Jesse Perl, Brand & Marketing for Major League Soccer, Discusses the Increasing Popularity of Soccer in the U.S.
Jesse Perl leads Brand & Marketing for Major League Soccer (MLS), overseeing the League’s creative campaigns, marketing activity, experiential marketing, event promotion, advertising, and culture marketing. Since launching his sports business career with MLS, Jesse has worked across a variety of different roles at the League Office, including PR and Partnerships. A born-and-raised Brooklyn, NY-original, Jesse is a lifelong soccer fan and a graduate of Wesleyan University, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in Psychology.
The Continuum recently talked to Jesse about building on the increasing popularity of soccer in the United States, growing the fan base even further, and defining the League’s marketing goals (pun completely intended).
Were you a soccer player growing up like so many other kids in this country? Is that how you found your career?
Yes. That’s definitely how I got mixed up in all of this. I was a player, but more importantly, I am a lifelong soccer fan. After college, I lived in Argentina, teaching English for a little over a year, and I think a love of soccer helped draw me there. When I came back, I had a brief stint with New York City Parks Department but found my home in Major League Soccer in 2008. Believe it or not, I started as an intern. It’s been a time of enormous growth for soccer in the country, for the MLS, which had only about 50 employees and maybe 16 teams when I started, and really for soccer itself in this country.
Forgive us for not knowing this off the top, but how many teams does the MLS have now?
We have twenty-nine teams right now, but San Diego is coming in 2025, so we’ll have thirty.
A professional sports league is an unusual brand; we only have a few of them here. What is your role? And how do you describe your brand?
I lead brand and marketing for MLS. My team is responsible for building marketing campaigns and initiatives to support whatever our business goals are, whether that's around products and product marketing or attendance and viewership at big events. We’re also doing a lot of brand partnerships now, like our new partnership with Apple, which is currently streaming all MLS games on MLS Season Pass, the MLS streaming service on the Apple TV app.
Our brand is very much rooted in the idea of creating a North American version of the global game. It’s about celebrating the things that make MLS different than other sports in this country and also different than international soccer. We’re remixing it and making our own version, but it’s really a fan-led movement. Our supporters are the beating heart of this whole soccer movement. Much of what we want to do, and what our clubs are doing right now, is giving these fans a platform to create their own rituals and traditions. No two cities are the same, but wherever you go to a game, there is an intoxicating energy. There’s no loudspeaker telling fans to chant defense and when to do it; it just happens. Our job is to harness that and get the people who aren’t at the stadiums yet to fall in love with the sport and their teams. We want to make sure MLS is and continues to be a welcoming place where every fan has a sense of belonging.
“It’s about celebrating the things that make MLS different than other sports in this country and also different than international soccer.”
If your goals are really about changing attitudes and building a loyal fan base, what are your metrics? How do you measure performance?
What we’re thinking about every day is growing our share fans, right? We want to make sure more and more people fall in love with the game and our teams. Our goal is fan growth, and there’s not a single metric for that. Not to sound too much like marketing 101, but we don’t know what part of the funnel our fans are in right now or where they are in their fan journey. There may be fans who are first discovering MLS, which means we measure their engagement differently than someone who is already a season ticket holder. We can look to indicators like how many fans are going to the games, how many fans are buying our jersey, and who is watching the games on MLS Season Pass on Apple TV or elsewhere, but the attitudinal stuff, which we really care about, will have some lagging indicators to be sure.
Soccer is really having a moment in the United States. The Women’s World Cup drummed up excitement, Messi moved to Miami, the incredible success of the Apple TV show Ted Lasso, and we’re getting ready to have the 2026 World Cup in North America. Do you think that Americans have truly embraced soccer now? Are we officially fans?
I think we have some of the best soccer fans in the world right here. I think you see that every day if you go to MLS cities and stadiums. By attending a match, you are bound to be blown away by the fan engagement, and we really do have some of the best soccer traditions and cultures anywhere in the world, and there is a big groundswell of support happening right now.
I think fans are sweeping in other people, and I think there has finally been a breakthrough in mainstream media coverage and pop culture. Think about Ted Lasso. That show happened because there are some real soccer fans in the entertainment business. In turn, it is helping us find more fans. Jason Sudeikis is a huge Sporting Kansas City fan. He did this incredible Emmy Award-winning show with our partners at Apple TV, and it gave a lot of people a platform to talk about soccer. Yes, soccer is definitely having a breakout moment, and you can kind of feel the ground shifting underneath us in really exciting ways. But the best is still yet to come for us, for sure.
Does this elevated love and attention change your marketing goals (pun completely intended)?
It doesn’t really change the goals because I think we’ll keep doing all of the things we’ve been doing that have gotten us to where we are today. I think of the increased attention as proof points that our efforts are working, and that just adds rocket fuel to our work. Our goal is to ensure that we’ve got the biggest tent in sports and are growing our fan base.
It does change some of our strategies, though. For example, Messi joining the league brings a lot of new attention to MLS from people who weren’t yet considering us. Now, our job is to nurture that fan funnel. We must ensure that the fans who came in for Messi become lifelong fans of MLS and fall in love with everything we offer.
“People care about the athletes that they follow. They want to connect with them, and they get attached to the big personalities.”
Speaking of Messi, do you think that the superstars of soccer help your marketing efforts?
Definitely, I think it’s a huge part of why we love sports, right? People care about the athletes that they follow. They want to connect with them, and they get attached to the big personalities. When one of the superstars performs in big ways or in big moments on the field, that love and momentum can really transcend outside of the field. This is one of the levers that we can pull as marketers.
Messi is obviously in a category all his own. You can really only talk about him alongside maybe Michael Jordan if we’re talking about North American Sports. We like to make sure that we’re celebrating our established superstars while also building our up-and-coming stars. We’ve recently identified ten to twenty players to work with to help them build their social media profiles. We are trying to get to know them very well and understand what makes them tick so that we can work with them to build custom content plans to help them express themselves on social media and help fans discover them.
As America is continuing to fall more in love with soccer, what are you most looking forward to?
I’m most looking forward to being surprised. As I said, I started in MLS in 2008, and somewhere along the way, I learned to stop trying to predict what was going to happen. No matter what I would have predicted, I would have underestimated where we are today. When Messi joined Inter Miami, the team had about a million followers on Instagram; today, they’re closing in on 15 million, which makes them one of the most followed sports teams in North America behind just three NBA teams, I think, and bigger than any NFL team. I couldn’t have predicted that. What I am looking forward to is just not knowing what’s around the corner in the best way.
September 27, 2023
