I’m a big believer in questioning existing practices. Whatever the context I often find myself asking “why is that like this?”. The operations of your favorite soccer team is no exception. For everything we do well, the question of whether or not it was pure luck comes to me.
The itch of wanting to mess with it just to confirm or disconfirm comes to me. This is not how owners and operators of sports teams normally think. Most choose to play it safe and go with established practices that produce a predictable result.
Let’s do it the same way it’s always been done. You may not create a lot of hoopla, but at least your downside is limited and the result predicable. Boring!
When Building Paradise, I decided early on that we will need to find areas to disrupt to give ourselves a chance of creating a financially sustainable club. That means testing things to see what works and what doesn’t.
Ideally you fail fast and learn even quicker. However, given the money involved, I’d prefer to have most things figured out before we move into the professional leagues.
Using our years in the USL League Two for experimentation will help us avoid expensive mistakes in the future. We are choosing to endure pain now and risk thousands of dollars to find out how to not screw up and risk tens, or hundred of thousands in the not so distant future.
In our first season I decided to try the things that I thought would work outside the field and stay out of the things happening on the field. The results showed my focus. We did great as an organization as was awarded the award for the best new team of the league.
Our average attendance was a mind-blowing 540 and we had more than 1,000 people at our final game! What were some of the key factors to achieve this?
1) All our home games were on the same day and time (and 4 weeks in a row). My theory was that predictability would help drive attendance over time.
2) We had three full-time employees during the season, two sales people and one operations person. It felt like we were overstaffed and didn’t get full value for the money spent.
3) Great summer. It was hotter last summer, but also dryer and as a result less thunderstorms. Not one game was postponed due to lightning, and for only one did they say it was going to rain - which it didn’t. That game was our lowest attended game last year.
For the sporting side we did okay in our first season with a .500 win record. For this year I was much more involved in the recruitment of players, making the final decision on all signings. Working closely with the coaching staff we were able to put a much better team together while keeping the local connection.
As a result of great players and a great job by the coaches, we won our division and made it to our first ever playoff appearance. Division champs 2024!
I did want to find out if the things we did last year were influential or if it didn’t matter. So for this season I decided to try different days for home games. We were scheduled to play on two Sundays (one got cancelled and rescheduled due to lightning), two Wednesdays (one was July 3rd) and keep two Saturdays.
There was some limitations to our stadium this season that made the testing too excessive. My goal was to have one Sunday game, not two for example. We kept the kickoff time from last year, so that was a constant throughout the season.
In addition to changing the days, we drastically changed the staffing. Gone are all of the full-time employees from last season and they were replaced by interns and volunteers. Didn’t seem like anyone noticed at the games, and we increased our revenues with 3% prior to season start.
Of the three key factors for our 2023 success above, only two were things I could mess with. The big guy helped us mess with the third one, properly. For every home game rain and/or thunder was expected and I think we only had one game where it didn’t rain. As mentioned, one game was canceled due to lightning storms that rolled in just before kickoff.
Our July 3rd game was delayed over an hour due to lightning as well. This extreme difference in weather from last year impacted my test a lot. Maybe the most.
What was the results? Having experimented this season, what have we learned and why?
1) Weather has a huge impact on ticket sales. Comparing the games where they said it would maybe rain vs the ones where they said it definitely would shows the story. People in Florida make decisions based on weather. So do I. It’s very understandable. You don’t want to spend money on something and risk it being cancelled or to be wet.
We don’t have any stadium cover, and people know this. Come to our game and you’ll be more or less wet. This is a challenge that we need to address for our venue at the pro level and see if we can mitigate.
2) We are never ever going to play on a Sunday again. One theory was that playing on Father’s day would be cool since dads like sports. Not a thing in Paradise. We had the lowest amount of ticket sales for our Father’s day game. Ironically it was also the game that got cancelled.
Sign from the Gods I guess, stay away from Sunday games! Obviously you’d like to avoid midweek games if you can. However, the July 3rd game worked out pretty good and with some fireworks and more pre-game activities I believe that could work. Preferably without a lightning delay though…
Next year I do want to try a Friday night game to see if that is an option, and play home every other weekend if scheduling permits.
3) What about the full-time staff? My conclusion is that having three people walking around talking about the team helps drive attendance, duh. Even though we increased our sales overall this year, the work they did at events was crucial last year. We didn’t have that consistency in events or quality representing us this summer.
I deeply missed the operations person since I ended up doing most of that myself, and some stuff we just couldn’t do due to lack of operational ability.
From a purely financial, short term standpoint, you definitely don’t need full-time employees to run a USL League Two team. But if you have higher ambitions or want to be the best team in the league, having a couple of folks would be a necessity.
To summarize, it was a successful summer on the field by winning the division and making it to the playoffs. It was also a successful summer off the field with key learnings through these experiments.
Next year will be freaking amazing in Paradise!!
MW
