Soccer <\/p>\n
EDITOR’S NOTE:<\/em> In celebration of Major League Soccer’s 30th season, MLSsoccer.com is exploring untold stories about all 30 clubs. “30 Clubs, 30 Stories”<\/a> will be unveiled throughout 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Dee Haslam will be the first to admit that she and her husband Jimmy carried little background in the beautiful game when the opportunity arose for them to lead a new ownership group to purchase the Columbus Crew<\/a> in 2018.<\/p>\n They did, however, know quite a bit about what professional sports teams can mean to a city, and how painful their departure can be, from their experiences as owners of the Cleveland Browns, whose original iteration relocated to Maryland after the 1995 NFL season before a rebirth as a new organization four years later.<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn’t know anything about soccer,\u201d Haslam told MLSsoccer.com this week. \u201c[But] when we read about that [the Crew] were going to be leaving and going to Austin, it piqued our interest, because we know from our Cleveland fans how devastating it was when the Browns went to Baltimore.<\/p>\n “So I think for us it was, \u2018Oh, well, that can’t happen.\u2019 A city can’t lose a pro team. You just can’t.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n The Haslams had the benefit of Dr. Pete Edwards, a well-known orthopedic surgeon in the area and the Crew\u2019s longtime team doctor, and his family on board as co-investors. They had also witnessed fans’ passion and desire to keep the club in Ohio’s capital city.<\/p>\n \u201cWe talked about community and about fans, and about shared experiences and how to make the gameday experience good, and about the culture of soccer in America, which is growing,\u201d Edwards recalled to MLSsoccer.com of his early conversations with the Haslams.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery generation of kids that grow up with MLS will have their own kids, and the soccer culture becomes embedded in our overall culture and country. So it was really a wonderful thing to see people that understand the value of a sports team in a community.\u201d<\/p>\n Current Crew midfielder Sean Zawadzki<\/a> can attest to that. He was a teenage academy prospect back when the relocation discussions began.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was obviously a devastating time, not only for the fans and in the club, but also for us as academy players,\u201d the homegrown told MLSsoccer.com on Tuesday. \u201cWe didn’t know what was going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n The Haslams\u2019 group spearheaded a plan to invest some $650 million into acquiring the Crew, bankrolling a new downtown stadium that would become Lower.com Field and constructing a state-of-the-art training facility, the OhioHealth Performance Center, adjacent to Historic Crew Stadium, the club\u2019s former home and a living monument as the first soccer-specific venue in modern US and Canadian history.<\/p>\n Thus the future of this founding member of MLS \u2013 officially the league\u2019s first chartered club, as Crew folks will proudly point out, a result of Columbus being the first and only city to hit the threshold of 10,000 season-ticket deposits in the wake of the stateside 1994 FIFA World Cup \u2013 was assured. Yet even the most optimistic backer could hardly have dared to imagine where the Crew would go from there.<\/p>\n Today, the Crew are one of MLS\u2019s model clubs thanks to:<\/p>\n The gains made over the past six years are particularly breathtaking given the scale of the task the new owners encountered upon arrival, and lingering perceptions of Columbus as a humble \u2018small market\u2019 with limited upside despite Central Ohio\u2019s rapid growth and economic dynamism, with the region\u2019s population having nearly doubled since the Crew first took the pitch three decades ago.<\/p>\n \u201cWe needed to start from zero with the Columbus Crew,\u201d said Dee Haslam. \u201cI mean, we had to build a staff, we had to build a soccer stadium, we had to build a facility. We had to get our leadership team together, and we had to get our players. So it was pretty much from starting from scratch.<\/p>\n \u201cBut we started out with, we think our job is to win, create a great experience for our fans and really give back to the community.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Hiring the right leaders was key. One of the new Crew\u2019s first moves was recruiting Tim Bezbatchenko, an Ohio native who\u2019d engineered Toronto FC<\/a>\u2019s rise from perennial doormats to 2017 treble winners and MLS Cup finalists three times in four seasons, to return home as Columbus\u2019 president and general manager.<\/p>\n Issa Tall joined up as well, working as the right-hand man of \u2018Bez\u2019 before succeeding him last year when Bezbatchenko moved on to become president of Black Knight Football Club, a group which operates English Premier League club Bournemouth AFC and other soccer investments in France, Scotland and New Zealand.<\/p>\n \u201cThe situation was not too dissimilar to what we experienced in Toronto,\u201d Tall told MLSsoccer.com. \u201cAfter the Save The Crew movement and the new ownership, when Tim talked to me about this project and the ambition of the club, it was kind of the same feeling of, \u2018Yes, it\u2019s an established club, but at the same time, it’s an expansion team, in a way.\u2019 Because there was no longer an academy, there was no scouting department per se, so everything needed to be built.\u201d<\/p>\n With ownership funding big-ticket signings from overseas like Lucas Zelaray\u00e1n and Cucho Hern\u00e1ndez in addition to the infrastructure investments that made Columbus a more attractive destination for players of all stripes, Bezbatchenko, Tall and their staff quickly reshaped the Crew from also-rans to contenders.<\/p>\n One of their most important acquisitions, however, was a homecoming of sorts.<\/p>\n Eyebrows raised across the league in 2019 when Darlington Nagbe<\/a> sought to move on from Atlanta United<\/a> \u2013 at that time the reigning MLS Cup champs and widely perceived as the most ambitious club in the league \u2013 and return to his native Ohio to join the Crew, arriving via a blockbuster trade<\/a> for more than $1 million in allocation money after contract renewal talks with ATLUTD reached an impasse. The tempo-setting, All-Star midfielder wanted to be closer to his roots in the Cleveland suburbs, but it was more than that.<\/p>\n He\u2019s still wearing Columbus\u2019 black and gold, and anchoring one of MLS\u2019s top engine rooms as club captain.<\/p>\n \u201cI definitely remember those questions,\u201d Nagbe said this week of his Atlanta exit. \u201cBut I knew the vision that the club had in terms of facility and stadium and things like that, and where they wanted to be in a couple of years. So the team was always there, the town was always there, the players were always there; I think now you attract more players when you have certain facilities and you know the product is good on the field.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving friends around the league, the way they view Columbus now is completely different than when I first came into the league. So credit to the owners and the staff and people that they’ve put in position to execute.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Josh Glessing is another of those people. The Crew\u2019s president of business operations originally learned of the Haslam and Edwards families\u2019 ideas for the club when he was part of a team at Goldman Sachs they consulted for strategic advice, and eventually the project drew him to move to Columbus to join up directly.<\/p>\n \u201cFive years ago, the Columbus Crew was effectively last [in MLS] in any meaningful revenue category, effectively dead last across the board,\u201d Glessing told MLSsoccer.com, \u201cto where we stand today, which is at the top of a lot of categories.<\/p>\n \u201cIn a lot of categories, we’ve gone from being behind in the league to being the North Star for a lot of clubs, certainly smaller, middle-market teams, showing what you can do in a market like Columbus, who six years ago was really struggling to stay afloat and was dealing with the threat of relocation. To go from that to what we have today takes a lot of vision, a lot of meaningful investment from our ownership group. And we believe that if we can do that here in Columbus, there’s a lot of other markets who have really bright futures ahead of them.\u201d<\/p>\n Glessing can reel off a litany of major events that have come to Ohio\u2019s capital since Lower.com Field opened, from last year\u2019s MLS All-Star Game to US men\u2019s and women\u2019s national team matches to visits from several Premier League clubs. He\u2019s even more effusive about the ongoing development efforts around the stadium, with hundreds of units of new housing construction, tentpole business tenants, community parks, public art installations and more underway for the emerging Astor Park neighborhood.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat does it mean to keep this team in Columbus? We very quickly realized that it was much more than just a sports story, and it was more than just a sports team story. It very quickly turned into an economic impact story,\u201d Glessing explained. \u201cYou think about the first time we toured the site that now is the home to Lower.com Field, it was a barren wasteland of abandoned municipal buildings. So to stand on that site and have the vision of what it could be, took real vision, and that vision started at the very top.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’ve used soccer to shine a light on Columbus. We’ve also used it to unlock this real, meaningful economic impact that otherwise wouldn’t have been there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Linda Logan has witnessed all this in her role as CEO and president of the Greater Columbus Sports Commission, and sees ample statistical and anecdotal evidence of how the Crew\u2019s revival has raised the city\u2019s profile.<\/p>\n \u201cThe brand has reached some greater international status because of the players we have, the coaches we have, the winning records that we have had. It\u2019s been really fun to see, because that\u2019s something that probably in the early days of the franchise was not the case,\u201d Logan told MLSsoccer.com.<\/p>\n \u201cWe do see it economically, we do see that when the Crew are in the city, hotel occupancy is up \u2026 What’s been special to me is to see the grassroots efforts of the community \u2013 so now we have so many more young kids playing soccer. Our high school programs are really solid, they’re winning state championships. We have a lot of our local homegrown talent that’s not only playing in college, but at the professional level, maybe even representing our country.\u201d<\/p>\n All involved describe this as a living, ongoing story. The Crew just swung a $4 million-plus transaction with the Philadelphia Union<\/a> to augment their attack with Hungarian playmaker D\u00e1niel Gazdag<\/a>, and there’s the potential for another big move this summer. The Astor Park development is still in its early stages and could eventually redefine a previously-ignored sector of downtown Columbus. Tall also points to the progressively younger ages of Crew 2 players as part of the plan to ramp up the academy\u2019s production of homegrown signings.<\/p>\n And in an ironic turnabout on the traditional Ohio sports hierarchy, the Crew will look to grow their presence in Cleveland this Saturday, with a bumper crowd expected to flock to the Browns\u2019 Huntington Bank Field for a visit from Leo Messi<\/a> and Inter Miami CF<\/a> (4:30 pm ET | MLS Season Pass<\/a>). It\u2019s the sort of occasion \u2018Dr. Pete\u2019 and others who were there at the dawn of this story could scarcely have imagined back in the 1990s, when Lamar Hunt, the club\u2019s first owner\/investor, defied conventional wisdom to plant MLS\u2019s flag in Columbus.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the beginning, we didn’t have training fields, let alone training centers or academies or anything like that \u2013 and sometimes in Columbus, we trained on grass that hadn’t been mowed in the spring for two weeks, and the grass was so tall you couldn’t even kick the ball,\u201d Edwards recalled wryly. \u201cLamar always said it would take a full generation of kids to live through MLS before it really took on. And he was hoping it’d be 10 years, but it turned out to be more like 15 to 20. But he was right. It just took a little longer.<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s something we talk about in Columbus called \u2018the Columbus way,\u2019 and that’s a collaborative spirit and a sense of community, and a sense of community pride, that allows us to to do things maybe that can’t be done in other cities. And so Lamar was spot on in picking us.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\nBuilding from the ground up<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
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Reshaping an identity<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
Meteoric rise<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
Rising tides<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n