NEW YORK – Don Garber and Larry Berg will always have one thing in common: each was unveiled as the incoming MLS commissioner on the same day, though the 27 years in between the announcements is much more important than the shared anniversary.
"This is really not a time to look back on what's happened over the last 28 to 31 years of the League," Garber said on Tuesday as he prepared to pass the torch to Berg, who officially won the votes to succeed the longtime MLS leader on Monday. "It really is about the future, the future path that we'll be on."
Berg, a private equity professional who has been a co-owner of LAFC since the team was founded in 2014 (Berg will divest from LAFC before taking over as MLS commissioner on New Year's Day), will inherit a league that is very different from the one Garber did in 1999. MLS solved questions about financial viability long ago, while the sport of soccer boasted a healthy number of supporters in the U.S. long before this summer's World Cup. Layers and layers of infrastructure are in place, to the point that Garber called lifelong soccer fan Berg a "byproduct" of the decades of investment that transformed American soccer from a fractured, malnourished ecosystem to a fully professional operation.
How the league "takes it from here," to borrow a phrase from the post-World Cup marketing campaign Garber referenced twice on Tuesday, has been the root of the existential question Berg inherits. MLS is in the midst of a relevancy problem. It feels cloistered away from the most notable American sports leagues and amongst global soccer leagues, yet to break through fully in either sense despite the strides it has made in the early decades of Garber's tenure and the prominence of several high-caliber stars like Inter Miami's Lionel Messi.
Berg outlined the bare bones of how he plans to answer those questions on Tuesday, his pitch built around quality of play and building consensus amongst the ownership groups who employed him.
"Simply put, the foundation has been built," Berg noted. "Now it's our responsibility to build on it and that's what excites me most. I didn't accept this role to protect what we've already accomplished. I accepted it because I believe this league is ready for its next chapter…The platform is in place. The infrastructure is in place. The opportunity is in front of us. Now it's time to pull the right levers, make the right decisions and build on everything that's been created."
'It all starts with quality on the field'
Bennett Rosenthal, a fellow LAFC co-owner and the co-chair of the succession committee, said Berg has a list of "greatest hits," a polite way of saying the incoming commissioner has had a long-term vision for the league, and has a habit of being repetitive about it. The greatest hits are built around a lofty promise that Berg will have to live up to as he charts MLS' next chapter.
"Obviously the foundation's terrific but I think it all starts with quality on the field," Berg said.
Berg argued that quality of play is the key that will unlock MLS' relevance issue, a pesky problem that branches out into a wide variety of problems he believes need fixing.
"[It] means roster investment model in part and that's something that the owners need to decide collectively," Berg said. "I think if I do that well, we will have more transfer revenue and we'll have more media money and that'll all lead to better product on the field and that'll become a flywheel because it leads to more transfers and more revenue and more more media money, but that's job one."
Berg was formerly the co-chair of the sporting competition committee, so the fact that he got into the weeds of MLS' complex roster rules came as little surprise, especially after the board of governors reportedly heard a proposal on revisions during MLS All-Star Week in Charlotte, N.C. last week.
"I'm really excited at the opportunity to have my fingers all over that even that much more," Berg said. "We call it choose your own adventure, different things, and it's my job to take all these things in and come up with a plan going forward and sometimes it's just a question of being a little bit creative and I have that experience in private equity to try to bring people together and try to make certain trade-offs. We've done it … with our current roster investment model in terms of choosing a [designated player] or choosing more roster investment or choosing a U-22 [Initiative Player] so people can decide what they want to do."
The incoming commissioner also emphasized the importance of youth development, a favorite topic in American soccer circles as the game's various stakeholders mull how to rise up the ranks in the men's game and maintain elite status on the women's side. MLS' decades-old investment in academies is one of the league's greatest success stories, regularly producing talent that feeds both the U.S. and Canadian men's national teams, including a batch of players that spend the majority of their professional club careers in Europe's top leagues. Even then, Berg feels there is room for improvement.
"Youth development in MLS is very near and dear to my heart," he said. "I feel like we have the clay, we've built the foundation. Almost every team has an academy. Most teams have an MLS Next Pro team. Every year, we have more and more emerging stars that are coming through. The U.S. men's national team, about 75% of them have roots in MLS, similar for the Canadian national team so the good news is we're starting from a really good spot but I also feel like we can do a lot more. I feel like we can get more players more minutes at a younger age, play at the highest level, continue to feed the national teams, continue to make this a soccer nation, ultimately win trophies, whether that be Copa [America] or the Olympics or World Cups so I feel really strongly that that's a place we absolutely need to dig in and focus on and we owe it to all the young players."
Format changes, broadcast partners on the agenda
Berg will assume MLS' helm months before it undergoes a flip to the fall to spring calendar, a necessary move to ensure the league's business runs concurrently with the majority of global soccer leagues. It may also provide the opening for a new competition format, both in terms of how the regular season and playoffs operate. The latter undergoes changes every few years or so, MLS' current owners yet to crack the code on what works from a sporting standpoint while keeping audiences engaged.
"I think the new calendar was a massive move," Berg said. "I think the new playoffs, the new divisions, these are all really important."
What exactly that new format is, though, is to be determined.
"The league has done a ton of work with outside parties, with inside parties looking at those very questions for the regular season, for the division for the playoffs, and there's a lot of analysis that's gone in," he said. "There's a lot of research and fan research that's gone in and there's a lot of discussion at committee levels that's gone in so what's important to me is we ultimately achieve consensus and move forward together but the good news is that I think the things we're thinking about certainly will move our league forward, make it entertaining, make it interesting and I'm pretty excited to roll it out. I don't know, timing-wise, when that might be. We obviously have, next summer, the start of our new calendar, so that's a pretty big deal. Perhaps we have it by then, I hope, but it's really about what the owners can do and what kind of analysis and leadership I can provide as a part of that."
An entertaining format will play a role in solving the oft-maligned broadcast agreement with Apple TV, which will conclude in 2029. There will be some time on the clock when Berg starts the role before MLS heads to market, but the paywall-first structure of the Apple deal has only made the league feel more niche. It is unclear which media companies will be interested when negotiations begin, but MLS is reportedly eyeing a deal that would be worth $400 to $500 annually, up from the $250 million it pockets yearly from Apple.
"It's about finding media partners that want to co-create the future with us," Ber said. "It's about co-creating, what's interesting to them, what's interesting to us. How can we change certain things to their benefit? I'll use one example — in the World Cup, we obviously all discovered hydration breaks. That was interesting in many ways but my job is to sell the future, to paint what MLS can be, to introduce Leagues Cup to media folks that some of them are not aware of it, but it's an amazing tournament that's starting this week, and our new playoff system will be something that I'm hoping to explain to people and get 'em excited about it."
Private equity background 'an advantage'
Berg's institutional knowledge of MLS as a longtime LAFC owner was a defining characteristic of his successful campaign to become the league's new commissioner, but the business professional also brings with him a lengthy résumé in private equity, including stints at 26North and Apollo Global Management. Private equity's role in sports has faced increased scrutiny in recent days after FIFA announced and then scrapped plans to privatize the World Cup, though Berg and his colleagues do not feel those criticisms apply in this case.
"Private equity in 'regular' business comes in, generally takes control of the company, owns more than 50%, installs their own management team and makes necessary changes to benefit the shareholders," Jimmy Haslam, owner of the Columbus Crew and Rosenthal's co-chair on the succession committee, said. "In sports, private equity is a great source of capital because the value of these teams has soared in all leagues. When somebody comes in to buy a pro sports team or buy a share of a pro sports team, private equity can provide a great source of value capital. I think it's important to understand, though, in the sports world, they mostly get about 30%. It varies by league. NFL's only 10[%], most leagues are at 30[%] and they have no governance rights. They have no governance rights, so I think it's important for Larry to understand that. Some people say Larry's a private equity guy. Larry's a very broad-based businessperson."
Berg described his experience in private equity as an asset in what is ultimately a job about building consensus amongst the ownership groups of MLS' 30 teams.
"I do think there's a lot of characteristics of private equity that do apply to other things, which is not a surprise," he said. "It applies to everything. It's about a sense of urgency, it's about rolling up the sleeves, trying to answer questions, aligning people for a common goal. There's a lot of parallels and I had a lot of experience on many boards, which gives me a lot of experience in governance and at the end of the day, this is a governance job with 30 owners and a lot of constituents and so I do think it helps and I think by virtue of having seen a lot of different businesses in a lot of different industries, I'm somewhat of a quick study who learns to, frankly, work with the experts in the room and the league office has a ton of experts … I personally think it's an advantage."
