In the wake of the disaster that was the 2018 men’s World Cup qualification cycle, many people have opined about how to improve the next generation’s development. U.S. Soccer has radically changed the coaching badge structure from a grassroots level. MLS continues to promote its franchises’ academy systems. Second and third-tier USL teams are signing their own homegrown players, hoping to scout more of the country. All the while, a growing wave of domestic players are testing their ability with European clubs.
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Now, an U.S. ownership group is looking to provide a place where American players can develop their skills abroad.
On Friday morning, FC Helsingør announced a takeover by an American ownership group. Fronting the group is new club chairman Jordan Gardner, a former left back who founded Ticket Arsenal – a startup launched in 2014 and “focused on secondary ticket resale for sports, concert and theatre tickets,” per the company’s LinkedIn. He sold Ticket Arsenal in late 2014, and has since joined the ownership groups of Swansea City and Dundalk F.C. Gardner has also been a vocal proponent of young domestic talent via social media.
Gardner spoke with The Athletic via telephone on Thursday night. In our conversation, he spoke about why the group settled into the Danish second tier, his sales pitch to prospective young American players, and why FC Helsingør could help move the sport forward in the United States.
How did FC Helsingør land on your radar?
I had looked at a couple of clubs in Denmark specifically. I thought Denmark specifically had the right recipe to bring young American players over. There’s no foreign player restrictions, pretty much everyone here speaks English, and there’s a culture of playing young players at all levels of Danish soccer. There are a couple of Americans who have proved the model there already; Jonathan Amon of FC Nordsjælland just got called up to the national team last year.
We were connected through Michael Stensgaard (a former FC København goalkeeper), who’s an agent now. He put me in contact with Helsingør after I gave him the criteria we were looking for: good infrastructure, good academy, and a location near Copenhagen. That was about six months ago after we’d gone through the early process with a couple of other clubs. We went back and forth with Helsingør for a while to make sure it was the right fit. It’s been a lot of work to finally get to this point, but we’re finally here.
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Do you worry about the Danish Football Union tightening restrictions on foreign players as ownership groups like yours join the ranks?
No. There’s other clubs that are using that—Nordsjælland has a connection to the Right to Dream Academy in Ghana. It’s important for us to note that conversations with the American media will always be very American-focused. The academy the club has in Denmark is a very important piece of the club. Down the road, it’ll probably be a 50/50 split of foreign and domestic players. I don’t envision that it’ll be a team fully-stocked by Americans, and it’s going to take a period of years. In general, I’m not concerned. It’s a relatively small club, and most other clubs have four-to-six foreign players; I’m not too certain we’d have too many more than that playing in games down the road.
What’s the target age group for the American players you’d look to sign?
I think the sweet spot is going to be 16-to-20. The younger ages will depend on a passport. We’ve talked about bringing some 16 or 17 year olds over on an educational visa since they can’t sign a professional contract. We’re going to have different pools of players. 18 or 19-year-olds are debating between going to college or signing an MLS homegrown deal, or going to Germany. We want to be that fourth option for them. 21-23 is still an option for players coming out of college or who are already in Europe and can’t find the playing time they need. Older than that, we’d consider a few cases to stabilize the first team or be mentors for the young players.
What’s your club’s pitch to an 18 year old who’s debating between college, a homegrown deal, or going to Europe?
It’s a pathway to first-team minutes in Europe and the ability to move to bigger clubs. Right now, what you aren’t seeing is player movement between the lower-divisions and MLS outside of affiliated teams. Outside of maybe two or three MLS teams, you aren’t seeing young guys getting first-team minutes or moving up from the USL.
The difference over here is that if you prove yourself in a lower level in most countries in Europe—Denmark included—you will get sold to a bigger club and move up the food chain very, very quickly. There’s so much movement if you’re a young player who’s very attractive. Amon is probably going to be sold in the next six-to-12 months to a bigger club, and he came over at 15. Because of how MLS is structured, most Americans don’t realize how little movement there is. People in Denmark assume that if you own the USL, you’ll be signed by an MLS team and move up. That doesn’t happen very often.
It’s an opportunity that we can give kids to prove themselves with first-team minutes if they earn it. Potentially, that could come at 17, 18, or 19, which they wouldn’t get back home.
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While you’ve been going through the acquisition process, Andrew Gutman spent the winter in limbo regarding his playing future. Is that a player you think would’ve been a fit for a situation like Helsingør?
Absolutely. The fact that we have American ownership is so unique in European soccer. Yes, other Americans own other clubs in Europe, but they’re either massive clubs like Liverpool or they aren’t clubs that are targeting American players. For us, the sell is that we know the American player and what it takes to help them be successful. That’s a huge selling point, whether it’s letting parents know their kid will be taken care of or letting players know that our interests are aligned. There’s almost an intrinsic trust when there’s an American ownership group running the day-to-day operations in Europe, which we haven’t really seen before.
Do you already have targets in mind in terms of players the club wants to sign in that first American wave?
I was in Spain last week for the U-20 and U-23 camps. I’m not sure if we’ll get anyone from this pool of players on board yet; we might be waiting for the next cycle. For us, it’s about educating the players and their families that this is an option now. It might not be the best for every player, but I’m pretty confident that within six-to-12 months, we’ll bring in the first class of players and build the momentum from there.
Is the idea to keep the international signings at Helsingør to the American player pool?
It isn’t American-specific. What we don’t want to happen is to mimic another team in Denmark, who uses the lack of foreign player restrictions to just throw foreign players everywhere. That isn’t cohesive in any way, and I don’t want this to turn into the United Nations or anything. We have to be careful, but there’s no doubt that the pipelines will be diversified.
There are members of Los Angeles FC’s and Phoenix Rising’s ownership groups in Helsingør’s consortium. Do you worry about split interests between the group?
There won’t be any direct ties between the clubs. I think we all have minority stakes in other clubs which we can leverage if there’s a beneficial way to move players. But no, the LAFC owner in our group is a minority owner, the Phoenix guys are working on their own project, so there aren’t strong connections. It isn’t structured like the City Football Group where we’ll be moving players freely or anything.
Why were four Golden State Warriors minority owners looking to get into a European football club’s ownership group?
That’s a really good question. A lot of it is personal connections. I’ve known Nick Swinmurn for a while and he’s a close friend. We looked together on a PDL project in Burlingame, and both of us looked (at ownership opportunities) in the USL and MLS. He was interested five or six months ago. I can’t speak for all of them, but it’s a unique opportunity to invest in something that’s just different. A lot of the guys have looked at MLS and it’s either for them or it isn’t. This is so different, and the idea that it could possibly be lucrative from a player sales standpoint isn’t something that really exists yet in the U.S.
What is Helsingør like as a city?
It’s a really interesting place. Like many clubs here, it’s within 40 minutes of Copenhagen. It’s also very close to Sweden and connected by ferry to Helsingborg. It’s a nice little spot and very tourist-focused. There’s a castle here that was referenced in Hamlet, so a lot of tourists come here. You can head over to Copenhagen and hop a flight to anywhere in Europe in about an hour. We think it’s geographically in a good spot.
The club is ready to open a new stadium this summer, which is interesting to us. It isn’t a pop-up; it’s an actual, real stadium where the club and academy will be housed like a proper football club. You can walk down the first level of the club to the first team, reserves, U-19s, U-17s, and U-15s all housed in the stadium. That infrastructure is right for developing players at this level.
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Within this model, how important is it for Helsingør to secure promotion to the Danish Superliga?
It isn’t a huge priority for us. Yes, we’d love to get up to the Superliga, but it’s more important for us to build a sustainable foundation for the club. It can be quite expensive and risky to gamble on getting up to the Superliga. That isn’t really the model. If we got there, it’d be more difficult to play younger players since there’s more pressure and the budget is raised.
We think that, for now, the 1st Division (note: Denmark’s second-tier league is called the Danish 1st Division) is the sweet spot to give players an opportunity, move them on, and bring the next wave of players in. You see guys going to mid-level leagues in Belgium, Holland, or the Superliga directly from the 1st Division. We won’t be selling to Manchester United, but we don’t think we need to be in the top division in Scandinavia to execute this model.
Are you expecting to make some changes on the sporting or technical staffs?
No major changes. We’re coming in to have a strong operational role in terms of recruitment of foreign players, specifically Americans. It’s going to be incremental and take time to make adjustments, but we’ll add value to the organization by being the American piece of the puzzle when bringing players here. We’ve been talking to somebody who was recently with the U.S. youth national teams that would be a great addition to what we’re doing here.
Within the last 18 months, you’ve had stakes in takeovers of Dundalk F.C. and now FC Helsingør. Are you looking at making more moves?
I think this is a good spot to set up for a while. My other investments are very small and more passive. This is an active investment for me; I was looking for something to latch onto and spend a lot of time and energy. I’m going to be focused on this for a while. Certainly down the road, we’d love to be doing this at a larger level whether that’s with the club or if this is part of a portfolio of clubs. For now, it’s about executing the model and proving that we can do what we’ve set out to do.
(Photo by Lars Ronbog / FrontZoneSport via Getty Images)