Catching Up With: Joe Cummings

SNE Talks Business with the Boston Breakers' President and GM

By Mark Goodman

April 27, 2009

These are busy days for Joe Cummings.

Joe Cummings

Joe Cummings is in his second stint as president and general manager of the Boston Breakers.

The Upton, Mass. resident is in his second stint as president and general manager of the Boston Breakers, having served in the same dual role during the club’s WUSA days from 2001-03.

Starting a new league is difficult work, but Cummings is used to it, having been director of operations and then assistant general manager for the New England Revolution during MLS’s first three seasons (1996-98) prior to his experiences with the Breakers.

On Friday, Soccer New England caught up with Cummings - who also founded the Northboro Youth Soccer Association program in Northboro, Mass. - at Harvard Stadium to talk business, both on and off the field.

Click here for the second part of this interview.

Soccer New England: We’ve heard the phrase “new business model” as it pertains to WPS in comparison to WUSA. Can you explain exactly what that means?

Joe Cummings: There are two really overriding changes, but the biggest change is that WUSA, like MLS, was a single entity. So you shared in the good and you shared in the bad. At the end of the season, we totaled up your losses and my losses and every other loss, or everybody’s profits, and it was a math exercise. You just took what the total was and you divided it by the eight teams. So if the league lost $800,000, then everyone threw in $100,000.

Now, it’s a franchise model. So I run just the Boston Breakers, and although I want all of the teams to be successful, my focus and my worry is the business of the Boston Breakers. That’s the most important thing.

The second thing is that Soccer United Marketing - which does all of the sponsorship and marketing for Major League Soccer and the Mexican national team and the U.S. men’s and women’s national teams - they’re actually securing sponsorships for us. So they’re out selling to an already interested buyer. They’re going to people that are already supporting soccer in the United States.

SNE: How do the early returns look so far?

JC: Obviously, we picked one of the worst times economically to launch a league, to launch any business. Sponsorship we’ve been impacted by, there’s no doubt about that. Everybody’s been impacted by sponsorship. But from a ticketing standpoint, we’re exactly where we thought we would be.

You have to take a good look at discretionary income and entertainment dollars right now. Our ticket pricing is $10, $15 or $20 - you can bring a group of 20 for $200... We’ve not seen an impact at all on the ticketing side or from concessions and merchandise. As a matter of fact, our numbers from our opening game, which was a horrible night weather-wise, have actually been better than what we expected. So we’re very pleased on that side.

Sponsorship, we just assume that it’s going to turn around. The economy will turn around and we’ll benefit from what they’re going to see this year.

SNE: What went wrong with WUSA?

JC: Besides the single-entity model, the business plan itself wasn’t as tight as it could have been. There were a lot of expenses that people hadn’t anticipated. When a business plan fails, it usually comes in two buckets. The first one is that the expenses are a lot greater than what you thought they were going to be, and the revenues don’t come up to what you thought they were going to be.

The revenues from a Breakers standpoint were exactly what they thought they were going to be. The expenses, because it’s a single entity and how you have to share, our share was equal to everybody else’s. Actually, if we had just been able to run our own business, we would’ve been at break-even in year three.

SNE: To what level are you concerned about launching a new business at this point in our history?

Boston Breakers

The Breakers drew just over 4,000 fans to its April 11 home opener at Harvard Stadium against Saint Louis Athletica, and are expecting around 6,000 for this Saturday's match against the league-leading L.A. Sol. (Photo by Robin Chan)

JC: Keep in mind, the Breakers had a two-year run-in to this. We announced in April of 2007 that we were coming back, because we anticipated starting this league in April of 2008. We postponed, so we’ve really had a two-year run-in. And over the course of those two years, we’ve taken a pretty good look at the ebb and flow of business here in Massachusetts and throughout New England. It wasn’t a surprise that the economy was having an effect on people’s businesses. This wasn’t just dropped on us in the last 30 days.

We’ve made adjustments in our budget over the last six to nine months to be a little bit prepared for this. We certainly would like it to be better, but we made the necessary adjustments on the expense side to match up against the revenues.

SNE: You mentioned the change from the single-entity to the franchise model. Is there anything else that league executives may have learned from the first go-round with this league that they can take into this one that’s going to make it sustain a lot longer?

JC: Not true here in Boston, but one of the things that’s happening across the league is that we have a number of teams that are now working in concert with other clubs. In L.A., AEG owns both the Galaxy and the L.A. Sol. In Chicago, there’s a relationship between the Chicago Fire and Red Stars. In Washington, D.C. United is managing the Freedom; they’re sharing some responsibilities. That opportunity to borrow staff… that’s a big difference from where the leagues were with WUSA and MLS in 2003. So there’s that merging and that synergy that does exist.

I think what we’ve learned, if we’ve learned anything from the WUSA days, is that you have to continue to go back to your constituency. I say all the time, it’s a political campaign - you buy tickets like casting a vote. We’re trying to elect the Boston Breakers, and you keep going back to your constituency and ask them to support you. I think that’s a lesson learned.

SNE: Is there any potential or any desire for the Breakers to get together with the Revolution?

JC: We’re talking to them about a number of different things. Maybe playing a doubleheader. If we would be fortunate enough to host the championship (the team that wins the regular season automatically hosts the WPS title game), perhaps doing the championship game [at Gillette Stadium], because it appears now that the weekend of the championship Harvard may not be available because football will be back in season.

I was there for quite a few years. I still have a lot of friends there, and I would love to have an opportunity to play a game down there. We did during the WUSA days, and we probably will during the WPS time.

SNE: In an ideal world, where will this league be in five years?

JC: I think in five years, if we’re averaging that number of 5-6,000 (the Breakers averaged about 6,500 fans per home game during the WUSA’s three seasons), if another group of American players have been discovered or have become the face of U.S. soccer, and if the international players have continued to come here to play, I think that would be considered a success.

Mark Goodman can be reached at newsdesk@soccernewengland.com.