The Fort Worth Vaqueros have reached across the pond and “scooooored” by buying into an England-based club. The local soccer team expects to benefit in many ways from the alliance, and good things have already started happening just days after the announcement.
“We’re already selling merchandise in England,” said Tobias Lopez, the Vaqueros’ director of business operations. “We’ve had four or five orders come in already in the past two days for window decals and t-shirts. It’s funny thinking of people in Vaqueros merchandise walking the streets of England.”
Local businessman Michael Hitchcock launched the Vaqueros in January 2014, and the team averaged about 2,000 tickets sold per game during its first season at LaGrave Field. A year later, on Jan. 1, Hitchcock announced he’d bought a “significant” interest in the Alfreton Town Football Club (he declined to say how much he paid). Owning both teams opens the door for crossover marketing, like the merchandise sales. The two teams also expect to share players, marketing ideas, and training techniques and to host international matches in both countries.
“I’m already investigating the visa process on how we get players in England to come play for us in May,” Lopez said. “The English season is going on now and ends in the spring. Ours begins in the summer. We’ve already identified several of our players we want to send over there to start training with them. It gives us an option that other teams in our division don’t have.”
One of the Vaqueros’ youngest players is already pegged to make the trip. Nestor Martinez, 19, grew up in Fort Worth, graduated last year from Diamond Hill-Jarvis High School, and earned a spot on the Vaqueros after tryouts in February. The team considers him a top prospect and wants to groom him accordingly.
“He’s a product of Fort Worth and the kind of kid we’re trying to help with this whole thing,” Lopez said.
Martinez has played soccer in several southern states and in Mexico but never overseas.
“They have a different style of soccer over there,” he said. “I like the way they play. They do a lot of running, they work out more, and it’s more of a contact sport. It will be a challenge, and I’ll start using my body more. I’ll add it all to my style.”
The new ownership group, called Legend Football Partners, includes Playbook Management International (PMI), led by managing partner Hitchcock. The other partner is 1836 Capital, led by managing director Jonathan Collura, who heads a Dallas-based corporate finance company that specializes in mergers and acquisitions.
Hitchcock made a couple of trips to Alfreton, in Derbyshire, during negotiations and was impressed by the intensity of the fans.
“The team is literally and figuratively the center of that community,” he said. “Most people walk to the stadium.”
In England, businessman Wayne Bradley owns primary interest in the Alfreton club. Apparently he hired a Shakespearean dramatist to pen his portion of the press release: “An exciting position has now been created; a position which will propel the great history of the club well and truly into the future,” he said in the statement. “I firmly believe that I will have achieved my ultimate aim of securing a future for the football club in a shape that I could only have dreamed of.”
The partnership, in turn, opens up Alfreton’s club to North American fans. “For the sport of soccer in Fort Worth, it’s important for the city to play in the global soccer community, and now we can do that,” Hitchcock said.
Bradley will still control three of the six seats on the board of directors of the Alfreton team. Hitchcock and Collura will select the other three board members. The Alfreton club originated in 1959 and competes in the Conference Premier. England’s soccer pyramid includes eight levels, with the Premier League at the top and the Conference Premier four slots lower.
“In England you can get promoted to the next level above you if you have a good season or get relegated to the division below you if you have a bad season,” Hitchcock said. “You are always fighting for something. Every game matters in the UK.”
The Vaqueros’ history stretches back only 12 months, but the team’s popularity is growing with surprising speed. They’ve relied on grassroots support and social media marketing from the beginning, even allowing local fans to choose the team’s name and logo. Season ticketholders received special jerseys that allowed them to enter the stadium without needing a paper ticket.
One major problem is that LaGrave Field is threatened with extinction (“Needing a Forever Home,” Dec. 10, 2014). The Fort Worth Cats baseball team lost their lease, and the stadium ownership group appears to be leaning toward selling or redeveloping the property, which could spell the end of the stadium.
The Vaqueros are still trying to work out a lease agreement at LaGrave.
“We’re hopeful we’ll be playing there next year, but we’re running out of daylight,” Hitchcock said. “We love the location, and we have some great memories of that first year.”
If the Vaqueros don’t ink a lease agreement at LaGrave in the next week, the team will look for a new home, perhaps at a local high school stadium such as Farrington Field, he said. No matter where they play, they can expect to see (and hear) the Panther City Hellfire, the independent support group that cheers on the Vaqueros.
“First and foremost, Fort Worth Vaqueros is our club, and no matter where they play, we’ll be there in support,” said Hellfire president Brian Price. “Our dream is for the Vaqueros to have a soccer-specific stadium of their own, a view we know the club shares. But we’re pretty sure that won’t be for a while.”
Hitchcock has been pulling late hours since the purchase. British broadcasters have been requesting live interviews during morning drive time, but that’s 2 a.m. in this time zone. Hitchcock has had to get up in the middle of the night to talk to British sportscasters about the Vaqueros and Texas and many other topics.
“We got a question from some fans over there who asked if we knew who shot Kennedy,” he said. “We get a lot of questions about Cowtown. That’s branding Fort Worth internationally.
“The game of soccer is getting bigger and bigger, but the world is getting smaller and smaller, and our announcement proved that,” Hitchcock said.
Sounds like there’s not a lot of hope of getting LaGrave for next season, if you read between the lines. Shame as the company that wants to develop has to get permission from the city to do so, and the city could sit on their approval in order to help out local teams for a few months. Oh well…. hope it works out. But the lack of beer sponsorship will cost the team and any money lost from advertising for a young club is never good.