As Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) negotiates with the U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF) to retain their Division 1 status with only five teams, three less than required, controversy swirls around the three year-old League. Now that USL W-League commissioner Amanda Duffy has revealed that they're considering adding a professional division and WPSL commissioner Jerry Zanelli has stated his intention to launch a professional league in 2013, it’s no longer a question of if there’s a market for professional women’s soccer, but about finding the best model for a league.
David Halstead, owner of the 2010 expansion WPS Philadelphia Independence, is confident the Division 1 sanctioning will be approved by the USSF and is preparing his franchise to launch two new marketing initiatives in 2012 and kick-up media relations. The Independence are well-positioned for the new season, having reached the WPS Championship final in their inaugural 2010 season and again in 2011, both times under two-time WPS Coach of the Year Paul Riley.
Prior to his purchase of the Independence franchise in 2009, Halstead was president and CEO of Halstead Global LLC, a business-consulting firm, and partner at Bradson Corporation from 1991-2007. Previously, Halstead served in the United States Air Force and worked on Capitol Hill.
Halstead spoke with me recently and answered the tough questions about the issues facing WPS and where the League is going.
LE: Where is WPS right now?
Halstead: At the League level, we’ve got to work with the Players Union to satisfy the collective bargaining agreement need that we all have and want to get done. We’re working with a couple markets to get them into the League and we continue to refine our business model to keep existing entities and teams, as well as bring in new ones. We’ve got to work with U.S. Soccer Federation so they understand better our accomplishments and achievements over the past three years.
When we launched a couple years ago, we overstated what kind of projections we were going to get with attendance and sponsorship and everything else. The result of that is, we way, way overstaffed and overcommitted in almost every area that you can imagine. I don’t think we did a very good job of managing our resources. As a result of that, everybody lost more than what they anticipated and as a result of that, teams flocked out of the league pretty quick, because the model wasn’t responsive to the community of interests that we had. Part of the casualty of that, was a press strategy and a media relations strategy and an outreach strategy to a very important component of our organization - the media.
LE: What has been missing in media relations and how has that affected the League?
Halstead: Those relationships, if they existed, were somewhat severed and I think that we’re still suffering from that. The only thing that gets out there is somebody slamming us – that makes news.
We are not putting out daily media advisories on all the exciting things going on. We’re not setting up weekly interviews with our coaches and with our players and broadcasting that to the media. We’re not doing the things that professional sports teams need to be doing to be legitimate. We owe the media information if we expect them to cover us.
[WPS CEO] Jennifer O’Sullivan sees PR and media outreach as an area that needs to be improved in WPS and that will be one of her first priorities once we get past this WPS/USSF sanction and the hot potatoes that we’re dealing with right now.
There’s a lot of good things going on. All teams last year spent less than the previous year and they made more money last year than the previous year, they needed less capitalization, they had more goals scored. There are so many key trends and indicators that would allow people to say okay, you’re on the right track, you’re only three years-old, you’re getting your sea legs.
LE: The WPS breakaway from Soccer United Marketing (SUM) seems to have been a major mistake in retrospect. Can you talk about this a bit?
Halstead: I came after this whole SUM thing was put to bed. Last year, 2010, was my first year of play, so I knew when I came in through the due diligence process that we had aligned ourselves with SUM and that they were primarily on the hook for the national level sponsorship and then that relationship and that contract went away. For the 2011 season, we were not aligned with SUM.
The SUM organization brought in some sponsors, so if they brought them in, they would continue to manage them through the 2011 season maybe, but they wouldn’t market us for any new stuff and if so, they wouldn’t get a share of that. It was like, if you slayed it you can eat it, but otherwise you’re not involved in that component of WPS anymore.
LE: Puma recently announced that they’re no longer going to sponsor WPS and the uniforms. What happened here?
Halstead: Puma was fantastic as a founding partner and provided excellent gear. I wasn’t around, but I believed that when they signed on to be the WPS league-wide apparel sponsor we had a presence in California with a couple of teams, a presence in the mid-West, a presence on the East-Coast, the number of teams were at a certain level and the prospect of growth was much higher than it is now.
So, looking at it from the standpoint of Puma, what they wanted from their association with WPS was to help their product move from the shelves. They were going to become a women‘s soccer commodity, and because Tasha Kai and Amy Rodriguez and Abby Wambach wore Puma that people saw on television, little girls were going to go buy Puma out of the stores. I don’t know if that happened. So, come time to renew with WPS - at the end of the day it’s dollars, every relationship. And at the end of the day, I think Puma did their analysis and said we don’t feel like our brand is going the same direction as WPS.
LE: What do you think of former magicJack owner Dan Borislow’s lawsuit?
Halstead: I don’t even think about it, honestly. MagicJack is out of the league now and when magicJack was terminated those players became free agents. There’s litigation involved where he seems to think that he should get something he doesn’t have and I’ll let the lawyers work through that. The whole magicJack situation last year was more of a distraction for Philly than we wanted and I should have been spending more time thinking about Philadelphia Independence.
LE: How close was the Connecticut team to becoming a WPS franchise for 2012?
Halstead: The way expansion works is expansion candidates notify the League and say, we want to bring a team to our market and we begin a process of due diligence. We both look at each other and it starts a slow dance process and we get into a lot of details and spread sheets and projections. It’s like the acquisition of any company. The Connecticut group has been fantastic. We’re still in the process of the due diligence, so I anticipate that Connecticut could be in the League in 2013, but 2012 was just too soon to get everything done.
There seems to be an assumption that there was some agreement that Connecticut would come in 2012, but there wasn’t. There was never any agreement or anything firm for 2012. That never occurred.
LE: What’s the cost of entering WPS?
Halstead: It's a multi-million dollar multi-year commitment. They need to come to the table with multi-million dollars and they need to think of this as being around for multi-years. Over that time, you’ll build your fan base and build those connections and that kind of investment will give you the basis for paying for that infrastructure until you have the ticket sales and sponsorships up to the level that you want them.
LE: Is WPS in talks with USL W-League regarding a possible affiliation and new model for a women’s pro league?
Halstead: No, the five teams in the WPS are planning and moving forward to be essentially the same WPS without magicJack and we have a lot of different expansion interest, but no, we’re not looking at being a W-League in any way at all.
LE: Will WPS go forward with a league even if you’re not sanctioned by USSF?
Halstead: The five teams as well as the League office are 100% confident that we’re going to have some good dialogue with USSF and work through some things and talk about the accomplishments that we’ve made not only in the business model but the quality of play that we have. I think when we walk away from that meeting that we’ll be Division 1 women’s pro soccer.
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