Don Garber: 25 years of the most powerful man in American soccer

Don Garber is a storyteller.

Over lunch at a Midtown Manhattan rooftop restaurant last month, as he chronicles his journey from Bayside, Queens to the NFL offices on Park Avenue to MLS commissioner, it is clear he knows it is the little details that make a story sing.

He didn’t just work at a gas station in high school, it was Barney’s Gulf, a sponsor of the Tony DePhillips Little League baseball team he played for. He didn’t just deliver newspapers, he learned how to properly fold up the Long Island Press to toss while riding his Stingray bike. He reels off the names of characters he has met along the way, like his wife Betsy’s boss at public relations firm Ruder and Finn, who told her she could find Betsy a better match “than this knucklehead”. “We’ll be married 39 years,” he notes. Or the man who ran the farmstand he worked at during summer break while a student at SUNY Oneonta.

He drops a few surprises, too. Garber’s resume may start at a vocational school near LaGuardia Airport, but his first year and a half after college was spent sleeping in a Ford van, working at bars and installing irrigation lines to pay his way across the U.S. and Mexico with some buddies.

“Old guys have great stories,” Garber says, with a smile.

Next month will mark 25 years for Garber as MLS commissioner, and his ability to tell a story — and to sell it — make him one of the most impactful figures in American soccer history.

Garber, 66, joined a fledgling MLS in 1999 from the NFL. His background in public relations, marketing and sales was essential to keeping MLS afloat. Garber had to sell soccer — to the public, to sponsors and, eventually, to investors. He navigated MLS through near bankruptcy and dissolution in 2001, ushered it into solvency with the creation of Soccer United Marketing, the commercial arm of the league that leveraged the growing popularity of the sport to keep the league afloat, and then led its expansion and foundational growth over the ensuing two decades.

MLS has a permanence now that never previously existed in the sport’s history in the U.S. and Canada. Whereas past pro soccer leagues came and went, an alphabet soup of attempts to make soccer “the sport of the future,” MLS now has 30 teams, 22 soccer-specific stadiums in markets across the U.S, with another two under construction and two more no longer in use, and club valuations that continue to rise at a head-spinning rate.

“I can confidently say we wouldn’t be where we are today, in fact, the league may not still be in business, without Don’s leadership,” said FC Dallas owner Clark Hunt, who also owns the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs.

Garber’s legacy is that foundation but, two and a half decades later, the job is hardly done.

Whereas he once sat across the table in a conference room with three owners, on Wednesday Garber will sit on a dais in a hotel ballroom for a board of governors meeting with nearly 100 people representing all 30 ownership groups. His job is to build consensus in that group at a time in which soccer has continued to grow in popularity in the U.S. and Canada, but where MLS is still fighting for its place in the sports landscape.

MLS is confronting a moment in time as consequential as when Garber first sold the idea that kept the league alive in 2001. The World Cup is coming in two years, and everyone wants a bite at the market Garber has called the sport’s ATM. The greatest player of all time, Lionel Messi, plays for Inter Miami and has brought more eyeballs to MLS than ever before. The league announced this week it has set midseason records in attendance and in sponsorship sales. But how they fully take advantage of the moment remains very much up for debate, even within their own board.

Once again, Garber — who is in the final stages of a contract extension to remain as commissioner — is tasked with seeing the right path forward; of understanding the risks, but also recognizing the opportunity.

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Garber shakes his head at the question: How much is Queens still a part of who he is?

“You cannot take the Queens out of anybody who truly was born and bred there,” he says. “It is a part of your DNA.”

Garber grew up in Bayside in the 1960s and 70s, a middle-class community built around immigrant families. Your reputation was built playing basketball and stickball, and you were judged not just by how good you were on the fields, but also how good of a hang. Garber didn’t struggle in either area.

“He was the glue, he was the guy who created a lot of the fun,” said New York Islanders owner Jon Ledecky, who went to grade school with Garber in Queens. “He was a ringleader, if you will, but not in a mischievous way, a very positive way of organizing everything, from being on the sandlot to hoops and just hanging out and having fun. As little kids, there are guys you look up to. Don was one of those guys.”

For Garber, being from Queens is about deep loyalty, but also “real ambition to want to be in an environment that still has the connectivity and the loyalty and the friendships from where you came from, but sort of aspires to be across the river.” It was a hunger that built up in his group of friends, many of whom went on to great success. The group includes a billionaire, a sports team owner and a commissioner, as well as several others who have risen to the top of their field.

Ledecky, a Harvard grad, said the cohort may be the smartest group of people he has been with in a concentrated fashion. There is a group of them, about 15 or 20, that still get together at a bar back in the old neighborhood around the holidays.

“We were all part of a group of guys who had drive and ambition burned into us by immigrant parents,” Ledecky said.

Garber left home to attend SUNY Oneonta, and then, after living in a van for about 18 months, got a letter from his mom trying to lure him back home with a job advertisement clipped from the newspaper. It was for a PR job at the Bulova School of Watchmaking, a tuition-free program for veterans. Garber moved back to the old neighborhood and got to work, coaching a wheelchair basketball team at the school.

Eventually, his aunt recommended he get an internship at Rudder and Finn, a PR firm, which was starting a sports department. There, Garber worked on accounts for 7Up, Miller Lite and Kinney’s Foot Locker. He eventually parlayed his PR work into a job with NFL Properties.

In an office filled with MBAs from Ivy League schools, the kid from Queens felt he constantly had to prove himself. Garber put his head down and worked in what was an unforgiving environment. It was there he learned how to sell and to “chart through choppy waters.” It was also there that Garber learned to trust his vision for what others might not be able to see.

When NFL Properties decided to keep just one sales exec to run the team, Garber remembers a colleague, Rick Dudley, coming into his office.

“Hey Don, you’re out,” he said.

As a VP of business development, Garber oversaw areas that came at a cost for the NFL. The other employee who worked in media sales was bringing in money. Garber, though, could not fathom the idea he was out.

“I said to Rick, ‘Why don’t you let me go home and I’m going to create a department for all these things that we’ve been working on,’” Garber said. “We can do an event at the Super Bowl. I think we can do TV shows. I think we should change the halftime show. There’s a whole events business… I went home and I came up with a plan.”

Garber returned and took the plan to the sales team. He was asked a simple question: Could they find sponsors to fund these ideas? If they did, it would get moved up the chain to NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue. Over the next few months, they sold the plan.

“We went to Coke, went to Amex, went to Frito Lay on the halftime show,” Garber said.

The NFL Experience launched in 1992, drawing 100,000 fans. Three years later, the success of NFL Experience led Tagliabue to tab Garber, then 37, to run the NFL international business. Garber built out a successful group there, too.

His success selling American football to the world prompted New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft to approach Garber to see if he would be willing to take over as MLS commissioner and try selling soccer in the U.S. Newspapers around the country panned the decision to hire an NFL executive with no soccer knowledge to run the league. For Garber, it felt like a similar pitch to the one he made around the NFL Experience. He understood the potential.

“There was so much opportunity,” Garber said. “They weren’t really doing everything they needed to do. And you have to have the kind of mind to see that, and that was my skill set. I saw something in soccer that I think a bunch of owners saw, but I don’t think a lot of other people saw. You have to look and see what could be as opposed to what’s right in front of you.”

It wouldn’t take long until that skill set was tested.

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Garber was just over one year into his tenure as MLS commissioner but, as he sat around the dining room table at Phil Anschutz’s ranch in Colorado with a handful of owners in December 2000, the existence of the league was in jeopardy.

Multiple teams were struggling at the gates. The league was losing money and bankruptcy attorneys were on retainer. MLS’s handful of owners gathered to discuss whether there was a path forward. Garber and then-deputy commissioner Mark Abbott presented two plans. The first was to continue doing business as usual.

“We’re going to lose more money and I can’t sit here today and tell you that, three years from now, we would recommend going forward,” Garber recalled saying. “We don’t think it’s a viable plan for a professional sports league.”

Plan B was more involved: “Quadruple down, take some big risks,” Garber said. Fold two teams, build stadiums and invest tens of millions into a new business focused on growing the commercial market around soccer. Garber said the idea was to prove there was, indeed, an appetite for the sport — and through that, a market for MLS.

“We needed to create a commercial engine that would raise the overall commercial value of soccer in America, because that hadn’t existed,” Garber said. “You couldn’t talk to a sponsor about investing in soccer. They didn’t know what soccer was. They couldn’t see any value in soccer.”

It wasn’t an easy sell to the owners.

“When we presented that plan, a number of owners said ‘I’m out’,” Garber said. “I don’t like Plan A, which is gonna lose more money and the league is going to fold, and I don’t want to put in any more money (for Plan B). And we needed to sit in that famous dining room and not leave until we had at least come up with an iteration of the plan which kept the original owners together. And that was backroom negotiations and some really fun discussions that got heated at times, that had everybody looking each other in the eye and saying: ‘Are you in? If you’re in, I’m in.’”

Three owners, Anschutz, Kraft and Lamar Hunt, committed to stay in. Hunt and Anschutz took on ownership of multiple teams. Teams in Miami and Tampa Bay were contracted after the 2001 season. Most crucially, the owners launched Soccer United Marketing, purchasing the American television rights to the 2002 and 2006 men’s World Cups and 2003 Women’s World Cup — which had no buyer at the time — for around $40million, covering all production costs and selling advertising for ESPN.

“Don’s a great salesman and he was able to convince us that there was an opportunity to create an economic model that went beyond the league, that Major League Soccer could participate in, that would help sustain the sport,” Clark Hunt said. “The creation of SUM was pivotal at that time. I think today, you look back at it and know that was one of those seminal moments in the history of the league.”

The decision around that table set the stage for the next phase of MLS: stabilize the league and then, just a few years after contracting teams, expand again. That Garber carved the path there was no surprise to those who had watched him ascend to the job.

“I think the reason they hired Don is they saw what I saw when he was a kid,” Ledecky said. “They saw that gift of being able to bring people together and to say, ‘Look, we’re gonna go from A to B, and we’re gonna be OK doing it.’ That is one of his superpowers.”

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The images have become ubiquitous over the past decade in MLS. Garber on a stage wearing the scarf of a new expansion city, or in a hard hat holding a shovel in front of a stadium site.

If Garber’s legacy in his first decade and a half in MLS was keeping the league afloat and helping it find some degree of stability, the past 10 years have been about the league’s growth, both across the continent and vertically in the stadiums and facilities it has built.

The turning point came in 2009, when Garber stood on the field in Seattle in awe of the 32,000-plus in attendance. The league started to expand again in 2005, welcoming franchises into Los Angeles — one of the league’s biggest mistakes, Chivas USA, which it dissolved in 2014 — as well as Salt Lake, then relocating a team to Houston in 2006 and welcoming Toronto in 2007.

David Beckham’s arrival with the LA Galaxy in 2007 also gave the league a level of credibility it had long sought. But the images of packed stadiums in Seattle became the selling point on which the trajectory of the league flipped.

“That was the shot heard around the world,” Garber said. “Like, ‘Hey, there’s something here that everybody’s missing.’”

Soccer was suddenly sellable. The Seattle Sounders were the 15th team in MLS. Ten years later, the league had grown to 24 teams, with expansion franchises in Philadelphia, Portland, Vancouver, Montreal, New York, Orlando, Atlanta, Minnesota, Los Angeles and Cincinnati. Five more teams would join from 2019-23.

“It was very hard to get people interested in the league with no fee to join (at the beginning),” Clark Hunt said. “And Don kept working at it and started nurturing some relationships that he had and building new relationships with people who were interested in the sport, and slowly but surely we were able to start attracting investors and also gaining traction with city leaders in various parts of the country who were interested in potentially bringing a Major League Soccer team to their city and helping build a stadium where that new team could play.”

As the league grew, Garber pushed owners to invest in facilities. Billions of dollars were spent on training facilities and stadiums around the country. The images of those soccer-specific stadiums, and the atmospheres in them, have become arguably the league’s greatest asset.

“One of the biggest accomplishments that our owners have achieved, which takes blood, sweat, enormous planning, intense lobbying municipalities and real courage, is the fact we built 26 soccer stadiums,” Garber said. “When I walk into this office every day and I walk past a long wall of (pictures of) stadiums, I find it’s still incredibly inspiring. We did that one brick at a time.”

As the league’s infrastructure and real-estate portfolios have grown, so too have valuations around the clubs. Forbes ranked LAFC as MLS’s most valuable club at $1.2billion this year, just ahead of Messi and Miami’s $1.03bn valuation. Forbes estimates the average value of an MLS club is around $658million.

It is a remarkable number, considering Forbes’ estimates that MLS teams average around $66m in revenue and the league recently locked into a 10-year media rights deal with Apple for $2.5bn, a deal in which the league covers all of the production costs. The Apple deal is considered one of the league’s biggest bets, moving the entirety of its product — local, national and international media rights — behind a paywall on a streaming service, but also in partnership with one of the world’s most powerful companies.

The market has remained bullish on MLS, especially with the World Cup around the corner. San Diego recently paid a $500m expansion fee and will begin play next year, while Indianapolis is now lobbying for its own expansion team.

On Monday, the league announced increases in league and club sponsorship revenue by about 10 per cent year over year, as well as increases in jersey sales and social engagement.

“It was an average (team) value of $10m 20 years ago,” LAFC owner Bennett Rosenthal said. “You’ve got close to $20bn of enterprise value (now). That’s a legacy of itself, that you’ve created something of such economic value.”

Garber, meanwhile, has grown into the most powerful figure in American soccer. In addition to running MLS, he has sat on the board of U.S. Soccer for more than two decades, a seat that drew the ire of fans this year when MLS attempted to pull its team out of the U.S. Open Cup. In the end, only eight MLS teams participated in the 110-year-old tournament. Garber has been accused of wielding his influence too much to favor MLS over other professional leagues and of putting the good of the league’s business over that of the sport itself. The relationship between MLS and U.S. Soccer was also long considered too cozy, with a shared media-rights deal brokered by SUM, though the U.S. Soccer and SUM relationship ended in 2021 after nearly 20 years of partnership.

Garber, however, has long pushed back at the idea he has too much power, instead saying it falls on the pro leagues to have that sort of influence on growing the game.

“There is no doubt we take it very serious that we have an obligation to build this sport,” Garber told The Athletic earlier this year. “And that’s something we think about every day. I’ve been on the board of U.S. Soccer for decades, I’ve never missed an (annual general meeting), and I take that responsibility passionately and seriously. But we all have to think about our evolving world of soccer as something that can’t just be based on what was — but has to evolve in a world of what it is and what it needs to be. And that requires rethinking things.”

That idea applies to more than just the U.S. Open Cup or U.S. Soccer, however. With the appetite for the sport continuing to increase, MLS must now determine the best way forward. Garber again will have a hugely influential impact on that direction.

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Messi’s arrival in Miami last summer turned an even bigger spotlight on MLS and highlighted areas where the league still has massive opportunity. While the business metrics are positive and the valuations have soared, the sporting side of the league still lags behind much of its global competition.

For so long, MLS has been about steady, targeted growth. But whether that approach is still the right one is very much up for debate in a boardroom that has had an injection of new personalities and opinions during the league’s boom era of expansion. Some owners want the league to push forward more aggressively. Others favor the continuation of the more conservative approach.

“In the past, we had 100 per cent unanimity on every vote. We don’t anymore. Now, there’s lots more debate,” Garber said. “And that’s OK. It requires us to do a little more work on ensuring everybody understands the decisions they’re making and what impact that’s going to have on the enterprise. But that’s the reality of a maturing sports league. It happens in every other league. You’re going to have big markets and small markets. You’re going to have legacy owners and new owners… I need to be focused and the league office needs to be focused on enterprise success on behalf of all. That’s a very, very, very different job than it was 10 years ago.”

Garber’s ability to navigate the boardroom has become an increasingly important — and difficult — job. Many of these owners are billionaires who have built ultra-successful businesses. All of them have strong opinions.

“Those are not 30 shrinking violets — and, by the way, it’s not necessarily 30 (owners), it’s 60 or 80 personalities,” Sounders owner Adrian Hanauer said, “Don has a superpower of relating to people in the way they need to be related to. He has a breadth of knowledge but also just a humanity about him that allows him to have empathy, to understand what people are going through and what they need.”

Nashville owner John Ingram said: “He can be a tough New Yorker when he needs to be, but he’s also just a lovely person too.”

Garber said he got one last piece of advice from Tagliabue when he left the NFL: “Keep the owners who hate you away from the ones who are undecided.” As the number and variety of opinions have increased, that task is probably put to the test more often. While his ability to tell a story and sell a sport may have been his most important skill when he first took over as commissioner, it is the skill set of the kid from Bayside, that ability to bring people together, that became his most important attribute over the past decade.

“As a commissioner, it’s not just having the ideas; it’s being able to get people to rally around them and join hands,” LAFC co-owner Larry Berg said. “And he’s very good at that.”

As Garber now moves into the back half of his third decade in charge of MLS, however, he has to determine the best path for owners to rally around. The league’s success with a deliberate approach over the past 25 years undoubtedly still informs the strategy today.

Garber clearly understands that, as the global market evolves, MLS’s ability to evolve with it is critical to its continued growth. What was accomplished in his first 25 years as commissioner has set the league up to be ready for what comes next, he said.

“Where it was a primary focus on building long-term stability and viability in the past and having to make some really creative or tough decisions to achieve that, today we’ve achieved that long-term viability and stability,” Garber said. “And now we need to turn a lot of our energy into thinking about: How do we take everything that we built and turn it into something that will truly achieve our goal of being one of the top soccer leagues in the world?

“What does that mean to our player signing strategy? What does it mean to our focus on competitive balance? What does it mean to our competitive schedule and competition format? What does it mean to how we centralize a lot of our commercial rights? We need to go through a process to determine: Are the things that we’ve done that have driven us to where we are today the same things that will drive us to where we need to go tomorrow? And I’m not convinced they are.

“I think we do need to take a big step back so we can take five steps forward.”

The many questions Garber posed remain unanswered as he and MLS determine what those five steps forward look like. At its core, Garber believes the task is still the same one he signed up for 25 years ago. Selling a dream about what top-division soccer can look like in the U.S. and convincing people to care.

“We will be one of the dominant leagues in the world,” he said. “The question isn’t if, it’s when. We will be. Nothing but time will stop that. And we just have to be smart enough to not be lazy and think we can get there too quickly. We have to earn it.”

It’s a story Garber’s not quite done telling yet.

(Top photos: Getty Images and Austin FC; design Eamonn Dalton)