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As soccer grows in the United States, giving talent access to a full array of leagues and opportunities becomes increasingly important.
Of course, U.S. Soccer, with its dominant women’s team and improving men’s team, and Major League Soccer are crucial to the game’s evolution here, but so are lesser known entities like the United Soccer League.
Seemingly every town in England has a soccer club, which creates a developmental foundation and professional path for players, regardless of if they’re from London or a small rural city. British-American businessman Peter Moore says that embracing smaller leagues like the USL is how America can chart a similar trajectory.
Moore and I crossed paths as he looked to spread the word about a new USL club, the Santa Barbara Sky FC, of which he’s the founding owner.
“Everybody knows the Premier League, but underneath that is what’s known as the Football League, which are three different leagues — the Championship, League One, League Two — that are stacked in order so there’s four leagues, all with promotion and relegation, which we don’t have, unfortunately, in [the United States] yet,” said Moore.
The goal is for the USL to become a vehicle to identify soccer talent in places where Americans aren’t traditionally looking.
“MLS is doing a great job in the major metropolitan areas — Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta — but there’s a need for professionalism in smaller cities and smaller communities like Santa Barbara,” he said.
Liverpool Days
Moore’s commentary on American soccer is welcome largely because he will, perhaps more than anything, be remembered as an ultra-successful CEO of Liverpool FC.
During the Liverpool native’s three-year contract from 2017 to 2020, the club won the UEFA Champions League, FIFA Club World Cup, and the Premier League title.
“It’s a little bit more difficult being an out and out fan when you’re the CEO,” says Moore. “You gotta rein yourself in and make some decisions less from the heart and more from the head.”
Being from the area, Moore is familiar with the passion a local club can inspire.
“Particularly in working class cities and places like the north of England where Liverpool is situated, you don’t have a lot going for you,” he said. “So you aspire to play…then you’re a fan and it gives you something bigger than your current life to hang onto.”
Building The FIFA Brand
Just prior to his tenure at Liverpool FC, Moore was a key executive at Electronic Arts, the world’s largest sports video game publisher — first as president of EA Sports specifically, then as Chief Operating Officer of the entire EA brand.
“I had 10 years at EA, 10 wonderful years at EA,” he tells me. “EA can be polarizing within the gaming community. I love it. It’s a great company with great people that, despite what everyone says, makes great content.”
With Moore’s time at EA in mind, and the fact that he’s worked closely with FIFA in multiple capacities, I had to ask what he thinks of EA and FIFA ending their licensing partnership.
“I think, ultimately, EA just made a strategic business decision and said, ‘Look, we can save this money. We can build our own brand, EA Sports FC,’ or whatever it’s going to be,” Moore explained.
The FIFA days were good, though, and Moore says EA deserves credit for building up the popularity of the beautiful game globally.
“I was fond of reminding our friends [at FIFA] in Zurich that during some of their more challenging times, we were the best thing they had,” he said. “We also, with the FIFA game, introduced [soccer] to hundreds of millions of people over 30 years.”
Xbox Insights
For all the clout Peter Moore carries in the soccer community, he made his name in video games, and not just with a sports-heavy publisher like EA.
His first claim to fame was as Sega of America’s president in the late 1990s.
- The company was mounting a comeback after the original Sony PlayStation had cornered Sega Saturn into irrelevancy.
- He oversaw the launch of the Sega Dreamcast, which had pioneering features like a built-in modem, but fell victim to the success of PlayStation 2 and forced Sega to exit the hardware business.
Next, Moore led the effort to establish Microsoft in video games, helming the Xbox business in the mid-2000s and launching the company’s best-selling console to date, Xbox 360.
Competition with Sony was, again, fierce and complicated by the infamous “red rings of death” error that plagued Xbox 360 units and cost Microsoft over $1 billion in repairs. Moore stuck it out, and in doing so impacted the fiber of the gaming market to this day.
“We encouraged the console wars, not to create division, but to challenge each other, and when I say each other I mean Microsoft and Sony,” he said. “If Microsoft hadn’t of stuck the course after the Xbox, after the red rings of death, gaming would be a poorer place for it, you wouldn’t have the competition you have today.”
Listen to Peter Moore’s full conversation with Front Office Sports EIC Ernest Baker on our new podcast, My Other Passion, or watch it on YouTube. New episodes with the athletes, celebrities, and executives who drive the business of sports drop every Wednesday.
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