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A BEHIND THE SCENES ORAL HISTORY OF SOCCER IN KANSAS CITY

On November 18, 2010, a Major League Soccer team changed its name. One minute they were the Kansas City Wizards. The next, they were Sporting KC. Of course it’s never that simple.

This is that story.

Greg Cotton
Chief Operating Officer, Sporting Kansas City
I hate the word ‘brand’ more than anything. It’s overused; it’s not understood. People are misquoted all the time when they talk about brand. Really, we use the word ‘ethos’ around the office. So it’s what our company is all about. It’s what our soccer team is all about. It’s capturing the passion of our game. It’s not just we can sell 20 percent more jerseys if we use this color or this shield. It has nothing to do with that. All of that is secondary. It’s kind of like falling in love. If you find the right match, all the other benefits are secondary. I think that is how we approached this. We needed to fall in love with a brand that reflected the ethos of the company. So when we say ‘brand,’ we don’t mean just the logo or all that. We mean it in a bigger way. We mean brand to encapsulate everything that we do, the way that we are viewed from the outside; the way that we are viewed from the inside. It’s bigger. It’s reflective of the love we feel for this club; the passion that our fans feel for the club. When a player grabs that shield on his chest and kisses it after a goal, that needs to mean something. And I think when we went through this process, we always had that in the back of our minds: what should a player, what should one of our athletes really be meaning when they grab that shield and they kiss it, and it goes back over their heart? I try not to think of that word, brand, and I hate to say it, but you have to use it. But you have to make sure you use it wisely. Love without wisdom is fleeting, and Sporting wants to be around for a long time. We’re the smallest market, or one of them, and we’re just trying to change the way people think about MLS.

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MR. HUNT’S TEAM

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Robb Heineman
Sporting Club Chief Executive Officer and Owner, Sporting Kansas City
I can tell you right up until the day before we made the name change there was not necessarily complete shareholder unity around making the change. I think even as a group—we have five owners in this group and five happy marriages, so we really have 10 opinions in the room about brands, names. And I’m probably the dissenting voice in that I really advocated for the name change. I really wanted to change the name from the day we bought the team. I don’t think all of my partners always shared that same belief.

Charles Gooch
Reporter, Kansas City Star, and the newspaper’s soccer blog, The Full 90
The most surprising thing to me reporting on the story was how committed the team is to it. There is a small underground sentiment of sports fans that think the team just did this overnight, that they made a decision, and they are just going with it. I’ve talked to Robb a bunch, the PR guys a lot, marketing people, ticket people; I’ve talked to all of them, and they are all very committed and 100 percent behind this idea. I don’t think enough people know that or realize just how committed this team is to making this rebrand work. And they are not afraid to step outside of the box and try innovative things. That’s the thing with the main company that is behind the team. The Cerner company is known for innovation and thinking differently about the way things are done (in health care technology). And there is some truth to how differently they think in how they involve their wives, involve all of their employees. I can’t speak for a lot of sports, but I don’t know how many sports franchises go that in depth into trying to enhance the fan experience on an individual level.

Cliff Illig
Owner, Sporting Kansas City
Shortly after we purchased the team, and especially once we got into a new stadium, we knew we were going to have to do something with the outward focus brand of the team. If you are going to spend as much money as we were planning to on stadiums and everything else, you really want to have a presence that is unique to the organization.

Robb Heineman
For us the evaluation around soccer wasn’t based around any real love we had for the game. I’m the only one of the ownership group that played the game growing up, and I hadn’t attended a whole lot of MLS games, and I’m not sure any of my fellow investors had ever even been to one. So we didn’t do this for a huge fondness for the game of soccer, but we did see the emerging demographics, and some of the changes that have been happening and are happening in the household around decision-making. We thought this was the right area for us to be involved in.

Mike Wurst
Original Wizards and now top-ranking Sporting season ticket holder
When the new ownership came on I was thrilled because A: it meant the team stays in town, and B: because of who it was who bought the team, I was very optimistic they would do good things with it, make the ambitious aggressive decisions to do something special.

Jeff Szajnuk
Cauldron member
I was part of a group of Cauldron guys and season ticket holders called Heart of America Soccer Foundation, which tried to help in the search for investors. Some of the people really involved in that group were David Ficklin, who now is responsible for building our stadium; Greg Cotton, who is COO of the team. Sam Pierron, who founded the Cauldron and now works for the team. Chad Reynolds, now the club’s graphic designer. So to see a lot of those guys now working for the team is a dream. I’m sure some of the haters, when they show up on opening day, it’s going to hit them that this is real.

Greg Cotton
Sporting Kansas City Chief Operating Officer
Frankly, when we bought this team, our season ticket holders were in the 600-range. We were last in the league in revenue in all categories. We were last in the league in ticket sales generally, season ticket sales, gross revenues, net revenues. We weren’t doing well on the field. We were way way way down. You couldn’t imagine a scenario that the team was further depressed. And the team had been for sale for two or three years.

Greg Maday
Owner, Sporting Kansas City
Robb is the common denominator; in roughly September 2006, when we finally bought the team and everything we went through, I’m not sure we didn’t start talking about the name change immediately thereafter as part of a long list of to-dos—build a stadium, build a training facility, change the name, change a lot of things.

Greg Cotton
I remember having conversations even before the team was purchased that we really ought to do a brand study and make sure this is the right team name, color scheme. Does this really represent what we want to do with the club? But there was really no momentum around it. I think everyone knew at some point in the future something would probably happen, but it was Mr. Hunt’s team, and at that time we were just kind of the caretakers. We wanted to very respectful in that regard.

Chad Reynolds
Graphic Designer, Sporting Kansas City
Back in about June of ’05, Greg Cotton and I sat down over a couple of beers and started brainstorming names, essentially, for this potential new ownership group. The state line element that we carried through to our brand now, we drew that on a napkin as kind of a potential element for OnGoal, and it carried from there.

Robb Heineman
We’d begin by asking does it make sense to give it some time? But we wanted to—our first goal—was to define ourselves as the third most popular brand in our market behind the Chiefs and Royals.

Greg Maday
I don’t think we have aspirations of knocking out the Chiefs and Royals. And growing up in the 1970’s, you couldn’t get a ticket to the Royals’ games. In late ‘70s early ‘80s, Arrowhead was empty. I was in college, watched John Elway in his first year play the Chiefs, maybe 1985-6. I would follow Elway all the way down the field. He’d move the team from the 20 to the 30-yard line, and I’d just move down the seats with them to be right in line with them. That’s how empty it was. In 1990, with Schottenheimer and Joe Montana, Marcus Allen, all of a sudden the world changed. But I don’t think we have any goals to challenge them. But this is a soccer community, and as those that play soccer get into the position of parenting and having children and taking them to matches, they are going to buy season tickets to our events. I don’t think it’s an either-or, but I like our position in the marketplace.

Greg Cotton
The shield was changed very early on; I think it was one of the first things we did after we bought the team. We took the primary logo, not a rainbow, but the colored stripes logo, and we made that our secondary logo, and we took the secondary logo, which was basically just a stylized word mark, and made it our primary. That was to make the brand we had more recognizable and more sellable and more wearable. So we changed that in 2007. We still had the Carolina blue kits, but we had the stylized word mark as the shield. I will tell you our merchandise sales on the jersey side, by the end of 2007, had increased 775 percent. That was attributed to the logo switch and the new, secure, local ownership. People were buying again. It was just a brand evolution, not a revolution, which is what I said at the time. That was probably summer of 2007.

Robb Heineman
I was the only one that was completely gung ho about changing the name. I would say that Greg Maday and Pat Curran were largely always in favor of it, but they weren’t always as vocal about it. If it would have gone the other way, I don’t think they would have been disappointed in it today. Nobody said absolutely not. Now were there meetings when things like that came up? Sure, I do remember a meeting there or two, but I don’t think it was ever an on-going strong conviction that anyone had against a name change.

Greg Cotton
Nobody was 100% in on changing the name or the brand, the colors, but we all wanted to explore it. Chad and I in particular took the lead on this project. That was probably the winter of 2006 to January-February 2007. And so we engaged the league; they actually were much more receptive than I was thinking. If we could have this phoenix rising from the ashes rebirth, a re-imagining of what this club was all about, we knew it needed to happen at a point when we have a bunch of new stuff happening. Just buying the team and switching ownership doesn’t mean all that much to getting new people excited about the club, which is what we had to do. So first we wanted to do it around the first of three stadium proposals, that one out in Johnson County. We thought that was going to be in construction in mid-2007. We just knew it needed to be a big launch, or a rebranding just didn’t make sense to do it piecemeal.

David Ficklin
Vice President of Development, Sporting Kansas City
I would say it was some time in 2007, and we’d have these conversations where Heineman would say, “I really want to change the name.” Ok, well, what are you thinking? “I’ve always liked the name Sporting.” I was like, wow, ok, that’s Francisco Marcos favorite team, he who built the USISL and the whole minor league, a great pioneer of American soccer. He talks about it constantly.

Robb Heineman
This is completely all on me, but I think we were relatively naïve on what the development timeline for the stadium was going to be. Or I should say I was very naïve. So we purchased the team in September 2006, and I think we were all convinced that we’d have a stadium built by early 2008. We made the strategic decision that we’re probably going to get a second chance to make a first impression here in Kansas City, so let’s go make a big bold push to the community when we have all of our ducks in a row. I’d say probably sometime in early 2008 is when that really started gain some momentum. It was, is this going to be a very literal name change or is this going to be more of a philosophical change around our business model, or none of the above? Will it be completely abstract?

Greg Cotton
Then the world fell apart early 2008, our stadium project on the Missouri side at Bannister Mall didn’t get off the ground. So for all of 2008 and most of 2009, or at least half of 2009, we didn’t pay attention to the brand at all. Other than having a slight modification of the shield and to the colors.

Robb Heineman
We really had to hold back from pushing forward from September ’06 to 2009. That was a little frustrating obviously, going through those doldrums, not necessarily doing all the things that you wanted to do, because you wanted to wait for the right strategic moment to do them.

Greg Cotton
After the Bannister Mall stadium project fell through due to an almost complete lack of retail development in the area, I guess it was rock bottom to some degree, but no one in our office thought that way, and I don’t mean to pat ourselves on the back, but we’re running 100 mph all the time over here. We’re always looking for the next thing. The next thing then was trying to figure Bannister Mall; then it was looking at other sites; it was trying to figure if we could play at Arrowhead; it was trying to figure out where we could play temporarily, where we ended up at the minor league baseball stadium (Community America Ballpark, CAB). There was just too much going on to feel the weight that probably the fans felt. And that I felt when I was fan all those years of the Wizards, which was, gosh, when are we going to get our own stadium, when will we have a home; rumors starting popping up again that the team would move because we couldn’t get a stadium. All that old bad blood came up again in 2008, but we were running too fast to feel the negative vibe. There were moves going on with the coach, with our marquee player, Eddie Johnson, who we sold to Fulham. There was change in the air all the time, so the change in the brand when it came up again in 2009 really wasn’t all that shocking to anyone. It was just the natural progression.

Chad Reynolds
It’s funny because we did kind of a stop-start, to be honest with you, a couple of times on potential rebrands. I feel like we’d get a month or two into a process and then be like, let’s make sure we’re on a little bit more firm ground on the stadium, when the stadium really started being a reality. But it became pretty clear to us that something had to change, and something had to feel more professional, is I guess the best way to put it. Or just to feel more… feel more real.

Greg Cotton
Robb got a call from Jeff Lynn, the General Manager Nebraska Furniture Mart, who said, “Mr. Buffet (Warren Buffet owns the Furniture Mart) noticed that when you guys play your games out here we are doing a little better in our sales, so would you be interested in coming out here permanently? We just happen to have a 13-acre site.” We engaged local counsel to explore it, and very very very short version, in November 2009, we finally got the $146 million in star bonds approved to build the stadium. That process happened very quickly over 6-7 eight months, all due to Robb and his ability to sell the vision of what our company and soccer team are all about. So then we knew we’d have a stadium in June of 2011, so we really needed to hustle on the rebranding. Spring/Summer 2009, we reached back out to the league and sponsors, are started having discussions again about it. We talked to five or six outside advertising agencies but decided to keep it within the league and it’s present partners. We were more focused this time and went in with a sense of what we wanted to be and what we wanted to see. We really wanted to come to a final result, a final mark, a final name, final kit.

Mike Illig
Son of Cliff Illig, team liaison for Illig Family Enterprise Company
It was actually helpful to all of us I think when we took it to the league in 2009, because then we had to take a step back and explain to them why we wanted to do this, what it was going to mean to us, what it was going to mean for fans. That’s when you began to get this entire picture together of the future, the brand ethos, and could really put some momentum behind the change. We had to develop our story. And that’s super important. It’s all about that story about who we are, because that will now never change.

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THE NONSTORY

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Chad Reynolds
I was a fan before I worked here. And I was never in love with the Wiz or Wizards moniker to begin with. Nobody seems to have a true history of it anymore. The way we understand it, back in 1995, there was a “name the team” contest held by the Kansas City Star, the big local paper. They received thousands of entries or whatever, and the name that won I believe was something Tornados, or Cyclones, or something related to the weather here. A very Oklahoma City Thunder type thing. And that wasn’t really appealing to Lamar Hunt. So he picked the Wiz moniker, because Wizards, or Wizards of Oz, had finished second or something like that. They trotted out some 9-year-old girl who had apparently suggested the name first, and that was their big thing. Well, immediately they started backtracking, saying no it’s not related to the Wizard of Oz. So there was always kind of a weird start to begin with, let alone the whole shortening it to Wiz thing.

Robb Heineman
It all had to do with the Wizard of Oz. I was interviewed the other day for a biography being written on Mr. Hunt, and they asked a question of Mr. Hunt: when they first named the team The Wiz, was he aware at that point that wiz was slang for urination? He said he wasn’t aware of that usage when he agreed to name the team that. The organization has had name challenges from day one.

Andy Tretiak
VP Marketing, Sporting Kansas City
The name Wizards is certainly very polarizing—people loved it or despised it; I knew coming into the organization that that was going to be a major hurdle.

Chad Reynolds
When you look around the league at the teams that have been successful, in terms of the fan bases that have been successful, the new teams, the expansion teams, they kind of had an advantage over the quote, rest of us, the organizations that have been here for 15 years. They didn’t have 15 years of bad marketing and marketing to the wrong groups, and the types of things the rest of us have had to overcome.

Greg Cotton
The Wizards name and the shield that went along with it was really Lamar Hunt’s second choice. He had originally come up with a teardrop shape for the original Wiz logo, and he really loved that. It was unique. He got a lot of stick for it I think because it was an unusual name, but he felt that was something—a name and a brand—that people could really rally around. Very shortly thereafter, there was a legal proceeding. There was a cease and desist I believe from Nobody Beats The Wiz that caused the powers that be to make the team go through a brand modification I think they called it, or enhancement or something like that, and so they threw Wizards on it.

Chad Reynolds
I was a 12-year-old [when we got the team] and was like this is the dumbest name I’ve ever heard. But you kind of had to own it. It was very much a, “nobody makes fun of my little brother but me,” type thing. Yeah it’s a bad name, but look around the rest of the league: the Clash, the Mutiny, just a ton of bad names across the board, frankly. Once I got into high school and college, walking around with gear that had a giant goofy looking rainbow logo on it. You could get into all the other random connotations and things with it, but it was just never anything that people were proud to wear.

Robb Heineman
There are a bunch of minor league sports in Kansas City, and frankly the Wizards were caught in that same fray for media coverage and community involvement. The T-Bones, an AFL team called the Brigade, the Blaze was still around.

Chad Reynolds
We had this problem in this town where a lot of people thought of the Kansas City Wizards, they thought of an empty Arrowhead Stadium with a bunch of screaming kids or they thought of a minor league baseball stadium (CAB) with a bunch of screaming kids. So that was a perception that very much had to change.

Greg Cotton
There was always a sense that maybe the brand doesn’t fit exactly what we want to do with the club. And Mr. Hunt never really—Wizards wasn’t his love. That wasn’t the brand or the team that he initially fell in love with.

Cliff Illig
There is nothing wrong with the Wizards; it wasn’t that it was a crummy brand, it was just we needed to make sure we had a brand we could build around for the future. Wizards was a unique brand, and didn’t collide with the NBA Wizards, and we considered not changing it.

Greg Maday
I travel all the time and pick up a paper to check scores, and the Wizards scores were 150-140. Oh, those aren’t the Kansas City Wizards; it’s the basketball team. There were trademarks issues about branding that name and owning it across areas and whatever.

Amber Heineman
Wife of Robb Heineman, boardmember Sporting Club Foundation
How do I say it nicely? Maybe it was a little corny. It was very Kansas oriented—Wizard of Oz, all of that. Their offices are in Missouri, and they wanted to incorporate both sides of the state line. It just seemed like it needed a big overhauling to take it to another level.

Mike Illig
There is really not a whole lot of brand equity in that. What is the story you are telling with that? It’s a bunch of nomads. We played Arrowhead; we went to CAB. The Wizards, the Wiz, the logos—there is not really a whole lot to be proud of with the marks specifically.

Jeff Szajnuk
Cauldron member
When I started coming to games in 2003, I was coming in spite of the name, in spite of the colors. All of those of things were hurdles for me to get over. It seems superficial now, but I never liked the name Wizards. People of Kansas City don’t feel a connection to the Wizard of Oz. You can buy Wizard of Oz crap at the airport, but there’s never been a connection. So you are either taking it Dungeons and Dragons—Harry Potter style or you’re taking it Wizard of Oz style. And neither of those things were something I could embrace. I didn’t like the name Wizards, but I’d lose my voice singing it. It was always about the city and the fans and the team. They’ve moved us, changed our colors, done all those things, but the fans are still here.

Chad Reynolds
I went to Kansas University, and everybody feels a part of it for whatever reason. We KU basketball fans talk about the KU basketball family, or the Kansas family. And I noticed when my friends would talk about the Chiefs, talk about the Royals, they would talk about KU, and they would say, “When do we play next?” And then they would say, “When do the Wizards play next?” My roommates, they’d talk about Arsenal and West Ham as “We.” And then they’d talk about the soccer team in their own hometown as the Wizards, a team that I work for.

Robb Heineman
We are one of the original founder members of MLS, and obviously the thing that is most important to us about all of it, is the star above our shield—the championship. That is what it is all about. We don’t want to do anything that gives the suggestion that we don’t care about the past, because we do, a lot, but we believe the future for us is going to be everything.

Robert Houghton
Former president of the Cauldron
Was it a great name? Would I have chosen in back in 1995? Probably not; it’s not great; it’s a very Americanized sports name, but it’s who we were; we won a cup under it. I thought it was important to keep it, but I understand the new ownership group wanting to make a clean break and move on.

Mike Illig
Wizards felt so Mickey Mouse to me. I mean how can you take seriously a team called the Wizards, formerly called the Wiz? They can’t even figure out what they want to be; how the hell are you going to go support them? The only thing anybody remembers is beating Manchester United, with all these global stories about this little team in Kansas City beating the big bad Man U. I remember thinking, walking out of the stadium that day, good god, how the hell are we going to explain changing the name now? For the fans that still love Wizards, wear the jerseys, it’s part of our history. That never will change. So do it, love it, but we have to move on to bigger and better things with this club that the Hunts Sports Group wouldn’t do.

Sam Pierron
Founder of Cauldron (previously Mystics) - Special Projects at Sporting Kansas City
I didn’t like the name Wizards when I was 18, 19-years-old. I don’t like the way it rolls past the lips. It’s doesn’t project strength; it doesn’t project anything. We were the Wizards but had a dragon mascot. No one wanted to have anything to do with the name. Now at the same time, I’m sensitive to people’s affinity to it. I have an affinity to it; it will always be a major part of my adult life. But no matter how good the memories are, things change. I married a woman I loved and ended up getting a divorce.

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THE BIRTH OF SPORTING

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Greg Maday
We knew the actual name was the big thing people were going to care about. People said why now? Why are you changing the name? It can be as simple as, hey, we are going to have to put a name on a stadium. So if we are ever going to change it, those names aren’t inexpensive.

Charles Gooch
We got a few tips early on. The team stopped having a lot of new merchandise early on in 2010, and then right around the time of the Manchester United friendly, Robb Heineman was saying some things along the lines of the team was looking to make some radical changes in the off-season.

Joe Tregellas
Cauldron member
I first heard about a rebranding maybe a year and a half ago. If you are a Big Soccer geek, there are always conspiracies flying all over the place. Everything was speculation.

Mike Wurst
They kept it pretty tightly controlled. It was all just speculation.

Mike Kuhn
Cauldron Member, blogger, Down The Byline
Last summer it really started picking up, and Sporting KC started get thrown around. When I found out for certain, somebody anonymously emailed me the logo before it was published. I ran it past another friend who knew, and he confirmed it for me. So I ended up leaking it on my blog earlier in the week of the official announcement.

Robert Houghton
The fans were kept in the dark about it. I understand that. I’ve dealt with the front office long enough and the people in the section long enough, that I know if they told someone–and what did leak out was posted by people in the Cauldron that shouldn’t be posting information but did anyway. So I understand them keeping it from us; they wanted to be prepared for the backlash they knew they were going to receive and present it the way they wanted to present it.

Sam Pierron
That’s accurate. That’s fair. When you are talking about something as significant and massive as a brand change, I don’t think you are going to get your best results by committee. On some level, the name has to represent the vision of the ownership, as much as the current passion of the fan.

Alexi Lalas
ESPN commentator, former President and General Manager of MetroStars/Red Bull NY & LA Galaxy
I was involved in a mid-season rebranding at Red Bull and a few years later with the arrival of David Beckham and the rebranding of the Galaxy. I learned there could be an incredible danger with having too many cooks in the kitchen.

Robb Heineman
I have all the respect in the world for our fans; I really do. But we understood that it was likely that there was going to be some negative reception around the name. The name for us has a very literally connotation around our business model, so it was kind of one of those things, don’t ask if you don’t want to know the answer. That was the calculated risk we were willing to wait on.

Charles Gooch
I think a lot of fans felt a little raw about it. Some groups felt the ownership group was taking their history away. And I know from dealing with the team that the star on their crest they won in 2000 is very important to them, and they don’t want to take away from that. But I think for a lot of fans those words weren’t enough. There is another group of fans that just wished they would’ve thought up the name, that they could have had an input or a say. They didn’t; they felt like it was forced upon them. That’s how fans work sometimes. It’s their team, and they want to have say in what their team does. The ownership group has not been opposed to making these kind of decisions and then letting the chips fall where they may. If the fans are mad, they’ll deal with that. If there’s negative press, they’ll deal with that. They are in it for the long haul; they want to be innovative, that word they always throw around. And sometimes innovations don’t work, and they are willing to fail on this one, but I don’t think they’re gonna.

Cliff Illig
When you start something from nothing, the brand is really important. We went through the naming of Cerner in an interesting way. When we started Cerner in 1979, we were just three guys’ names, and it wasn’t something we thought we could tackle the national and international marketplace with. We really studied how you go about naming a company. We decided we liked two words, not three, because three always got boiled down to alphabet soup. We liked companies like Xerox and Exxon also, which adopted words that didn’t mean anything before the company. We liked the protectability. We went through a similar and long process to settle on the name Cerner. We’re enough corporate guys to believe that your brand is important and part of what you frame your strategies around. It’s not something that you just do.

Robb Heineman
As far back as 2008, we had done a logo study, so it was something that Greg and I and Andy Steinberg, and David Ficklin, we had talked on and off about it for years. We knew that when we took it to the shareholder group, for approval, that it had to be an informed discussion; we couldn’t just go to them with a bunch of nonsense and expect we were going to get much traction.

Greg Cotton
We did all of these brand identity workshops and got things like the Missouri and Kansas state insect are the same: the bee. So we had honeybees all over one study. And we just kind of looked at each other. It was our own fault. We didn’t know what we wanted well enough. In late 2007, maybe early 2008, we just said, we are not going to pursue a rebrand at this time, and we will look at it again at some point.

David Ficklin
I remember in 2007, we’d have these conversations where Heineman would say, “I really want to change the name.” Ok, well, what are you thinking? “I’ve always liked the name Sporting.” I was like, wow, ok, that’s Francisco Marcos favorite team, he who built the USISL and the whole minor league, a great pioneer of American soccer.

Robb Heineman
We’re not just going to call ourselves the Kansas City Bears. We ran the gamut around Athletic Club of Kansas City, Soccer Club, and all those kind of things. But in all of those what we were trying to avoid was the alphabet soup. We didn’t want to be ACKC for example. We ran through all the literal names: Boulevards, Fountains, Tornados, and none of those really caught our eye.

Chad Reynolds
What really kind of happened was, it starts with symbolism, and what symbolizes Kansas City. We have more fountains in Kansas City than any city on the planet except for Rome. Which is cool, and something most people in Kansas City are proud of, but most people outside of Kansas City don’t know that. We don’t have that kind of one iconic piece of architecture like Seattle has with the Space Needle. We needed something to be that iconic element. And Kansas City is cool and unique in that it does straddle two states. It’s a big part of what Kansas Citians identify with. It’s a big part of what causes political hassles in this area. You’re from Kansas or you’re from Missouri. People ask me where I‘m from when I’m here in town, and I’m from Kansas City, Kansas; people from Missouri say, “I’m from Kansas City, Missouri.” But out of town, people ask where I’m from, and I say Kansas City. I’m very proud of that. So we immediately latched onto this idea, this state line; this thing that divides us in our own town at times, is really something we’re all very proud of, and then being very proud of being from Kansas City outwardly. The state line was kind of the very first element where we went, that’s it, that’s got to be incorporated somehow, going back to that line I drew on that napkin in June of ‘05. All along we were like we’ve got to find a way to use that; that’s our iconic element.

Cliff Illig
In this country, from a sports standpoint, we’ve got this city/mascot model that we’ve historically worked off of. That’s one approach to naming and one that is very acceptable. And then interestingly over the last few years, you’ve seen a move from plural names, like Royals or Chiefs, to singular theme names, like the Fire and the Galaxy. And then when you look around the world, you see in addition to Barcelona and Real Madrid, you also end up with Manchester United and other words that don’t follow that traditional U.S. model. Part of what we’ve done, and you can see this especially in the stadium, is saluting European design. Physically it looks and feels European, but it includes all those things Americans have come to expect, the amenities that are not necessarily characteristic to an international setting. And in the same way we thought about that in respect to the brand. We wanted it to be associated with Kansas City but also to have a European or international approach to naming.

Greg Cotton
So we recognized the state line as something very unique to our story, and we wanted to have that unification/United theme around our club. So we even as a lot of clubs have done coming into the league, suggested what if we were Kansas City United? I remember that at the very beginning. And of course, they said, “We already have a United.” We said, well, there are 45 of them in England, we’re kind of striving for authenticity, does it make sense, particularly because it matches our story? We didn’t really love that to be honest, but it was a challenge to the establishment, and we wanted to push it, to see how far we could get it. So we pushed it fairly far; it got to the commissioner’s desk, and he said no.

Amber Heineman
Just because there’s DC United, I don’t see why we can’t use that. There’s also Manchester United. The wives really liked that one. We also thought of FCKC, Football Club of Kansas City, which is pretty generic, but some of the owners didn’t want all the letters, and it is also a name of a youth soccer program here already.

Greg Cotton
Spring 2009 I was sitting with Robb, talking to a design firm at the Brio restaurant on the plaza. We were sitting outside on the second deck, and they asked about the name. I started, well, we don’t really want to go into this process thinking about a name, we’d like the name to kind of evolve out of the process, and quite frankly the name could end up staying Kansas City Wizards, and Robb just said, “Whoa whoa whoa, wait a minute. I want to call the club Sporting.” At first—I support Robb in everything that he does—I looked at him and said, huh, I’m not sure I get that.

Robb Heineman
I think we previewed it first to Cliff. It was Cliff and Michael Illig. I think they liked it. But Cliff and Neal, they’ve always asked, what is the thought process underlying our decision?

Clay Patterson
Son of Neal Patterson, Owner Sporting Kansas City
My dad is typically one to challenge the thought process. He’ll even play the other side of the table purposely. I’m not surprised at all that he was the hardest to get support from.

Cliff Illig
I don’t remember when I first heard it exactly. There was no grand epiphany.

Mike Illig
It was first brought up to me on a flight by Robb to me and Pops (Cliff Illig) from one of our away games in 2009. He had both of us together in a space where we didn’t have an agenda of things to discuss; he had us right where he wanted us and just started going off on his plan to remake the team under Sporting Club. He didn’t know if it was Sporting Club Kansas City or Kansas City Sporting Club, but he knew he wanted Sporting to be the base. Both of us we’re like, “Ok great. Why? “ My wheels start spinning a million miles an hour, like, oh my god, that name is going to piss a lot of people off. Specifically I was confused as to why, myself. Pops was kind of like, “Whatever.” When you say Sporting, his big question is Sporting what? To sit there and ask yourself what your mascot is—Sporting What? You’re Sporting Kansas City. Ok, well, when you talk to guys like Pops and Neal and Greg Maday and Pat Curran, they sit there as part of the very GenX thinking: “I’m used to the Kansas JayHawks. The Kansas State Wildcats. The Oklahoma State Cowboys.” They get the mascot, no matter how childish a mascot may be, you still have to have something with it. So, they were like, “We’re sign off on it when you guys come up with Sporting What.”

Cliff Illig
Some of the anxiety around Sporting came from when you look at the word in the English language, it always invites that question. If there is an area as we still settle into our own brand that is uncomfortable to us, it’s that the word Sporting doesn’t come across as impactful as a case where you have a mascot—The Chicago Fire. That’s the path we had to walk.

Greg Maday
From the get go, there were different versions and different iterations, and I remember having a conversation with Neal in spring of 2010, and he said, “So what do you think of Sporting KC?” That was the first time I had heard about that specific name. And I said, what’s that? We talked about it; that that was what the guys—Robb and others—were recommending for the name change. I said, OK, well, when I go get my hair cut, what do I tell my barber? I’m giving him tickets to what? Sporting? Hurry up and get my hair cut, I’m going out to Sporting? I wasn’t on board immediately.

Mike Illig
I can’t tell you how many times I’d go to my parents house, talking to Pops in his home office going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and I’d leave so fricking furious. Just because he wasn’t getting it, and I was so nervous that Neal wasn’t getting it, and I’d come back to Robb and say, I’m having a real hard time with this; are you getting any luck? And he’s like, “None whatsoever.”

Alexi Lalas
I know the hours and hours we spent [at New York and LA] on why this star is going to be placed here and all that stuff. For most people, most fans, that stuff probably doesn’t matter, but it should matter when you’re creating something you believe in and is ultimately going to be part of a history that is important to you. That’s a long way of saying that it’s a lot of work that goes on that will never be recognized. And then you throw it out there for the masses, and invariably, you are going to take your hits. But that’s fine if you believe in it, if you’ve put in the hard work. My biggest pet peeve in MLS is winging it. I hate that. I’d rather have a flawed plan than no plan, on or off the field.

Cliff Illig
There was a plan. It was a team effort that a few of us had to catch up with. But nobody walked into it thinking it was a mess that’s gonna take a lot time for someone to arbitrate through. The visual brand work—the logos, and the shields, and the colors, the kits—there was no hesitancy that that was really good stuff. So you had this really good stuff that was using and leveraging that particular brand identity selection, and the only question we had was would the Sporting name confuse; by being unique are you in fact confusing the people you are trying to build brand equity with?

Amber Heineman
We were presented with Sporting, and I will say not all of us were just certain that was the right way to go. The LLC that bought the team is called OnGoal, and Liz Maday is the one who came up with that name. So when they presented Sporting to us, I looked over at Liz saying, can’t you think of something else? I remember one of the wives saying, “Maybe it is too cool for us to understand.” We just wanted something more basic. But it grew on us.

Liz Maday
The wives are picky about everything about the team. That is true, and everyone knows it. The hard thing about the name is what do you yell when you’re in the stadium. We initially said, ”We can’t yell Sporting, it takes too long.” So we tried to come up with cool nicknames. We had alternatives right there when Sporting was presented to us, but I don’t really remember them. It’s probably not healthy to think about that. There were so many names that had been taken. It was easy to think of names that reminded you of Kansas City, but that isn’t what we were really going for. We wanted to be bigger than soccer and show off that Kansas City was the best-kept secret in the world, pull in the region and nearby cities, adapt to other interests.

Chad Reynolds
I was sold on it because I heard the concept before I heard the name.

Cliff Illig
Neal and I weren’t part of the initial process of coming up with alternatives, and when it came to us there was consensus it was the best option, and it didn’t come across to us as forceful as we hoped it would. Now it met most of the other principles. It is unique, we can build around it. It is a single word. No alphabet soup. It can be associated with Kansas City. It’s workable around Sporting Club, the parent organization, and the other things the club may do. For example we have Sporting Innovations, which is the market leading work we’re doing in the digital space to make our stadium venue incredibly digital from the outset. So Sporting what? Sporting Kansas City is the team. Sporting Innovations is something else. Sporting Club is something else.

Mike Illig
So when we talk to Pops and Neal, it was difficult, but what it took actually was what Neal called a W.O.R., a With Out Robb meeting. You get Robb in a room and he is damn good at selling. He’s like me in a sense, very passionate about it; he has an answer for everything it seems like. So it was a meeting that allowed everyone a fresh take and a chance to speak without Robb interjecting his answers or comeback immediately to whatever your question or thought was. And to be fair to Robb, it was also about let’s hold off on criticism and try to come to a stance ourselves. If we all end up not liking the idea, then we can go back to Robb and say here is why. As it worked out, we reached a consensus that supported Robb, though obviously with the understanding this was going to be tough, and it certainly has been. Robb and I joke about it now, like, “How many other W.O.R meetings have you had since that one?” And honestly there has been none, but we still joke about it.

Robb Heineman
I wasn’t there, so I can’t be completely certain, but I’m an extremely opinionated person. And so in a lot of these meetings, my opinions are sometimes presented as though that’s what we’re doing, as opposed to them being presented as an option. It’s not something that bothers me a whole lot. I have a lot of faith and trust in my four partners.

Charles Gooch
Robb is a fascinating person. He is a lot like Mark Cuban. He comes from a tech background. They both think out of the box when it comes to the game. They sit near the team, they are passionate about the team. Robb live-tweeted a practice during the preseason, and it was just like a fan was retweeting what was going on. And he is a very excellent salesman.

Cliff Illig
Robb’s in an interesting position. He is not just one of five owners, but he splits bullets everyday trying to put all of this together. He has very strong opinions and sometimes in meetings you have to ask Robb, hey will you just not try to defend one thing the whole time, but allow us to look at all the alternatives? It’s a constructive and positive thing. I don’t want anyone to think it is a negative part of the process. You wouldn’t want the team putting this together to not walk into the room and feel like this is the right thing to do, but at the same time, you don’t want them to dominate the time and not give everyone the opportunity to think on their own. We don’t have one master of marketing who decides this stuff. Our style is more collaborative and team-oriented, which is something we brought from the culture of Cerner, which has a very flat organization without a lot of hierarchy or politics.

Joe Tregellas
Robb Heineman on some radio station had thrown the name Sporting out there. Kind of a, “We’re toying with the idea.” We also saw light blue and dark blue trusses going up on the stadium, so in my mind I knew the colors were changing. You knew something was happening. I figured the name was going to be Sporting a couple months before they announced it.

Robb Heineman
I do remember having it as a collection of names that dropped at the time. We’re always trying to test things, sometimes much more overtly and literally, and I don’t honestly remember what our thought process was around that, but I doubt that it was just a pure slip of the tongue.

Charles Gooch
He threw that out there on the radio; a Monday morning in mid-August, and things went crazy on Big Soccer from there. They immediately kind of backtracked from it. They didn’t deny it, but whenever we asked about it as a newspaper, they would just say, “Nothing is official; we’re just exploring some ideas.” In my experience with Heineman, he gets things out there before they are really done. I know he tweeted about the Manchester United friendly before the league had even approved it. That’s just the way he is. He gets really excited about connecting with the fans. He just throws things out there. I think at the time they had already decided they were going to go with Sporting Kansas City.

Robb Heineman
We got final shareholder approval in mid-2010. It was at Neal Patterson’s farm. He has a woodshop that has a meeting area, and we met out there as a group, and I think there were probably 12 or 14 people in the meeting. We went through it and made the decision. It wasn’t the only topic of the meeting, but of course it was a very important one.

Mike Illig
We joke about that place. It’s pretty famous for us. Robb calls it a shed, when it’s a shop. A shop is where things are created, and a shed is where things go to die. That’s Neal’s analogy. It wasn’t an over the top conversation. It was brief in nature, because at that point we knew what was happening. We went around the table and everybody said their piece. Neal goes around the table—what do you think? I was convinced 100 percent. Our vision and minds had created these ideas, and this is so much bigger than anything we could have done with Kansas City Wizards. That being said, and to this day, it still goes back to Sporting what? So our work is not done. The joke at that meeting was, you guys better know what you’re doing.

Cliff Illig
I didn’t worry about it once the decision was made. You can’t waffle as if there is a concern. You just go forward and work around it and be consistent. There was a fairly big concern around our long-standing fan base that A: changing the name to anything from the Wizards was not going to be well received. And then B: the worry of dealing with that reaction.

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A MIDWESTERN STORM

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Robb Heineman
I knew it would be interpreted in a different way than we meant it. It really is a literal name, but I figured there would be some interpretation that it was being done just for namesake. We knew there was going to be a lot of pushback regardless of whatever the name would be, but then the name as being as different as it was, particular for some non-soccer traditionalists—we expected the worst frankly. We’d even tested it within our own organization and didn’t necessarily have strong support from staff, so we knew it was coming. We were asked by the league if we wanted to do some market research around the name, and we kind of said, “No, we know what the answer will be.” It’s going to be, “We don’t like it.” So there is no reason to do research on a question we knew the answer to. I wasn’t surprised by the backlash, but I was nervous, because I knew I was going to be the one to stand up in front of everybody and deliver the message.

Alexi Lalas
When the unveiling happens, you know you are going to take hits, no matter what. You could have the best design and brand in the world, and you’re gonna take hits. You have to stand firm, and I think Kansas City did. You have to be prepared to explain yourself. As exciting as it is, it has an incredible potential to be challenging, shall we say, from a PR and cultural standpoint that you built up over the years with your fans.

Joe Tregellas
I absolutely hated it. I was actually pretty fond of the Wizards. I didn’t buy into the Wizard of Oz thing–my mind never went there; I’ve never seen the movie. Harry Potter either.

Jeff Szajnuk
A few weeks before, we thought for sure that it was going to be Sporting. People starting freaking out.

Sam Pierron
Huh. That was my exact reaction. It’s something to chew on; there’s no doubt about it.

Mike Kuhn
My first thought was, God I hope it’s wrong. I’ve been really in favor of keeping the name Wizards. It was part of history and changing it I thought would do more disservice than anything positive. I’ve gone to games since 1996, and my parents are in the top 10 of season ticket numbers at this point. Their initial reaction when I told them was, “Really? Isn’t that a little too European?”

Chad Reynolds
Yeah there’s really not a lot of middle ground is there.

Andy Tretiak
We gave the possibility of negative feedback a lot of thought.

Greg Maday
Robb did the announcement at Power and Light District. I took my whole family down there, and I told them I think we might need to make a quick getaway if the crowd turned into a mob.

Robb Heineman
The name and the logo had leaked onto the internet obviously before we did the announcement, and a lot of the messaging was really negative. We had been working on it for so long that it is actually pretty amazing that it didn’t leak long before it did. And yeah, it wasn’t a controlled piece of news. There were way too many people that knew about it to keep a lid on it. There was talk about what different factions of fans were going to do at the announcement, that there was going to be booing and stuff.

Amber Heineman
I’ve probably never seen Robb so nervous. We have a joke that he has done so much public speaking, and he’s so good at it, and I think he kind of likes it. He can be a bit of a ham sometimes, and I like to give him a hard time, but that was not one of those times when he wanted to get up and talk to people. He sincerely believed in the subject matter he was presenting, but he was nervous of the reaction. People who have been fans of the team for years, they have jerseys and memorabilia; not only was it changing the brand name, it was changing basically everything about the team except for the players. I remember him asking me about our kids. Like, “How do you think our kids are going to take it if people start booing me and yelling at me?” I know that was something he was really worried about.

Robb Heineman
Mike Illig called me in the morning and asked me if I was going to order a Kevlar vest for the announcement that night. I think everybody anticipated the worst, and all the ownership group did as well. We all thought it was going to be negative reaction. I was nervous, and I don’t usually get nervous for speeches like that, but that day I definitely had the butterflies going, and I think it was noticeable. My wife said a few things to me. I asked a few of the staff members to say a few things to me; so yeah, it was definitely a different day.

Cliff Illig
The amount of fairly forceful feedback we got from our existing rowdy fan base was a little bit of a surprise to me. There was a lot of back and forth on the blogs, even about whether we had the right to change the name. Ultimately, we had to say we think it’s best. And I was surprised by the effort we had to put in to bring those avid and committed fans—those fans are very very important to us—along. And we don’t necessarily have all of them on board yet.

Robert Houghton
I went down to the announcement, and I remember not really thinking that much about it. I was kind of in denial going into it, and then walking away, I felt like a good friend had died, an empty sick feeling in my stomach; I literally felt like I lost someone very important to me. And that is kind of what it is. It hurt a lot right off the bat. C’mon really? Euro-poser name? Really? We really have to go that route?

Robb Heineman
The announcement went off, in my opinion, pretty well. I was surprised it wasn’t as outwardly negative as I anticipated. And I think now more and more as I spend time with the community and fan groups, I think they are giving us the benefit of the doubt. Some of them may not love it; there are still a lot of our fans that are referring to us as the Wizards, even in some of the chants that they are doing in the games, but I think generally they appreciate us as an ownership group what we are trying to do for soccer in Kansas City.

Charles Gooch
It was a cold and rainy night, and it was packed, packed full of the diehard fans. A lot of them were negative going in or a little bit weary, and then Robb gave a speech that just about everyone was like, “I’m behind that guy. That guy owns my team.” He can take a crowd and put them in his hand and guide them where he wants to go.

Jeff Szajnuk
The only reason there wasn’t a complete backlash from the entire Cauldron was because the inherent weakness in the name to begin with. If it was a name that fit like a glove it would have probably been over our dead body, and it was like that for some people. We had people give up their season tickets and say, “I’m not coming back.” I was at a Cauldron meeting a couple of months ago, and there was a guy who came up with the flyer they sent out for renewal and he just showed up to tell them off.

Chad Reynolds
I immediately went, there’s a lot of people who are going to struggle with this. I’ll be the first to tell you, I hate the name Real Salt Lake. I hate it. It makes no sense to me. What did they get a charter from the king of Utah? How do you get Real out of that? That’s the ultimate in Euro-poser names, to take the term that’s been thrown at us a lot. In 10 years Real Salt Lake is never going to make anymore sense than it does right now. Potentially in 10 years Sporting and Sporting Club make a lot more sense.

Shawn Francis
The MLS Insider
There was that idea, was it too euro-sounding? I think Real Salt Lake was the first MLS team to come out of the box like that. At first it sounds super jarring, but now I don’t think anyone notices it anymore or worries about the Euro-poser thing. Largely because Real has been so successful on the field, which will always take away negative stigmas.

Greg Maday
I wouldn’t have supported the name if it was just about a European model. For MLS to thrive and go great guns in the United States, it can’t be European soccer, it has to be American soccer whatever that is. We want them copying us, not the other way around. But OK, the other teams in the world named Sporting are in Portugal, it’s very European; we don’t get soccer; we don’t get the name. That was never our intent. That was never an angle. The name just fit the membership model we are trying to create.

Charles Gooch
While this was all going on, the team said this is not a European move; we’re not trying to emulate a European team, but they obviously are. They are obviously using a foreign model for the name. And they’re using a foreign model for the idea, because a lot of clubs in Europe, you go to the club dentist, the club shoe store, the club this and that. That’s what they are trying to do. That’s a funny point we joke around about here at the Star. It’s not a European name, but it really really is. And a lot of people are unhappy about being a Euro-poser. A lot of American soccer fans want to have an American identity. They don’t want to go around chasing Uniteds and Football Clubs and Sportings and Reals. They want an American stamp. I think Kansas City Soccer Club would have worked. I think an ode to the year they were formed, a Kansas City 96, I think that model could have worked without the Euro-poser tag, but I don’t think either of those would have fit with what the team was trying to do with the membership.

Alexi Lalas
The amount of people who complained about the more European name or global ideas behind the brand, the same number of people complained in the early days of MLS that it was so American and there was no connection or recognition that it is a global sport. So it’s hard to win and straddle those two—be authentic in the world of soccer and to be true to this unique thing we have in North America with MLS.

Sam Pierron
It’s less about being a Euro-poser and more about reflecting an entirely different mentality. If you translate sporting or sport into a number of languages, then you’ll see it appears throughout the world. So many Spanish-speaking clubs have deportivo in their name. It’s the concept of the club and membership that drove the name change, and if it takes a name that is a little harder to categorize, that’s a little jarring the first time you hear it, that’s not a bad thing.

Mike Illig
For some of us, when you see people are not necessarily fans of the teams, but friends of us, saying, “Wow, look at this awful comment. Look what these guys are saying, I don’t understand this.” That was hard for Pops and my mom and the wives because they didn’t really understand it either; their part of that old school nature when it comes to mascots and Jayhawks and whatever decals they can put on their daughters’ faces to go to the games.

Liz Maday
We do read all the websites; I usually read them out loud on Sunday mornings. My husband said, “You’re giving me heart palpitations.” But we just reassured friends and people that it grows on them. We’re not going to miss out on a mascot, and the overall idea of it is so much better for Kansas City, because the name adapts to entertainment and other sporting endeavors. You’ve got to trust us.

Amber Heineman
We heard it a lot from our friends, and that is always hard. Kind of like, “What are your husbands thinking? Why did they do that?” And of course it’s hard not to take that personally, because you see how hard your husband has been working, and you see how much he believes in the rebranding. It’s not like this wasn’t extremely well thought through.

Greg Cotton
I thought there would be more animosity around changing the name in general and not keeping the Wizards. But that type of vitriol I wasn’t expecting. To the extent that it came. We wanted to make the announcement long before we actually did. We wanted to announce it in the summer and through a variety of complications it never came through.

Liz Maday
My children would not wear the new logos and shirts to school at first, because they thought they would get criticized, but now they do, and all their friends do too. I think the twenty-something children, six of them or so, of the owners loved the name, and they were the biggest supporters. And that age group is our future. That influenced us in the positive and made us feel old, like, “Why don’t we get this?” A lot of people called us the Wizards Wives, and we wondered if we were now the Sporting Wives. Because that doesn’t sound so nice.

Greg Maday
Anecdotally from my experience, I thought I spent the entire holiday season after someone got their first cocktail in them having to explain the name to them. And now, four months later, everybody knows what it is; most people understand, some still don’t and may never. Long and short of it is, I think it’s one of the coolest names going. It fits. You needed to get rest of the story. It’s like reading the first page of a book and saying, I don’t like this book.

Sam Pierron
The broader story is that I understand why people don’t get it right away. I didn’t get it right away. But while the syntax might seem a little unusual in the American lexicon of sports names, it’s not as if we are claiming we have the royal charter of the king of Utah. On some level it’s just a name, and all that does is provide a brand on top of an organization. Real Salt Lake is viewed as a topnotch organization because they’ve showed success on the pitch, have a nice stadium, all those kinds of things.

Greg Cotton
It certainly has been controversial, which quite frankly, if it wasn’t, if everybody just shrugged their shoulders and walked away saying that’s nice, we didn’t do our job. It needed to be attention capturing, and it certainly was. From that perspective we hit our mark.

Robert Houghton
Immediately afterward there was a lot of animosity, and you could probably break it down perfectly along years of involvement with the team, based on discussions on Big Soccer and places like that. If, for the most part, you had not been a fan of the team for more than 5 years, those guys were all ok with the name change. Those of us who had been around since the beginning weren’t happy with it. I think that’s pretty standard. You’re invested; it’s part of your life.

Chad Reynolds
What you would name a soccer team in Kansas City, and make it feel soccer-y, and make it not cheesy? Are you naming it after weather like the Oklahoma City Thunder? What are you supposed to name a team in this area? There’s a lot of answers that always have some complications with them. What about the Blues, I’ve always liked the Blues. Well there’s the St. Louis Blues across the state. One of the ones that I always thought was funny, was the Kansas City Athletics? You know the Oakland Athletics- they were in Kansas City for 15 years. That one’s not going to fly. So there’s a lot of, ”Oh well, ok, you know,” that type of response.

Jeff Szajnuk
That’s the thing. If there was a natural name for this club–we’ve been debating this for 15 years, and nobody has ever had this thing. Thousand-word essays on Big Soccer; no one had the perfect name.

Chad Reynolds
I can’t tell you how many fans and friends and season ticket holders I’ve had come up to me and go, “You know I hated it at first, but I think it was just me reacting.” And I go, yeah, I understand that. “We’re going to change the name of this team, crap, what does that mean for me?” That’s the immediate reaction. I probably have more Wizards gear than anyone on the planet. There’s a handful of guys who own more old Wizards jerseys than me. I have the training jersey; the Charlie Brown jersey, the one with like the stripes across the front. The Life Savers jersey where the Life Savers wrap around the sleeves. I’ve got them all. And what’s funny is that as a designer, as a guy spear-heading the brand change, I lost two-thirds of my closet when we re-branded this team. And that’s no joke, I can’t wear any of that gear any more.

Mike Wurst
I think it was a vocal minority that was against it. I’ve had a lot of people say, “I don’t understand it,” which is different than saying, “I hate it.” In the end, it’s much more about the product on the field than what it is actually called. I think people will forget about it and move on. Some people will always go overboard.

David Ficklin
The hardest part was not being able to tell everyone all the details from the very beginning, and just say, “We’re gonna do something really crazy here, and it might sound kind of strange, and we can’t tell you the details, but trust us.” We wanted to have concrete things to say about what we were doing, all the while our best fans were desperately wanting to know more. “What is this? Tell me why I need to buy into it?” And we couldn’t give them the whole story, and in fact we still haven’t yet.

Robert Houghton
One of the things that helped me come around to it, was the day after the announcement some of the players were at Dick’s Sporting Goods doing an autograph signing. And I had a jersey to get signed. There wasn’t anybody there, so I went up and started talking to the guys. Three of them were there, and I was talking to two of the more senior players. I asked them about it. The response from one of them was, “I think it’s terrible, but it’s their team. It is what it is. You deal with it and move on. It doesn’t change the players on the field or what we do, it’s just a name on the jersey.” Walking out of that, I was suddenly ok with it. I only took me a day. We weren’t the only ones who weren’t big fans of it; some of the players weren’t fans of it. But you just deal with it.

Joe Tregellas
Given the totality of the plan, I don’t think they were just changing the name for a money grab—buy new uniforms—or for giggles. At least their intentions were pure. The execution hasn’t been great at times, but the overall plan and idea, that is why I can like Sporting now. Honestly, what probably made me like Sporting more than anything was other fans around the country saying, “Oh man, that’s too bad, you guys are called Sporting.” I’m the type of guy who’s like, yeah, so what? The more outsiders hated it, the more I had to like it. It’s mine for better or worse, so I better own it. It’s mine now. I love it.

Mike Kuhn
I’ve learned to live with it. I still don’t really like it, but I’m not going to stop supporting the team.

Chad Reynolds
We’re selling merch like crazy even though we don’t have a ton of it out right now, because it’s something people want to wear. And that’s partially because of the new color scheme too, it’s more attractive. But the logo is not something people are going to be embarrassed to walk around with on their shirt anymore.

Sam Pierron
My philosophy is I’ll explain and I’ll explain and I’ll explain, and I’ll always be honest. At the end of the day they’ll decide if they like us based on the facets of the organization that they see and not per se the brand that sits on top.

Andrew Steinberg
Executive Vice President of Revenue, Sporting Kansas City.
If we weren’t careful we ran the risk of, here we go again, another American soccer club being a Euro poser. So that is why it is so important for us as Sporting Club to revolutionize the way we connect with our community.

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Charles Gooch
I think the word ‘club’ to them was the most important part of the rebrand.

Robb Heineman
I really think as a group, it was one of those things that the name change grew on us. What sounded a little unconventional and crazy early on, as you keep saying it, and as we start talking about the other aspects of our business that we are going to be involved in, it started to make more sense. What we wanted to do, particularly around the name, was do something a little bit different that would give us a platform that would allow us to better connect with our community. We look at the fact that we are the only locally-owned team in Kansas City as a huge flagship for us. We wanted to be more than just a Major League Soccer team playing in a soccer stadium. We really wanted to be a community aspect that impacts sports not only at the professional level, but also at the youth level. We want to be not just a sports team; we want to be instilled in the social fabric of Kansas City. So that’s really the context that we try to do all of our decision making.

Greg Maday
The story is about membership. About being inclusive, not exclusive. It’s about who we are in the Midwest. About the five of us who came together to buy this team, local entrepreneurs, about soccer but about other events, sports, and opportunities.

Mike Illig
What are you? We are Sporting Club and happen to be in the business of soccer right now, but in 5 years from now, who knows what that might entail. Ten years from now it could be a lot of things, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows right now, but if a new deal comes along where we can be cutting edge and innovative, I think without a doubt we will look at it. And Robb has led that charge to speak that way and look that way. He’s never been afraid.

Chad Reynolds
The flagship will always be this MLS soccer team. But hopefully a couple years down the road, there’s the Dallas Cowboys or New Jersey Nets calling and going, “What did you guys do here, where did this club model come from, how does it work? How can we implement parts or all of it, because we think it’s the future of American sports?” And we, Sporting Club, do think it’s the future of American sports. It’s never really been tried on this kind of scale in this country.

Andrew Steinberg
That’s the key. Taken in its totality, you kind of get those, “Huh, I get it.” There is something more here, and it’s central to athletics and wellness, but also the social aspect and everything else around cause with Livestrong and other things I hope aren’t lost on people.

Robert Houghton
They’ve repeated the mantra over and over again and put their money where their mouth is, moving toward and creating this club idea that is more than soccer, and it not just being a moniker. I think a lot of the younger guys have gravitated toward that, the idea being they would love to have a rugby team, a lacrosse team to follow as part of the family. For me, at 48, I’m lucky if I can get away with watching soccer. I’m married, I’m already pushing my luck. But I understand the rationale behind it and applaud them for taking a step nobody in this country has done. They are breaking new ground in the American sports environment.

Jeff Szajnuk
They didn’t have a lot to announce around the brand initially, especially the membership part of it, and we’re still waiting to see a lot of that. Getting perks for signing up and some sort of reward system is nice, but a lot of us felt like members already, so for a lot of us, it is still a vague idea. I think it’s more of a hint of the thought that went into this, and there is more to come. Hopefully there is, and I think people have faith in the ownership group to try to do all those things to be more than a soccer team and follow through with this whole club idea.

Alexi Lalas
They might have a rougher start than most because it’s not a sporting club right now, unless there is a steam, sauna, and hot/cold plunge, and some squash courts. There was a rush to compare and contrast what sporting clubs are around the world, and I’m not sure we have the proper comparisons besides these athletic clubs which are basically country clubs or gyms. Maybe that’s a good thing, trying to create something bigger than just the soccer. You have to applaud them, but in the context of what they are right now, I can see why people would have issues with it.

Mike Kuhn
I like some of perks of it, but there’s also a thing where members can be anybody, including non-season ticket holders, and I feel like as a whole, the season ticket holders aren’t getting the benefits they should get. Instead, any member gets those benefits.

Charles Gooch
If this rebrand is going to be successful, they are going to have to make this whole membership platform and Sporting Club thing work. They’ve absolutely dug their feet in on this. And if they are able to bring rugby and soccer and youth soccer and all these things they want to be the umbrella for, be successful with it, have 50,000 members, 11,000 of those are season ticket holders, the rest are just people who want to come out to a game, then maybe you say, “Ok, well, they couldn’t have done that with the Wizards.”

Robb Heineman
So, what we’re trying to do as a group is position ourselves a little bit differently, and there are a lot of things we’re going to introduce over the course of the next few years that will be very definitional about why we did change the name. If we don’t pull those off, I think the 10 of us as shareholders will sit around the table and there will be some of us who say it wasn’t a good idea to change the name. It’s husbands, and wives, and lots of the kids that are involved. And we all have strong opinions. I think for now we are all good with it, but it’s a work in progress. And on such a big birthing decision, having a unanimous decision is not necessarily the norm.

Greg Maday
If you want people to like you, make yourself interesting, right? If there is a coolness around the club and stadium, with Livestrong, with associating with a cause, with being a member that gets you special things, if you have an opportunity to make yourself a new likeable organization that people want to join, than giving up stadium endorsement dollars, going through a rebranding, it should all pay off. And so far, it’s been a very good thing. Hopefully it will last. And that’s all up to us.

Chad Reynolds
We were out at a bar back in early January, and there’s a bunch of us from the staff out at a bar, and we’re all sitting at a table and one of the guys has on a Sporting Kansas City jacket. And I was sitting at the other end of the table and didn’t have anything Sporting on, or anything like that, and some guy comes up and just starts ripping him a new one. Just, “This is the worst idea ever, blah blah, I hate the name, the logo’s alright but I hate the name.” Just essentially yelling at him at this bar. And other people are looking, and he just looks at me sheepishly like, “What do I do? Here go talk to that guy he designed it.” So he sends him down to me, so now this guy’s ripping me a new one, giving me the same argument he just yelled at my buddy. And he goes, “Where do you guys even come up with this shit?” And I look at him and I go, so did you go to Wizards games at Community America Ballpark a lot the last couple years? And he goes, “Well no, blah, blah.” And then he made a crack about it being a minor league baseball stadium. And I looked at him and I went, exactly. When people thought of this team, the Wizards, they thought of a minor league baseball stadium, and empty Arrowhead, and a bunch of yelling children. And he goes, “Oh yeah, well that makes sense I guess.” And I’m like so we’re about to open a 200 million dollar stadium that’s going to be one of the finest in the country, and you want us to go open that with the same kind of thought process in mind. And he goes, “Well that makes sense too.” It’s one of those things, that yeah, you don’t want to have that argument or conversation with every single person, but when people stop and think about it, it makes a ton of sense. It’s more than just being a professional soccer team at the MLS level.

Jeff Szajnuk
A decade ago, any fan in the country, if you asked them which team was going to be moved, it was going to be our team. Jamie Trecker actively lobbied, I’d say for three years, telling everybody how bad a market it is here. I think even after the team was sold to good local ownership, he was still saying it would have been better if they moved it, so we have our doubters. The Cauldron membership has exploded. I don’t think that’s because of the name change, but maybe a combination of those things. New identity, new stadium, exciting group of players on paper, new professional branding. Even if you don’t like the colors, you can tell more thought was put into the design of everything from top to bottom. Whatever you want to call them, fine. Probably half our songs still say Wizards, and that’s not changing. We’ve moved to a few parks, we were almost sold out of town. I think people here get the big picture. Even if you don’t like the name change, I think everybody can be happy we still have a team. I mean, we really really almost lost this team. We’re probably luckier than any team in this country because of the owners we have. Just the ideas they are willing to try while still respecting the game. We’ve had failed stadium project after failed stadium project and each time renderings came back looking better and better. It’s been a long long long time getting to this new place.

Mike Kuhn
They better create a true sporting club. They affiliated with the local Blues rugby club, so they’ve bought themselves a little time.

Joe Tregellas
I hated it at first, but I’m pretty settled into it now. Time, plus you see what the ownership is trying to do, the bold steps, the heart they are putting into the stadium, this idea of being a regional power in soccer. I like that. You don’t have to be right all the time; you just have to be really right some of the time.

Charles Gooch
I’ve kind of been the Manchurian Candidate on this amongst Kansas City bloggers, because I saw the reasoning why there were doing it. When the stadium opens, that was going to be a big chip for them. And if they were ever going to put their stamp on this team after buying from Lamar Hunt and taking it from a team that was going to leave the town possibly to a team that was going to be locally owned, I saw that as, well if they are going to do it, they might as well start now, start this process and pick a name they like and brand it going forward. The rebrand is not something that should be judged now. Not even judged at the end of the season. It’s going to be a couple of years in the future when the stadium is completely and totally entrenched and the team is entrenched and the ownership group is entrenched. That’s when you’ll be able to look back and say this is a success or a failure.

Chad Reynolds
We as soccer fans are always talking about the next generation of fans. We hear all the time, “Oh people have been saying since the 60’s that soccer is the next big thing in this country.” Well, it’s fucking coming, there’s no denying it. So let’s make sure that when that happens in Kansas City, it’s something that everybody can feel a part of. That’s kind of where we’re at. Ten years down the road if we haven’t lived up to the Sporting Club concept then we’ve all failed and none of us deserve to have the jobs that we have.

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Follow Adam Spangler on Twitter at @TIAS

Banner photo of Livestrong Sporting Park courtesy of Sporting KC.