BEHIND THE PLAY #49

If you were starting today, what would you have to do to build a great youth soccer club?

I’ve been working full time at a youth soccer club for over 20 years now. I’ve learned some things and I’ve seen an incredible shift in how clubs need to operate to survive and be successful in the current landscape. It was already a dynamic time as we headed into the pandemic. That dynamism has gone turbo since.

While clearly my experiences are shaped by where I work (Vancouver) and some ideas may not transport well to other jurisdictions, I think many will. This will be an ongoing feature in BTP until it’s run its course. Some of it will be obvious to people, some of it will be quite surprising.

I’ll start this week with an overview that gives the 30,000 ft view.

Building the perfect club, part 1: Overview

When I started working at the club level in 2003, my club was just the third in Metro Vancouver to have a paid Technical Director. It was part time the first year, becoming full time thereafter. We had a part-time administrator. Online registrations were not a thing yet but soon would be. Volunteerism was rampant, necessary and appreciated. Parents lined fields, set up goals, coached and managed teams, acted as age group coordinators and even reffed games at the younger ages.

You were considered a big club then if you had over 1000 players. We had about 1300. Today, you’re a big club if you have 3000 or more. There are more, but not significantly, players overall but fewer clubs. Many mergers have occurred to allow clubs to get to a point where they could support professional staffing and have a critical mass of players to comfortably offer teams at every age and level of play. As professionalism increased in the game and Vancouver became a much more expensive city to live in, parents embraced a change which normalized less volunteerism. The combination of more staff and a swift move away from grass fields which were free of charge for a long time before the Park Board started charging a still very reasonable $2/hour to artificial turf fields which can cost over $100/hour meant that soccer fees rose considerably.

As soccer became more expensive and demographics continued to evolve along with parenting habits and actions, youth soccer, which had been one of a just a handful of established activities that parents chose from for the kids, now faced increasing competition from other sports that had previously been peripheral (martial arts, rugby, volleyball) and non-sport activities (dance, piano, language lessons, tutoring). Additional competition came from within the sport as well. Academies started popping up very regularly. In 2003 there were just two: Roman Tulis and Total Soccer Systems (where I worked as a coach for three years prior to becoming a TD). Now there’s probably close to 50 that range from established, successful and highly regarded to tiny, marginal and barely hanging on.

So it’s not enough to just hang out your ‘youth soccer club’ shingle and expect to have players flock to fill up spots on your teams or training groups. It’s very competitive now. Factor in a dramatically different parent mindset that is far more demanding in terms of player safety, development and, for a disproportionate number, a clear, continuous path for their child to higher levels of play and if they don’t get that upward movement, they are far more likely to change clubs. I would guess the number of players who play their youth soccer at a single club now, compared to 10-15 years ago, is less than half. I was speaking with a BC League 1 coach who told me one of the players on their women’s team had used the NCAA portal to change universities four times, all in search of a ‘better’ soccer experience/program. It’s not unusual for players to play for three BCSPL clubs between U13/14 (starting age changed recently) and U18.

The four P’s of marketing are Product, Placement, Price and Promotion. It’s actually a good lens to use for defining the landscape and how one would go about trying to start a new youth soccer club in this current environment.

Product

Clubs, here, primarily take the form of either a not-for-profit society that is registered as such with the Provincial Government. This provides certain advantages and limitations. Depending on the final goal of the enterprise the decision on which to opt for is important. As a rule, clubs fall into the former and academies are formed as private businesses; generally corporations. Some academies then look to create partnerships with clubs to access league play for their players as the established leagues don’t allow private business academies to enter. The gymnastics some resort to are impressive, and sometimes off-putting, but the hallmark of successful businesses in that they persevere to find a way to stay viable.

For the most part this “How to build a club” feature on BTP will do so from the point of view of a community-based, not-for-profit club rather than a private academy as that is where my knowledge rests and they remain, by far, the default choice for the vast majority of players. I would guess that the largest club in Metro Vancouver has more players than all the private academies combined; if not, definitely the two largest clubs.

So we’ll assume the product is a not for profit society type of club that is required to become a member of a District (which are increasingly anachronistic but hold the actual membership within BC Soccer, our Provincial governing body, rather than the actual clubs) and plays in leagues sanctioned by those Districts and have their rules approved annually by BC Soccer.

Placement

As mentioned above, there has been a move to consolidate smaller clubs into larger ones that have the ability to offer all levels of play at all ages from U4 to U18. The club I started with merged with two other neighbourhood clubs on the west side of Vancouver to form one larger club that would have the resources to add staff and offer the right level of play for all players once tiered play starts at U11. Again, you really need to be approaching 3000 players to pull that off. Starting a club from scratch would find it virtually impossible to get that critical mass unless is was a merger of two or more clubs.

So if you’re not in the position of being a ‘full service club’ right out the gate, how do you position yourself to survive the first three years as you establish yourself in terms of credibility, quality and value? Product differentiation, in some form, would be critical but in a flooded market it would be difficult to find an original approach. I’ll cover this in more details in subsequent BTP’s but essentially you’re looking to simplify your messaging around who and what you are and have that carry forward in all messaging and on the field. Want to focus on U4 to U10 and be a destination for those who want a fun, safe environment where the emphasis is to facilitate kids playing on the same teams as their friends? Do it and push that community aspect. It would seems to be a logical way to enter the market but its not that simple. The reality is that there’s some very tactile downsides to it despite the apparent charm and simplicity; name blowouts and a lack of pathway once you hit divisional soccer at U11. These are two of main reasons players quit the game or move to another club.

There’s several other options for a new, assumedly small club, to choose from in terms of an identity that places them, accurately, in the youth soccer market. These will also be discussed later.

Price

Price is really a function of the programming you plan to offer. Nailing down accurate program descriptions is critical both from an internal operations and budgeting perspective. Are you going to push for volunteer coaches and volunteers to do admin work or are you going to go fully professional and just have parents drop off their kids for sessions led by staff coaches? Can you do a hybrid? These and other factors affect costs which in turn inform what you’ll need to charge. Another aspects of pricing include depth and length of programming. Will teams train once, twice or three times a week? For how many months of the year? Will travel be involved? Are there expensive certifications and other training that coaches will be required to obtain to coach at this level? What access do you have to fields?

Consumers have tremendous options in terms of how much they want to spend on their kids’ soccer. Value also varies considerably and perceptions around coaching, club communications, player evaluations and overall organization are very subjective (from the parent end) and open to considerable qualitative differences (at the club end).

Promotion

Unfortunately we are in an age of ‘over-promising and under-delivering’ in many facets of the marketplace. Acquisition costs are a fundamental metric for new businesses and start-ups need to be very judicious in how they spend money to get attention that manifests in registrations. That leads to over-promising and in the youth soccer world it can be in various forms from online ads encouraging players to join your club to club proxies hanging on fields where other clubs are playing and having a quiet word about how great your kid and how they have a team that would be a great fit for their development.

That’s a nice way of saying I work in a business that is increasingly cut-throat and at times unethical in how they get players to join. Particularly on the girls side, with its every decreasing numbers, the gambits that some clubs are making reek of desperation and what they promise will often be hard for them to deliver on if and once a player moves to them.

The alternative way to promote a new club is word of mouth. Known to be one of the best marketing tools, word of mouth is also hard to direct and track. Affiliate marketing programs work well in this space Incentivize current, happy members with registration discounts that the people they register also get. It’s honest and effective. People will very rarely recommend something they don’t believe is good, especially if it’s for kids and to their friends. Leverage the goodwill you’ve created by running good programs as soon as you can to grow semi-organically. Clearly when you’re just starting and have few or no players who can vouch for your awesomeness you have a problem. A solution for that is a soft-launch where you use contacts and social media ads to offer free programming with the catch being that if you participated and enjoyed the sessions you’d be willing to forward affiliate marketing materials to friends.

Next week and beyond

There’s many components to this. In no particular (yet), I’ll be covering these aspects of club development and how a new club should go about handling them:

• Player development

• Governance

• CSA Licensing

• Staffing

• Club culture

• Facilities

• Evaluations and team selections

• Finances

• Transparency

• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

• Parent Education

• Establishing realistic player outcomes

• Discipline (Codes of Conduct)

• Communications

I have lots of thoughts on all these topics but I’m not quite arrogant enough yet to think I know everything about all of them or even that this constitutes a complete list. To that end, I think this ends up being a better project if there’s an element of crowd-sourcing. This newsletter is read by a very diverse group of people in the soccer community. There are decision makers at the very highest level, long time Technical Directors and other Club staff, respected coaches and many parents who have invested a lot of time, money and energy at various clubs. So many of you probably have some excellent insights into what a great youth soccer club would look like (and what they should avoid doing/saying/being).

To that end, here’s a link for you to submit thoughts and ideas on what the ideal youth soccer club should do, think, believe, be.

On a similar note, I set up another form if you have questions about the game you’d like me to answer. You can find that one here.

Centreback saves the day

Let’s finish off with this uplifting and very timely foot in by what must clearly be from a centreback. Might’ve saved a life here.