Stillitano could deliver, despite his small staff.
Still, it is not exactly a free kick financially for ChampionsWorld. Besides the millions of dollars in appearance fees due the clubs (more than $2 million to Man U alone), it also is paying $2.5 million, sources said, to the U.S. Soccer Federation for the sanctions to host international soccer in this country. Those sanction fees ensure it is prohibitively expensive to stage these matches, and explain why an undertaking like ChampionsWorld's this summer has not occurred before.
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| "Every time we did a big event... people felt it was more than just a soccer match." |
| Charlie Stillitano,ChampionsWorld LLC |
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With Man U as the drawing card, other clubs soon joined, some with their own tours, creating what Stillitano markets cumulatively as the ChampionsWorld Series. Under his contract with Fox, Stillitano must pull off an eight-game series for five consecutive summers here.
With soccer's jumbled calendar of tournaments, World Cup and Olympics pulling top teams in different directions, Stillitano has his work cut out.
"It will be very hard to get the timing right," said Sunil Gulati, the former MLS deputy commissioner and now executive vice president of the U.S. Soccer Federation. Without Man U as a lure, he predicted, "replicat[ing] it every year is next to impossible."
Don't tell ChampionsWorld, however, which later this summer plans to unveil next year's tours. It's counting on global soccer clubs coveting exposure in the United States more consistently than in the past.
"Clearly the desire of ChampionsWorld is for these teams to come back on a regular basis," said Blake Darcy, a board member and the former CEO of Credit Suisse First Boston Direct. "From the standpoint of these teams branding in the U.S., they will have to have a regular presence. They understand the U.S. market is huge and fairly untapped."
