How Charlotte FC's relationship with fans could play deciding factor in its success
Charlotte FC President Nick Kelly left no doubt this week about his belief that the expansion Major League Soccer team needs to redouble its efforts to connect with fans as the inaugural season approaches.
Eight months before the team plays their first match, Kelly and the club disclosed plans to hire a chief fan officer by September. And he said Charlotte will differ from other teams by elevating the fan officer job from entry level to one with direct and frequent access to Charlotte FC executives and at parent company Tepper Sports & Entertainment.
“I wish we would have done this sooner, but it became more and more apparent that this is something we need to do,” Kelly told me.
The move also lends insight into the uniqueness of not just soccer, but MLS itself. It’s well-established that soccer fans — led by independent supporters’ groups formed around teams in Britain, Europe and, more recently, the U.S. — have more influence.
Or, as Gilt Edge Soccer Marketing principal and former MLS Chicago executive John Guppy put it, “If you as a team owner or operator fail to respond to the wishes and demands of your fans, you might pay a higher price.”
Charlotte FC has already set lofty goals for its debut season in 2022. Kelly said during an earlier media availability that the club is targeting average attendance of 30,000 fans per game. That would put Charlotte near the top of MLS.
Home matches will be played at Bank of America Stadium, the 75,000-seat home of Tepper Sports’ NFL Carolina Panthers. For most MLS matches, capacity will be 38,000 — using only the lower seating bowl.
Mark Pannes, former CEO of AS Roma and MLS Vancouver, said Charlotte FC has several advantages as it considers fan culture and outreach.
For starters, “it’s a blank canvas,” Pannes told me. “The team is not defined. You can define what your team stands for, how it fits in with the city, what kinds of fans you appeal to.”
As an example, Pannes cited Major League Baseball. The Chicago Cubs, even with a 2016 World Series victory in hand, have been defined for more than a century as lovable losers whose fans factor suffering and angst into their relationship with the team. New York Yankees fans, in contrast, expect to win all the time and are angry any season that they’re not either in the World Series or winning it.
How a club is viewed by its fans and how those fans are welcomed — or not — becomes increasingly important as professional sports teams endure the inevitable shifting fortunes of good seasons and bad ones.
Pannes praised Tepper Sports as forward-thinking in soccer terms. Tom Glick, who runs the business side of Charlotte FC and the NFL Panthers as Tepper Sports president, came here after six years as an executive with clubs in the Premier League and MLS.
Glick’s experience will serve Charlotte FC well, Pannes added. In soccer, when teams share their strategy with fan and supporters’ groups, they will usually receive the benefit of the doubt.
“If you say, ‘Here’s why we hired this coach, here’s why we signed this type of player,’ as long as you stick to that, fans will be a lot more patient because they feel like they’re part of the family,” he said.
In his experience and observation, Pannes added, soccer fans tend to think they own their favorite team and view the actual owners as interim stewards.
The usual concerns about game-day experiences, customer loyalty, and oh, right, the game on the field, have been heightened in the current era even compared with the 1990s and early 2000s because teams can no longer avoid or ignore their fans.
“You’re living in the era of social media,” Guppy said. “I think the requirement to be responsive to the fan is even greater today than it was 15 or 20 years ago."
And, for an MLS team, connecting with, and listening to, fans is even more important. The reason? MLS is successful and growing, but, unlike the NFL, NBA and MLB, it is not the best version of professional soccer in the world. The Premier League and other European series boast better players and larger audiences.
All of those top leagues and players are on constant display in America through cable broadcasts and streaming, meaning the leg up that MLS teams do have is their proximity and the experience of seeing games in-person. Without the tribal ties endemic to soccer, and a constant give-and-take dialogue, that advantage is lost, Guppy said.
Unspoken but obvious: If the allure of chants and the march to the stadium and the other elements that make attending a match special are found lacking, MLS loses if left to compete for fans on the basis of watching the best players.
Initial signs — despite missteps this year with season ticket prices and seat licenses — for Charlotte FC are encouraging.
Jeremy Hachens, a member of QC Royals, a local soccer supporters’ group formed in 2015, said the new MLS club has been receptive so far.
“I think they’ve done a really good job with being responsive to fans,” he said. “We reached out to the club several times and they’ve been nothing but professional and open to all of our ideas and they’ve been open to meeting with us.”
Mint City Collective board member Jay Landskroener gives Charlotte FC a grade of B+ on fan relations, dinging them for the inclusion of seat licenses as part of season-ticket plans. Landskroener sees both sides of requiring fans to pay one-time seat license fees, but he added that those fees are atypical in the MLS and, thus, sure to lead to scrutiny.
“It would be higher if it wasn’t for the unique aspect” of seat licenses, he added, referring to his assessment of the club’s relationship with fans. “Soccer is a game of two experiences. There’s what happens on the pitch and the other experience is the fans” and the game-day environment.
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