Steve (00:15.17)
You know, it's so interesting when you have a guest on your show, The Transaction Report, one who has literally encompassed embraced every side just about of the sports business experience. Whether that was as a talented, all-American, academic all-American athlete, second round draft choice in the NFL.

an attorney by trade, one who goes on and literally is intrepid, for many, they would avoid putting themselves in the hot seat of a new league, a new organization, new team. But Oliver Luck has absolutely just been, it's a gravitational pull as this interviewer sees it when it comes down to his ability to thrive on chaos and make chaos right for all.

Oliver, what a pleasure it is to have you on the transaction report.

Oliver Luck (01:10.578)
Well, thank you, Steve. It sounds like we should talk about dark matter and the gravitational pull of the planet.

Steve (01:14.094)
Now you're talking with me. Well, let's get right into dark matter. And it comes down to very much a whole issue that comes down to issues when you want to get into anything that is above us, things you can't see, things that theoretical physics have to manifest and we have to subscribe to do a whole bunch of tests about believing that that's the way it is, even though there's no proof of such. And as a man,

Oliver Luck (01:19.912)
Hahaha

Steve (01:43.244)
that I see is so deeply embedded in the American experience, and in many ways the Horatio Alger experience, which leads me to something that I was pondering when I was learning about you. And obviously I heard a great deal about you from our CMO of sports, Dave Wharton, in discussions he's had with you. what really hit me was of course, your passion for sport, which I gather like many of us who played ball, you had a much more.

Oliver Luck (02:01.126)
Okay.

Steve (02:09.365)
obviously, Excel level, elite level. I played D1 College, lacrosse. But you start off as a young kid and it's in your DNA. But with you, I saw something else in your DNA. And that is what I'm going to state something. It's a hypothesis. That is someone who is not only embedded in sport, but deeply embedded in the American ethos. Deeply embedded in that this nation

Oliver Luck (02:32.994)
.

Steve (02:39.201)
has an enormous contribution to make and has made to the world. And sports is maybe a metaphor, the chaos of collegiate sport and all the ascending leads in pro sport is maybe just a metaphor for the bigger picture of the embodiment of an athlete that so represented America, but America's in the midst of change.

Oliver Luck (02:43.624)
Thank

Steve (03:03.605)
And how do we identify what was great about that athlete, the American athlete, and how do we regain that greatness?

Oliver Luck (03:13.724)
Well, that's quite the intro. So thank you very much. I used to joke when I went over to Europe in 1990, I was 30 years old. I had been asked to run basically what was then called the World League of American Football that morphed into NFL Europe. I was asked to run the Frankfurt Galaxy franchise in Frankfurt, Germany. And I used to joke to my wife and kids that, honey, we're going over to Europe. We have to do some missionary work. We have to convert.

Steve (03:41.813)
I think you had a harder job.

Oliver Luck (03:42.824)
You know, all these heathen Europeans do the great game of American football. But it's interesting you say. That's right, it's but it's interesting you say American ethos because I think one of the beauties of living in this country and I think it is the know greatest place to grow up to live to raise a family, etc. To create a career. Everything is open. There are unlimited possibilities in this country because we're big. We have, you know.

by and large strong institutions. get tested sometimes politically, but it's a great place to grow up. But you can take a chance. I remember thinking, gosh, the NFL wants to have a league in Europe? Are you kidding me? I don't understand that. So, you but you can take a chance. And, lo and behold, American football, certainly the business of the National Football League is doing extraordinarily well in Europe.

games this year in Madrid, in London, in Berlin, outside of Europe, down in Brazil. And who knows, you know, if there's an 18th game that's approved, you'll have every team once a year playing an overseas game. And that's not just generating a bunch of ticket revenue and sponsorship revenue. It's also opening up, as you know, Steve, it's opening up that 9 a.m. East Coast window for a football game. So you can now sit on your couch and watch four games a day as opposed to just three. But

My point is, in this country, we have so many interesting opportunities that I think, and not just young people, but middle-aged folks, even older folks, can take advantage of that. Take a flyer, if you will. You don't know if it's going to work. I didn't know if the XFL back in 2020 was going to work. I certainly didn't know that after five games, we would get shut down because of COVID, right? We didn't have the right to play games in our marketplaces because of the local health authorities.

So, but you learn through all those experiences and some of them work. Like NFL Europe worked extraordinarily well and I think we were on a great pathway with the XFL to work, know, but for COVID, which shut down a lot of industries. But we do have this incredibly diverse, incredibly robust, incredibly entrepreneurial system in this country. And that includes sport. It includes both, you know, amateur, what we used to call amateur sport, collegiate sport.

Oliver Luck (06:08.313)
It's no longer amateur, of course, but it includes college sport, pro sport, includes all the other leagues that have grown up. it is, as I look back on my career, an opportunity to have taken some chances, right? Don't always play the safe game. Sometimes you just got to, it's third down or fourth down, you need a first down, you got to throw that ball in a tight window.

Steve (06:31.821)
Well, that's why I like what you said about black matter. When you look at, for example, that reference, where you have gone...

has usually been this tabula rosa of what is in your vision and what is in your vision that is hopefully what's going to come to fruition because there was perhaps no precedent. And while yes, there's an NFL precedent in the United States, as many of us know who've spent many years living overseas, I spent 13 years in the Far East here in London and probably two or three years that I spent in Israel. At the end of the day,

Oliver Luck (07:04.359)
All

Steve (07:08.811)
When you're starting from scratch, it is very much a black hole. And it's something that people rely on you to be that quarterback, to be that visionary, be that team leader, and make sense and create tangible something from nothing. You've done that. And you've done it in a way that what also dawned on me is you've had to convince.

or demonstrate a value proposition, benefits, pure benefits to people who believed in your vision. And those are called sponsors. Broadcasters is another thing, but let's go to sponsors. When you look at the corporate brands that were putting money and believing in you, in what you were creating from nothing, or when you were starting out, you know, and heading up the Houston Sports Authority, where you were literally building stadia and raising an enormous amount of capital from the community.

What is it that you believe it takes when there is not that precedent to hang your hat on, but a vision ahead of you that convinces so many to follow the Piper?

Oliver Luck (08:16.614)
It's a very good question. think ultimately there needs to be a pretty simple message. The message has to be on point. It's got to be fairly simple. It can't be complicated. If I think about showing up in Frankfurt, Germany in 1990 with literally a check from the National Football League, I had to open up a bank account at Deutsche Bank.

You know, get little there was nothing had been done. There was a stadium there, of course, for the local soccer franchise. And but there was no stadium relationship. There was no employees. There was no practice facility. Nothing right. So you have to create a very simple message. You have to figure out what your core group of people is. And we were lucky in Frankfurt because, as you may know, you know, the Frankfurt effectively was the headquarters for

I think both the 5th Corps and the 7th Corps, the US Army after World War II. know, Frankfurt folks, right, people in that general area were accustomed to American stuff, American things, soldiers, you know, and there was a very positive relationship. That wasn't our target market. Our target market was, you know, Wolfgang and the other Germans that we wanted to get interested, but have a very simple message and make it fun, make it enjoyable. In fact, the model that we used with the Frankfurt Galaxy back in 1990,

won when the season started, really was the college model, not the NFL model. It was all about tailgating. It was all about cheerleaders. It was all about fireworks at the ball games, et cetera. And you have to sort of figure out, and this is part of the message, you have to figure out where is my entry point? Where is my entry point? Where is there a need? How can American football, in this case, fill that need?

The sports landscape in Europe is much different than it is in the US. We've got a very robust, healthy, I would say, comprehensive landscape with all the different sports, professional leagues. We have college sport, which the Europeans don't have. There's one example of college sport in Europe, and that's when Oxford and Cambridge row on the Thames once a year. But we've got a very, very big sort

Oliver Luck (10:43.203)
comprehensive sports structure, the Europeans don't. you know, not every euro, not every German or Dutchman or Spaniard or whatever is a soccer fan, right? And as a result, we were able to say, listen, here's a game, American football, that is different. It's interesting. It's fun. It has a collective effervescence of being in a stadium with 30,000, 40,000 people rooting for your home team. It's a code from, you know, rugby, if you will.

which was sort of the original sport in a sense, in terms of carrying the ball and throwing the ball backwards, forwards, whatever way. So there's a, it's historically tied to soccer, but it's an American offshoot. Come on out one time and just try it. Let's see what it's like. And if you have sort of a comprehensive message and have a certain degree of credibility and believability, not just the business community, but others will join. We're a fairly,

entrepreneurial race, you will, know, the Western democracy. We've got the opportunity to do things. We're not controlled from the top down historically. You know, we're controlled from the bottom up. And all of a sudden, there's 25,000, 30,000 people at the first Frankfurt Galaxy game. People say, Whoa, wait, that's significant. And guess what? They're all young. You know, it's not the 65 year old granddad.

Steve (12:04.749)
By the way, I do want to interject. something we talk all about. And Oliver, just one point before we move forward. We had a guest on recently who is actually the chief revenue officer for the Boston Legacy, formerly known as Boss Nation. And they had some very difficult times when they announced their launch, changed the name. she was formerly with the commanders when they had just changed their name.

Oliver Luck (12:24.824)
Women's soccer, yeah.

Steve (12:31.627)
And we talked a lot about the mistakes that, and having seen it throughout my career as an event owner and a property owner on a league and an event level, whereas budding organizations very often will be so focused on the ticket revenue that what happens is, and you saw this with the professional lacrosse league with Paul Rabel, who's a brilliant businessman, a very smart strategist, and perhaps one of the greatest lacrosse players offensive.

lacrosse players ever play the game. But they did their first opening game at Gillette Stadium for the league. Now that's a 65,000 seat stadium. You show up with 8,000 people, it looks like you have a few people following one casual individual. So my question to you, when you say you had 30,000 folk showing up for an NFL game, and at that time it wasn't an exhibition, it was an actual...

Oliver Luck (13:10.204)
Yeah.

Oliver Luck (13:21.461)
This was NFL Europe. This was the AAA league. This was the Frankfurt Galaxy playing the London Monarch. So this is not the...

Steve (13:25.997)
AAA league. So wasn't bringing over some of our teams to Europe. It was 35 years ago, showing them and demonstrating some of the taste of football. How did you get 30,000 folk on that first game?

Oliver Luck (13:31.267)
That's right.

Oliver Luck (13:41.495)
Well, we became the antidote to a traditional soccer match. Soccer is a great sport, right? I love the game. I was involved with MLS for many years. Soccer is a great sport, but it's also sort of like your grandfather's sport. It's like a Buick ad back in the day. It's your granddad's car. It's not young. It's not hip. They wouldn't play music during games and soccer matches. It was all very, you know, very regimented, right?

Steve (14:04.193)
Huh. Stodgy. Yeah.

Oliver Luck (14:07.477)
Yeah, and Stantie is a good word. And if you remember, this is back in the 90s, there were hooligan problems all across Europe at soccer matches. You would go to an Eintracht, that's the Frankfurt club, which means harmony in English. You would go to an Eintracht game and it would be nine, and I'm exaggerating a bit, but there's a kernel of truth in here. It'd be 98 % male. There would be guys, you know, skinheads going to the games. They would sit in the...

stand in the curves, in the end zone as we would call it, but it was standing room only, cheap tickets. They would, you know, it was a very right wing sort of crowd and you know they had you know riots in Holland and in England and you name it. So we said, listen, a game can be fun. You, Hooligan, you can bring your girlfriend, you can bring your mother and dad to this game, you can bring a bunch of your friends and have fun and tailgate before the game. We're going to play music and we're going to do stupid, you know.

trick, dog tricks if you will. We had elephants in the stadium and helicopters landing to bring the game ball and Harley Davidson's and you name it, all kind of cheap American schlock. But the reason it worked is the one game that those Europeans used to see back in the 80s and 90s, even with government controlled television over in Europe, was the Super Bowl.

And if you watch the Super Bowl, is a German kid or a Dutch kid or an English person, right? All you see is the entertainment. It's a halftime show. It's a pregame show. You the games, you see the game and the games obviously very challenging and fun. And you may not quite understand all the intricacies. But the point was we were targeting a different audience and putting on a different event. And we were able initially to get, you know, to get these 25, 30,000 people in there. The fifth game, the fifth home game.

The last home game of the Frankfurt Galaxy, our head coach was Jack Elway, John's father. Jackson's passed away. We were out of the playoff hunt. We were playing the Sacramento Surge. We had, Steve, 50,000 tickets sold for that one game because we put on something different. We sort of filled a niche that soccer just couldn't fill because it's bad. You know, I should say it's burdened by

Oliver Luck (16:22.208)
by history and by the fact that they didn't want to really do anything differently. We did.

Steve (16:27.853)
So as you achieve that, going in, because you were in, I believe for almost 10 years, you were a part of that experiment that laid the groundwork for what is today virtually becoming a global league in some context.

Were you able to, first of all, just sustain that? You had an enormously successful, unprecedented first year. I contrast that, by the way, with the opening of what you were a part of as commissioner. I brought one of my sons and two of his friends to the opening of the XFL season at Giant Stadium, MetLife Stadium.

And that was not what you experienced in Europe. You outpaced that dramatically. And there were obviously some teams that were doing very well in the XFL, and then others could not find a path to attract fans to come and experience. they're obviously off season, having just completed with the NFL. You sustained that as you evolved, did the fans come back to that product, even though it was not quote unquote

Oliver Luck (17:11.029)
Yes.

Steve (17:34.207)
our flagship property.

Oliver Luck (17:36.065)
So I would argue that, and this applies to the XFL as well, so anytime you have a league of six or eight or whatever number of teams, you're going to have a couple of dogs. And it's just inevitable. New York was a dog for us in the XFL. St. Louis rocked. Washington, D.C. rocked. St. Louis rocked because of unusual circumstances. There were still a lot of, you know,

Steve (17:55.851)
Hmm

Oliver Luck (18:03.72)
antipathy towards the Cronkite family and the fact that you know the the market of St. Louis and Lawn, or an NFL market with the Rams leaving etc. So that was unusual but we had some you know strong support in in some of these other markets. Houston, we played at the University of Houston. That franchise did very well. New York was not. New York is like London. You have to be the top of the line. You've got to be you know Broadway.

caliber you can't be off off-broadway and expect to draw it's just a you know It's a it's a different type of market if I if we did it all again I would argue even harder that we should have been in let's say the MLS Stadium in Harrison, New Jersey You know across the river, which is a much smaller venue because you're right You can get 12 or 15 or you 18,000 people looks good in the 20,000 seat stadium It doesn't look good. You know at the metal lands. I mean, that's just that's remark, but to your point

Steve (18:46.957)
Mmm.

Steve (18:59.489)
And by the way, please.

Oliver Luck (19:00.811)
To your point, we did create a lasting sort of legacy with NFL Europe. But you have to think of NFL Europe in this way. Think of it in three phases, and I'll be very brief. First phase was bringing NFL preseason games over to Europe. It was called the American Bowl Series. And there were games in Sweden, London, Berlin, you name it, right? Ireland.

Steve (19:12.727)
Please.

Oliver Luck (19:24.123)
And they worked for about six, seven years until people realized, Joe Montana is not going to play but one series. This is a preseason game. It doesn't really matter. The second phase of that was, well, let's give them their own teams, Frankfurt Galaxy, the Ryan Fier and Dusseldorf, the London Monarchs, the Barcelona Dragons, the Scottish Claymores. And that was sort of their own team. And that really built a fan base. But at some point, people said, this is just a AAA league. This is sort of like minor league baseball.

We want to see the real thing. And now it's phase three and it's NFL teams going over to Europe. There's a game in Brazil. I think the Chargers are playing somebody, divisional opponent in Brazil. And then you got these games in Europe going on. I just booked a flight to fly over to Berlin and meet a bunch of my cousins, German cousins, and we're to go to that game. So that's the third phase. What's the fourth phase? I don't know. I'm not inside the NFL's building anymore.

But you have to think of it in sort of long-term. Sure, sure.

Steve (20:24.941)
I'll share with you all a pine about what might be a fourth phase. And by the way, the gentleman who was a tournament director in my company in the Republic of China in Taipei back in the 90s, he went on to become the head of the NFL in China, Richard Yang or Yang. I don't know if you ever came across him. He probably came on after you left in 2000. He probably came in the early 2000s.

To me, that next phase, and I remember speaking with him deeply about this, was about how do you cultivate a local market to play your sport? And ultimately, that seems to me, for the ultimate success, one is a commercial success on the professional level. Of course, that can be achieved in sports that don't play tennis or don't play golf, but you can have enormously successful events or leagues coming over.

Oliver Luck (21:00.415)
Okay. Okay.

Steve (21:13.837)
But to me, think ultimately it's, in his context, how do get the Chinese to ultimately embrace a game? As you said, we're 35 years into the experiment with the NFL since you went over in 1990. And so it's patience. And it's, to me, I gather in some context, local for, you know, fertilizing that local, local.

Oliver Luck (21:38.761)
Yeah, I mean, that's a very good point. And I think American football has a significant challenge in terms of youth participation outside of North America, outside of the U.S. Canada. And there's some football played in Mexico at the university level. And it's a game that you see kids throwing the ball around. But in Europe,

Soccer is simple. It's about the simplest game you can play with an inflated pig's bladder if need be. It's cheap. Basketball is a fairly cheap sport. Even rugby is a fairly cheap sport when you compare it to American football. So you get the whole kit and caboodle. get the helmets and coaches and fields and tackling dummies and all this sort of stuff. It's not an easy game to play. In particular, the challenge in Europe is

Steve (22:06.189)
cheap.

Oliver Luck (22:28.177)
European kids that grow up with some exceptions, but European kids grow up not using their hands, right? If you're standing 10 feet away, Steve, from a 10-year-old German boy and you toss him very quickly a ball, he lifts his foot up to control it. He doesn't grab it like an American kid would. So one of the big problems, long-term challenges that exists in Europe is that they don't catch or throw the ball as much as we do. And as a result, the most important position quarterback

Steve (22:38.317)
Thank you.

Steve (22:42.091)
Interesting. That's great.

Oliver Luck (22:57.999)
is really a position that's only even in sort of the amateur leagues over in Europe is only held by an American usually a kid from a D1 or D2 or even a D3 school who goes over in place for a couple three years in some of the amateur or semi pro leagues I should say so there's all sorts of challenges the other thing that's that's really important I think to understand is you know Europe

While it is, you know, the European Union and a common market, you know, going back to the 1960s, post-war, etc. It's still there. The German culture is just totally different than the Spanish culture and that's different than the English culture. They all have their idiosyncrasies. We found, I thought, a model that worked well in Germany. You know, I ran the Frankfurt Galaxy for a number of years and then moved up the road or I should say down down river to

the Dusseldorf Rhine fire and that franchise took hold. We've kind of just implemented the same strategy. We had a team in Berlin. We had a team in Hamburg. We had a team in Cologne at one point. So we figured out Germany, which is probably the best country to figure out because it's the leading economic giant, if you will, in Europe. But we struggled in Spain. The Spanish are different. They have a different culture. They sometimes they eat dinner at 10 p.m. in the summertime, not at six like the Germans do.

We're a much more, this country is a much more Germanic country, if you will, in terms of our culture. We've inherited a lot of things from the Germans. But you have to understand how the French operate or the Spanish or the Scottish, it's very cultural and we have to be sensitive to that. And that's one of the lessons I certainly took away from this American model of moving into Europe or China, Japan, same thing.

but with, you know, much different culture.

Steve (24:51.383)
You know, I really appreciate your example of you throw a kid a ball in many countries and they're either gonna pop it off their chest, kick it to the foot, put it on their head. And it's very true, by the way. They're not, unless he's a goalie in soccer, gonna catch the ball, embrace the ball. So.

Oliver Luck (24:59.835)
No. Think about it.

Yep.

Steve (25:16.363)
What is interesting about that is you went into a market where literally kids...

The idea of throwing a ball, first of all, what you see is some great athletes, and we've seen this all over the world, extraordinary athletes, perhaps athletes that have hundreds of millions of followers on social media. Yet you give them a football to throw it or a baseball to throw it, and frankly, it would look like a kid just learning to throw a ball in first grade. So it's a very, very legitimate point expressing how far away we are.

in certain markets to introducing sports that are just anathema to the local market. I wanna go back to the sponsorship issue because you were the head of the Houston Sports Authority, involved with hundreds of millions of dollars. You were the founding president of a major league soccer team, I believe for five years as I read. You were the commissioner and CEO of the XFL. You were the president of NFL Europe.

And I think someone who is bottom line driven about expanding the pie of opportunity. I want to hear from your perspective if you could put on a sponsor hat for a moment, a corporate brand. Why would Oliver, a corporate brand, if you find the common thread among all of your leadership roles, and I know there are others that I didn't cite, but what would be that?

that driving motivation that you could distill from those 40 years of experience, what they saw in what you were proffering. And they said, I need this for my target market. I need this for my bottom line. This is important to me as a company to be a part of your world.

Oliver Luck (27:10.589)
So in my experience, which is very entrepreneurial startups, NFL Europe, that was a startup, the exit fell as a startup. MLS in Houston, that was a franchise that we basically recruited the San Jose Earth, the old San Jose earthquake to relocate from San Jose down to Houston. That was a startup. Houston isn't necessarily a great soccer market.

It certainly hadn't been, but it was the fourth largest city in the country and you figured that a soccer franchise would work well. It's a very multicultural place. But these are all sort of entrepreneurial startup, hey, here's a new concept. Let's embed this and create something special. And basically, I think you need sponsors who have that entrepreneurial bent, who maybe are willing to take a chance, just like we were taking a chance on.

the XFL or the Houston Dynamo, is the name of the franchise down there. We needed companies that were willing to take a little bit of a flyer on something that's new. It's not a big chunk of their marketing budget, their promotional budget, but it was something different. And I think we relish the opportunity to have companies

join us in sort of building something really from the ground up. So it wasn't established at all. It was a startup and it's not dissimilar to startups in any sort of industry across the board. You have to have belief. You have to have some credibility. You have to, again, tell a good story, but keep it relatively simple. I can remember

You know, over in Europe, probably the best example, know, knocking on a lot of doors. Obviously, the NFL, which sponsored, you know, that league over there, has plenty of contacts. But most of the traditional banks or automobile companies were not willing to join a startup because they didn't see the value. But we signed an automobile company, Škoda, which was an old Czech company.

Steve (29:30.285)
Sure, sure.

Oliver Luck (29:32.442)
Now it's part of the VW family, you know, and this is right after the wall came down. Think about this. The wall came down in 1989. We were in Europe 1990, right? In Berlin and Frankfurt, et cetera. So the wall came down and immediately, you know, there were all these brands from the former East Bloc that needed to create some sort of legitimacy in Europe. So, hey, you know, what better entity to associate yourself with for ŠKODA, a Czech.

Steve (29:52.748)
Hmm

Oliver Luck (30:01.979)
automobile brand than a startup American football. They kind of an unusual combination, but they loved it. And they came back year after year after year. In fact, I drove a couple of company cars and they're actually very nice vehicles. were as nice. Yeah, as nice, if not better than what we were making in the West with VW, Volkswagen. I think there needs to be a little bit of sort of adventuresome-ness, if that's a word, from a lot of companies.

Steve (30:16.141)
They make a very good carton of hardware today.

you

Steve (30:30.989)
So what do you do, when you... So just again, finding that common thread of benefit for the brand. I understand they're adventurous. I understand what would propel them to be excited about the entrepreneurial opportunities, to be a part of something like buying NVIDIA at a buck. And that's very exciting. And I wish we did. But at the end of the day, so someone who's promising in many ways, assuring them...

Oliver Luck (30:38.276)
Right.

Oliver Luck (30:52.953)
Yeah.

Steve (31:00.511)
instilling that confidence about what's to come. There's the sense of pioneering attitude and at the same time, I'm getting in early and there's gonna be a lot of benefits thrown my way for believing them when perhaps many did not. But when it comes to the material benefit to the brand itself, and let's go back as just an illustration of SCOTA, the automotive company, what would you be communicating to them?

would be a material value proposition that they could buy into and you felt very confident that this is being delivered by any of the multiple properties you were part of.

Oliver Luck (31:41.402)
So think of a Division I college football game somewhere, right? You've got fans that show up at 7 a.m. They undo the tailgate, et cetera. I right? It's part of the game day experience. So that didn't exist at all in German soccer, right? I'm localizing this. The word tailgate doesn't exist. We had to teach them how to tailgate.

Steve (31:47.276)
Mm-hmm.

Oliver Luck (32:10.532)
called it a power party. had at the Frankfurt Stadium two large practice fields right next to the stadium. We could put tents up. We hired former soldiers to grill ribs and you name it, right? Had all kind of silly games, had music, had lots of fun. So we say to Škoda, hey, there'll be 30,000 people showing up for a tailgate party. And the Germans love automobiles. They can go.

You know, sit in your car so can take a test drive. You can have your salespeople out there. It's a relaxed family atmosphere. It's not like somebody's in a dealership, you know, with the pressure to buy the car. This is a chance to build your brand. And keep in mind, this was 1990. This was less than a year after the wall came down. you know, people did, they knew what a Škoda was, but they didn't have a chance to really see it or sit in it or, you know, talk to some salesperson or whatever. So the opportunity to, you know,

sort of sample a product, if you will, right in the middle of this very buoyant, fun, know, family friendly, music driven and of course, the Germans love to drink beer. So there's beer everywhere, you know, over there. That was an opportunity that didn't exist in any other sports. It didn't exist in soccer, didn't exist in team handball, it didn't exist in rugby. Nobody tailgated. It's one of the great things that Americans do.

Like we bring our food with us, you know, and have a big party before a game, right? And party with our fellow fans.

Steve (33:35.254)
you

Steve (33:40.846)
With Houston, by the way, just to pop over to this side of the ocean, how did you manage when people were familiar with tailgating and you're selling something, again, which entertainment is very, very important, you have a finite crowd there, obviously on what you can fit in via spectator and then the crowd outside.

How did you transcend that experiential marketing side of what I just heard you say and bring them the bigger value proposition?

Oliver Luck (34:09.901)
We, that's a good, yeah. So totally different, totally different value proposition. And this is the, I guess I would call it slight of hand that we were able to accomplish with the Houston Dynamo. Which by the way, the first two years that team was in Houston, we won the MLS Cup, the MLS Championship. So it was a good franchise that played.

Steve (34:31.679)
Unbelievable. Yeah, I mean you got the Midas touch on that one.

Oliver Luck (34:35.564)
That played very well. Yeah, it had nothing to do with me. We just had a great coach and a very good team. But this was the theory and this is what I drilled in to our coaches, our players and our front office staff. The day before the Houston Dynamo arrived in Houston, there were three professional sports franchises in the city, right? And you know who they are, the Texans, the Astros and the Rockets. Football's king.

Of course, in Texas, Astros had had a really nice run, but there were three franchises. We simply said there are now four franchises, the Astro, the Texans, the Rockets and the Houston Dynamo. would and I because I had run the Sports Authority, I knew the folks at all the professional sports franchises. We would partner with them basically in sort of promoting the fact that there's a fourth professional sports franchise and the fourth largest city in the world.

It's the world's game soccer. It's about time a professional soccer franchise was, you know, was at home in Houston. We were playing over at the University of Houston, which is a nice small, right, 30,000 seat stadium. And we portrayed us as being a part of, you know, three much bigger, much more established franchises. And, you know, there were soccer fans. mean, Houston is a

a very multicultural city, not just with Latinos, you know, from Central or South America, but with, you know, with Asians, with, you know, all, mean, it's got as many consulates, I think, as any city in the country, except maybe New York. So we were able to sort of tap into Houston pride, right? Every city, you know, cares about sort of the city and the vibe within that city. MLS was still young in those days.

and the fact that a franchise was willing to relocate to Houston after the worst relocation in the history of Houston was the Oilers leaving to go to Tennessee. Now we're on the receiving end of that. And we basically sort of put ourselves in that firmament along with the Texans, Astros, and Rockets. And you tell a 10-year-old kid that professional soccer's in town and that Brian Cheng

Steve (36:45.759)
Interesting.

Oliver Luck (36:55.049)
or Duane DeRozario or some of the great players that we had, national team players for their respective countries, Ching for the US, D-Roe for Canada. You tell a 10, 12-year-old kid that the dynamo is at the same level as the Astros or the Rockets or the Texans, and they will say, yeah, great, I love it, let's go, Dad, Mom, let's go down to the game. And there's a big soccer market, youth soccer is obviously an incredibly popular sport. So it was a much different approach.

And you know, got to be flexible when you've when you're an entrepreneur, you got to figure out how do we how do we fill that fill that gap?

Steve (37:28.429)
Particularly when you're seeking out a certain amount of revenue generated for your sponsorship and you get countered with folk who really doing their best to get in at the least path of resistance.

Oliver Luck (37:46.763)
Well, you if you think about it, right, Houston is the fourth largest city in the world. Greater Houston, think, is about. Houston's the fourth largest city in the country, the last in the world, fourth largest city in the country. And you know, there's there's lots of Latinos that live in Houston. There's no question about that. And you could, you know, I think it's safe to say that soccer, right? I'm a European football soccer is the sport of choice for Latinos.

Steve (37:53.357)
I'm sorry, up one more time.

in the country.

Oliver Luck (38:14.007)
And every one of the sports leagues, know, the NFL, the NBA or Major League Baseball, they were all they had their, you know, Latino legacy or Hispanic legacy day. They're all trying to mainstream the Latino community into their various fan bases. And they've done remarkably well in places like Houston, Dallas, Phoenix. But, you know, we could say we had the original Latino sport, the original Hispanic sport. But it's all, you know, it's spread throughout the U.S. All cultures play. I mean, show me a culture that doesn't play soccer.

Seriously, show me a culture that doesn't have soccer as one of its top, if not the top sport. And we, the US and maybe Canada with hockey, we're an anomaly, right? Everybody else mostly has soccer as its number one sport. When the World Cup comes next year to the US, people are going to be blown away, even though we've had it back in 94. They're going be blown away by the the internationality of the sport and how the US

It was always considered to that, you know, that the fleck on the global map, on the globe that didn't adopt soccer, well, we have. And we played into that, right, in our own way. And we were attractive to a lot of companies because they jumped on board. We had a Venezuelan player. We had a Venezuelan player who was a very good player. He's now doing commentary for ESPN.

And we had the Venezuelan National Oil Company sponsor our franchise because of this one Venezuelan player who was sort of a very notable good player. So, you know, there are all sorts of connections that the soccer world has in the international community. And Houston's the energy capital of the world, bar none. So, you know, there was a lot of picking and choosing that we could do to get companies involved. Because you wouldn't find a Venezuelan player playing for the

Steve (40:05.013)
interesting.

Oliver Luck (40:10.517)
for the Texans or for the Rockets, you might find a player playing for the Astros, given baseball's popularity in Central and South America. So that's the fun part of figuring out what is the potential match that we could get.

Steve (40:27.657)
If you didn't have that and it wasn't this welcoming in this fourth entity, fourth estate of Houston being your MLS team, and it was just another team and you, or perhaps when you were heading up the XFL as commissioner president, CEO, were helping teams drive revenue. Just generically, if you were putting the hat and you now wore the hat,

of a sponsor being approached by, let's just say Oliver Luck and his minions, selling to them a sponsorship of significance, which could be hundreds of thousands of dollars or several million dollars on a multi-year basis. What would you have done as a sponsor, as a brand steward, a marketing director, a brand manager, a sponsorship director, a CMO?

If Oliver walked into your home, your company, pitching you on this very important relationship, what might you have queried him in trying to understand how to enrich the value of an agreement you would have entered into with him?

Oliver Luck (41:37.701)
So I

I think the questions that I would ask is, know, tell me your origin story. Why are you doing this? Right? Which is a question for any entrepreneur. Why did you decide that professional soccer in Houston, I think back then MLS had maybe 12 franchises. They're up to, I don't know, what, 26, 28 nowadays, you know. But why are you doing this? What's the origin story? What do you want to accomplish here? And how...

How lasting can you be? Do you have the deep pockets to maintain this for a while? We don't want to have our brand be associated with a sort of here today, gone tomorrow type of a thing.

Steve (42:24.865)
How many years does that need to be? If we had to quantify that in relation to Houston or the XFL.

Oliver Luck (42:29.749)
Well, think what's important is the believability and the credibility right off the bat, right? Because the best time to get in to buy NVIDIA is when nobody knows about it, right? And all of a sudden you realize, oh my gosh, I jumped on this speeding train. This is great. So it's really the believability. And it's not just convincing somebody and being believable, credible, but it's all the pieces put together.

This is a league sponsored by the National Football League. We're going to have players like Kurt Warner here. Kurt Warner played over in NFL Europe and that's what allowed him to have a second chance in the league and go to the Super Bowl. So it's having the right pieces in place to give a very believable, convincing presentation that yes, this is going to stick around. We're going to have... You're investing at the right time. You're investing in the $1 Nvidia stock.

Now, a lot of people will back off and say, no, we're a big brand and we can't run this risk, et cetera. I get that. We have plenty of nos, you know, but as long as you keep turning, you're going to find a couple of yeses. And to me, some of the brands that were involved with us, we were in Houston with the franchise and the state of Texas just deregulated the electricity market, right?

Used to be you had to buy your electricity from the local utility. You had no choice. Well, the state of Texas, I'm sorry, deregulated all of that. And there were a bunch of different companies involved with commercial and residential energy. So we signed up one of those companies, Amigo Energy, a great sort of combo between this is a real energy business and you got a Latino aspect to it, et cetera.

And nobody knew what that brand was. So when we put them on the jersey, boom, everybody, what's that? What's Amigo Energy? was just curiosity. sponsorship is, to me, it's like a puzzle. There's lots of pieces that don't fit, and then you finally find the right group that does fit. And you say to yourself, OK, that's a building block. That's a good brand. And then we can keep making that puzzle. It's not science. It's a lot of.

Oliver Luck (44:51.133)
sort good fortune, but it's also just a lot of shoe leather, right? It's just a lot of work talking to folks. Yeah, I mean.

Steve (44:55.373)
pounding the pavement. But if we fast forwarded 20 years, and again, you're now, I see that your alma mater, the Houston Dynamo just signed BHP Billups, a conglomerate. They have a tax, Bay Credit Union as part of their organization. If we 20 years fast forwarded, you were there in 05 to 2010. Now we're 2025.

You're an established organization. You're playing routinely on television, nationally, regionally. If again, you were a prospective sponsor and Oliver Luck was showing up with his team to talk to you, what would you as the sponsor want as a breakdown?

to justify value. And I understand there's a distinction between B2B type of businesses and B2C clients, but let's just stay a standard B2C business. And it could even be, let's just for the sake of discussion, a soft drink category was open for negotiation, whatever you would like. But you're the brand steward, the custodian, who has to justify this to the C-suite. What would you be asking the folk?

Oliver Luck (45:49.779)
Thank

Steve (46:08.669)
proffering selling that sponsorship. What would you need to make this a tangible, understandable investment?

Oliver Luck (46:17.683)
You know, good question. Obviously, a mature business that's in the B2C space, right? You're going to have the traditional metrics. You know, what's your broadcast package? How many people are watching your games? What's your attendance? What sort of presence do you have in the local community? What makes, I guess I would ask the question, what makes you different from my company going and doing a deal with the Astros or the Rockets?

or the Texans or the University of Houston or a series of college teams in and around Texas. Because it's a much more mature business at this point. The Dynamo just celebrated their 20th year of playing in Houston. Houston is still the energy capital of the world. It will be for the next, I don't know how many decades, so plenty of energy companies that you can tap into. But it's a much different question and I think the traditional metrics

and the cost, right? To get involved with a national football league or major league baseball is a pretty expensive proposition because they are the leaders, if you will, along with the NBA in sport in this country. But you also have to keep in mind the beauty of soccer, certainly back 20 years ago, and I think still the case today, is you've got a beautiful piece of inventory, which is the jersey.

Steve (47:18.605)
and

Oliver Luck (47:42.49)
And people wear those jerseys. Do they wear Texans jerseys? Absolutely. But the Texans don't have a corporate logo on their front. Do they wear Astros jerseys or Rockets t-shirts, etc.? Yes, they do. you know, except for the patch, the practice patch, you know, or the game patch now in the NBA, know, American sports leagues have shied away from using the jersey as a as an advertising vehicle. And that's a benefit that soccer has. And if you sit

with a bunch of soccer people, that's what they're selling. you have to, I think, be somewhat pragmatic, somewhat opportunistic. But as you mature, the more traditional metrics are going to be important. But the ability to still be entrepreneurial as a 20-year-old company or an established league, we got the World Cup coming here. There's all sorts of

Steve (48:30.199)
Hmm.

Oliver Luck (48:37.873)
you know, stuff that's going to be going on with American soccer. Can we tap into that, you know, that groundswell of interest and support, just like we had in 1994? People forget in 94, you know, stadiums were being sold out. You know, the Pontiac Silver Dome, if you can remember that, was sold out. 75,000 people, whatever, for a soccer match. People didn't know what was going on. They didn't really care who was playing. But, you know, it was a great atmosphere because there were, you know, thousands of foreigners that came into this country to follow their team.

So, you know, the ability to be entrepreneurial and offer some things that perhaps the more established leagues couldn't offer, right? Just because they're more established, they've got strong unions and players need a piece of it, yada, yada, yada. To remain somewhat nimble and agile and entrepreneurial and creative, think would be where I would if I were selling for MLS, locally speaking, where I would be.

try to focus my attention.

Steve (49:39.598)
You know, I never really phrased it that way, and I think you nailed it. When you see churn so often, you you're working with a client, you put your guts into securing them as a sponsor. It is one of the most brutal, for many who don't own a monopoly, it is one of the most brutal undertakings in sports ownership, is literally spending so much time, investing so much effort, and then a client says, I'm opting out, I'm not renewing a contract. And that churn,

It seems like part of that diminishing of churn, and I've never heard it expressed that way, and I think it is so vital. It really is, if you will, treating every day as your first day. What do we used to say? You're only as good as your last game or your last. So it's almost like coming in as a QB or any athlete and saying, if I have to talk about yesterday, that means my self-esteem is really low.

Oliver Luck (50:27.876)
That's right.

Steve (50:36.909)
But if I'm here today in the present and I treat this as a new sponsorship and I see what's going well and I don't get into that rut of just repeating what I've been doing and you see brands sometimes for 30 years that just stick with it because a successor to a CMO or his underling says I'm not gonna rock the boat it seems to be working okay we'll just keep it going but they miss so much on tap or leave so much on tap value on the table.

Oliver Luck (50:56.016)
Okay. Okay.

Steve (51:06.187)
because they did not look at it with entrepreneurs glasses on and say, I've got some vision here. I've got to, I've got to.

sometimes reinvent myself in this to get more out of it and question everything we're doing routinely. Fascinating. I like how you did that. That was a really neat insight that I will definitely repeat because I think it's a vital one to make sure sponsorship stays fresh. The target market feels their passions are being tapped into in a fresh way, innovative way. Listen, I could talk to you for days, a really, really pleasurable discussion with you, Oliver. I wanted to share with the audience that you have four

beautiful children. Two associated with Stanford as I understand it. believe three. Right, so two went there. Three went to school there. You have also a son who's the, is he the athletic director now?

Oliver Luck (51:49.381)
No, three. got three. Yeah, three of my kids went to school.

Oliver Luck (51:59.095)
Now he's the GM, if you will, general manager for the football program at Stanford. Yeah, not the AD.

Steve (52:03.775)
the football program, me. So would be Andrew. So Addison, was the, as I read, perhaps one of the top soccer players in West Virginia when he came out of the system. And then you have Mary Ellen and you have another daughter, correct?

Oliver Luck (52:19.703)
Yeah, I got two sons, two daughters, three of the kids went to Stanford to play sports. They're my one daughter played volleyball. Andrew, course, played football. Youngest son went to Yale. He was a soccer player at Yale. He now lives in London. He married a British girl and just finished and passed. Thankfully, knock on wood, he passed his solicitor's exam. He's a he's a newly minted lawyer, you know, in the UK. So, yeah, they, you know,

Steve (52:42.892)
Well done.

Oliver Luck (52:49.615)
A big part of our household is sport. But I was very forceful, I suppose, in sort of saying to my kids, along with my wife, that, you know, use sport. Don't let it use you. Use your sport as a high school player or a college player or whatever to create the benefits that sport should give you, but don't become chained, if you will, to your sport.

Because, you know, getting a scholarship to Stanford or getting, you know, to go to Yale for four years and play soccer, it's a tremendous opportunity. But, you know, use it. Don't let it use you. Those are basically the lessons that I gave my kids. And I think they all, at least those that listened, they all used that fairly intelligently and strategically.

Steve (53:39.499)
And obviously on a public level, what you taught your NFL quarterback son and Andrew that it seems like he also had the temperament to understand the EQ to understand when it was enough.

Oliver Luck (53:52.078)
Yeah, well, listen, football, you know, at the college level, certainly at the professional level, football is a tough game. It is a very challenging game. I mean, I sat and watched a couple of games this past weekend, college games, know, college season started. It's you get knocked down, you get beat up, you're on national television, you make a mistake, you know, people say, oh, you're terrible, you're a bum. It's a tough game. And, you know, I admire any player.

who sort of decides on his or her terms when the time to go is, when the time to drop the sport and leave. Because there's a whole life to live, which is one of my points that I would tell my kids, listen, you can play football for 10 years or five years or whatever, but don't let it use you. You decide when you're done. You decide when you are finished, because if you don't have that sort of passion,

intrinsically, intuitively, guess, you're not going to do well because it's a demanding sport that you need every ounce of energy, every ounce of your physical and mental capacities to actually play the game well. So, I'm very happy when any player says, I'm done. I've played my eight years, 10 years, whatever it is, and I'm getting out. And ideally, they get out while they're still fairly healthy.

Listen, you don't want to go to an old football players reunion because it is not. It is not a nimble agile group. I'm telling you.

Steve (55:21.901)
I'm honored and grateful for at least the old could be used for so many athletes who didn't get there and how difficult that journey is for some who took such a beating on the brain that it took so long for our leagues to awaken to that. But yeah, I hear you on that one. I want to ask you one question and when preparing for this discussion.

I just, it hit me thinking about you and your son. You have, and I know you're, and I saw an article with you with Archie Manning, Archie Manning, elder statesman, three generations of pro quarterback, or let me rephrase it, two generations of pro quarterbacks, one playing at Texas and soon to be a third in the NFL. With your dynasty, do you see, is that something you think about that one day a grandchild,

Oliver Luck (56:05.761)
Soon to be three. Soon to be three.

Steve (56:17.141)
might actually find his way as a quarterback into the NFL.

Oliver Luck (56:21.249)
I've got three grandchildren, all girls. at this point, I know, I know at this point, I don't think that's a possibility, but who knows? is great. It was a big part of my childhood. It's a big part of tens of millions of kids in this country. And it's important for a lot of reasons, but.

Steve (56:23.437)
Listen, in today's world, Oliver, anything goes.

Oliver Luck (56:46.029)
playing sport just because you may think or a parent may think, oh, my son or daughter can be a professional athlete. Those are the worst odds in the history of you have better odds of buying the next Nvidia stock in a buck, right? So you should do sport for lots of reasons. But one of the reasons is shouldn't be, I can make a lot of money as a college football player or make it in the NFL or the NBA. It's only the absolute best of the best.

Steve (56:50.924)
Yeah.

Oliver Luck (57:15.265)
Do sports because it teaches you lots of lessons. Do sport because you have an appreciation for physical fitness. Don't do it simply because you think it's a meal ticket to lot of money.

Steve (57:25.793)
You're a good dad, one by the way, you may be speaking of Arch Manning just as we come to a close. Just give us a prognosis, one game in. Do you have your top three favorites of who's gonna come out as college football champion?

Oliver Luck (57:38.445)
I, you know, I really don't. Ohio State looks very good. You know, Penn State, nobody's talked about Penn State because they just played a lower level team in Nevada, but Penn State's got a pretty good team right now. You know, it's so wide open. Who knows? Very difficult. listen, Arch is going to come back and have a couple of great games. And, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if Texas at the end of the year is in the hunt for one of the playoff spots.

Steve (57:42.669)
It'll be tough. Yep.

Steve (58:08.65)
Oliver Luck, I would just close by saying this, the consummate entrepreneur who brings an incredible vision and passion to wherever he's been in his life, raised a beautiful family, continues to do so, beautiful grandchildren, what a pleasure and privilege it was to have you today on the Transaction Report. Great, we're gonna hold you for one moment.

Oliver Luck (58:25.781)
Thanks Steve, enjoyed it.