The Interview: Boris Gartner
The La Liga North America CEO on the Details Behind the Spanish League's Move to ESPN in the U.S., What He's Learned About the U.S. Market, the Potential for Official Matches in the U.S. and Much More
As the CEO of La Liga North America, Boris Gartner has gotten things done, none bigger than helping engineer the move of the Spanish league broadcasts to ESPN this season from the much-less-visible BeIN Sports. I picked up a lot from our conversation about his experience in the U.S. soccer business and what he has learned about the U.S. sports-watching market.
The entirety of the written interview below is reserved for paid subscribers. As always, you can still get the entire free audio version of my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to go for your pods.
Grant Wahl:
Our guest now has had a huge influence on increasing the profile of Spain's La Liga in the United States, and in the rest of North America. Boris Gartner is the CEO of La Liga North America, a joint venture between Relevent Sports and La Liga. Boris, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Boris Gartner:
Good to see you, Grant. Thank you for having me.
Grant Wahl:
Lots to talk about here, but I'll start by saying: You started this job in August of 2018, and that was with the launch of La Liga North America. Could you explain to our listeners what your job is?
Boris Gartner:
Sure. It's been quite a journey. In short, La Liga North America is basically the league office for La Liga in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Central America. It started originally with a focus specifically in the U.S. and Canada, but as we set up the infrastructure for the joint venture, and started putting the basic pillars in place, we expanded that area of influence, let's say, to Mexico and Central America. So as of today, basically, anything that La Liga wants to do in these territories, that goes through the joint venture. It goes through us.
“We knew that BeIN was and still is a very important global partner of La Liga. They have the rights to La Liga in over 17 territories, they represent an important part of our budget from a media rights side of the business. But we knew that as the media landscape in the U.S. was changing, they probably were not in a position to help us grow in the same way that they had in the past. And so when I came in [in 2018], I did a big write-up of my initial assessment and sent it to the president of La Liga. And we got into a pretty interesting and heated discussion in week one. I got a couple of all caps emails.” — Boris Gartner
Grant Wahl:
So it's a joint venture between La Liga and Relevent Sports. Our listeners might be familiar with Relevent Sports, that's the Steve Ross company, owner of the Miami Dolphins, real estate guy. Relevent Sports has put on a lot of summer exhibition games with the big clubs in the United States. Relevent has branched off into other things. They recently acquired the rights to sell for the next round of Champions League television rights in the United States. Is there a reason that Relevent is part of this? It's not just a La Liga venture in the United States. What does Relevent bring to the table?
Boris Gartner:
Yeah, and that's a great point to highlight. Because as you've mentioned, Relevent has been an incredible influence in the world of soccer in the U.S. for the past decade starting with the events business that they built, with the ICC, with the women's ICC, with ICC Futures, and the company has shifted from that core event business to include also a media business that recently started with the La Liga joint venture. And as you said, expanded now even more with the agency partnership with UEFA for the Champions League and basically all the club competitions from UEFA for the next cycle.
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From a league perspective, I think that the whole concept behind this joint venture really started as the league identifying the U.S. market as a key growth market for the league at that moment in 2017, when they actually started having these conversations, getting ready for the next 10 years leading up to the 2026 World Cup for sure. And having a partner like Relevent in the territory was a key part of that strategy. Because as you know, and unfortunately we see a lot of initiatives from international leagues and clubs that they clearly identify the U.S. as a key market but fail to actually deliver on the execution.
And for the league, from a very pragmatic perspective they knew that they needed a local partner that knew the marketplace, that lived and breathed soccer, and that had the financial wherewithal to actually support and accelerate the growth of the league in the territory. So I think that in a basic way to put it, the effort of the league to branch out in the U.S. would have not been as successful as it has been without the support of a local party like Relevent.
Grant Wahl:
That's really interesting, because it's been a trend now over the last several years for soccer leagues, soccer teams and clubs to open a New York City office. And I've gotten used to seeing the press releases now: X entity is opening a New York City office. And some of that, to be perfectly honest, I feel like isn't actually doing much. And so I guess my question for you is how do you do more than just open an office? How do you actually make something work that is tangible in a venture like this?
Boris Gartner:
And you're being politically correct, I would actually even take it a bit further. You've seen a lot of press releases that are not more than press releases. And it's clubs and leagues basically taking up a WeWork space in Park Avenue, putting out a press release saying, "All right, the U.S. is a huge priority for us, we're opening an office and we're committing resources." And in a year you don't hear anything else. And when you ask, actually the office is no longer there. And I think that hurts the growth of the sport in this country, to be honest. Because I think that it gets the perception, I guess not so much by the fans, because the fans really don't get to see the impact of a local office that much.
But from the business side of things, from brands, from media partners, from us in the industry, that it almost has become a pattern where you see one of these announcements, and you know that it's a question of timing when they're going to close and you know if it's going to be serious or not from the beginning. The challenging part is that for a lot of his leagues and clubs, they see it as either a vanity project or a marketing expense. And you know how it goes, every time that there's a financial crunch, or need, the first things that they cut are, all right, how much is the lease in New York? And how much are the two or three people that we have there? Cut that and then let's go focus on our core business.
I think that the main difference from what we've been able to do is that we've never seen this as a marketing expense. We've seen it as a business. And since the beginning, the way that this joint venture is structured is a 50/50 joint venture for 15 years with an option to extend for an additional five years. So there was a long-term commitment baked into all of this since the beginning. And we had a 15-year plan, of course that gets revised every year with a budget allocated with clear financial targets on the sponsorship side, on the media side. So we've been running this as a business, and I can tell you that we're in our fourth year.
We're going to close this season not only being profitable, which we are since last season, but we're going to be basically giving back to our partners Relevent and La Liga close to $10 million. So we're generating $10 million in EBIDTA. We have a commercial operation that generates this year's going to be close to $11 million in regional sponsorships. So all of that is incremental. From the global deals that La Liga might do with companies and partners like Verizon, Herbalife, PointsBet. We have six sponsorship partners that generate that.
And then we've done the two largest media rights deals that La Liga has done outside of Spain. The landmark deal that we did with ESPN here in the U.S. for eight years, and the media rights deal in Mexico and Central America that we wrapped up late last year as well. So between those two you have $2 billion worth of media rights deals that we've brought in. So we are a clear revenue driver for the league. And so when you're in that position and you're generating value that's tangible, not just for the league, but as a business, then you have the capacity to keep on investing and growing and having a team that's dedicated. And that's the main difference. We're not subject to somebody in Madrid defining what the budget is going to be for next year. And if they want to cut it or not, based on whatever priorities.
Grant Wahl:
It's interesting, I think it was maybe 2017, 2018. So I don't know if your project had even started yet. But I was contacted by a very well known journalist globally who was working for La Liga in a consulting role and spent an hour on the phone being asked questions about what I thought would help La Liga in the United States. And I tried to help. And one of the things I remember saying was get on a better television channel that had a much bigger audience in the United States. And eventually that happened. And I'm not saying my role had anything to do with it, because it took several years. But I just thought that was really important. It did happen. And that move of La Liga to ESPN, what was your role in that? How did that process work?
Boris Gartner:
So the first thing is that I commissioned that research study. The first day when I came in, I think there's a big difference between you instinctively thinking what you have to do versus getting the right research and validation. So that was one of the first things that I did when I joined was actually commission that research study that had the guy that interviewed you. But with that said, I should tell you a funny story. My first week on the job, and if you remember, we launched August 2018. And BeIN lost Comcast and DirecTV AT&T at that time. So we lost basically 50% of our distribution the moment that we had signed this joint venture and we were launching. So that was a curveball.
And we knew that BeIN was and still is a very important global partner of La Liga. They have the rights to La Liga in over 17 territories, they represent an important part of our budget from a media rights side of the business. But we knew that as the media landscape in the U.S. was changing, they probably were not in a position to help us grow in the same way that they had in the past. And so when I came in, I did a big write-up of this is what my initial assessment is and sent it to the president of La Liga. And we got into a pretty interesting and heated discussion in week one. But I guess that we are getting into too many details, I got a couple of all caps emails.
But I think that that helped us get to an understanding of the global impact of BeIN as a partner, what was really the best path for the league in the U.S. So we started working on it from day one, but as you know, there's a couple of things. Again, it is in this case beyond just one territory. And the second part of it is there's always that balance between the value of your rights, or how much money you can get in the market, versus distribution. And a lot of things have changed since 2018. And I think that with the booming of streaming services and traditional media companies putting more money behind that, I think that has been a boom.
And it's been great for soccer specifically. But also understanding that when you go back to a club, which I said at the end of the day, who we serve, and ask them, "What do you want? Do you want more distribution, or you want more money?" They all, 100% of them, will say philosophically we all want more distribution. We're in this for the long run, we want more people to see us. We're thinking about how our brand is going to be perceived 10 years from now. And then you say, "All right, great. You're going to get 30 percent less money." And they go, "Well, actually give me the money, I need to pay this player." And so that's a balance that we have to work.
We were fortunate enough that we were able to get a deal that not only got us more distribution but more money. So again, I think that the short of it is that balance is real. And that tension is real. But I think that where we are today, and we're very grateful for what BeIN did for many years, and again, the partnership that we have with them on a global level, but where we are today is definitely much better than we were a couple years ago.
Grant Wahl:
And it’s an eight-year deal with ESPN. And is it accurate to say that the industry, including European soccer leagues, maybe even including UEFA, are starting to move toward longer deals than more traditional three-year deals, where it seems like the channel can change every three years and there's not as much long-term investment?
Boris Gartner:
100%. And I think that you’ve got to understand that how it's been done historically in those three-year terms, or cycles, it’s not different than how it's done in Europe for different reasons. Because they do it there from a regulatory perspective. And I think that for most European leagues, it was just kind of the easy way to do it, you have that three-year restriction in Europe, you basically go out and do the deals on that same cycle. And for the most part, they all run them exactly on the same date. So all the deals are coterminous.
La Liga started actually shifting that a few years ago, and started doing ad hoc deals on different territories depending on what they saw was fit, but the mentality of the three-year term was still there. I think the first European league that did a longer deal was the EPL on their last NBC deal, six years. Bundesliga did their new deal with ESPN for six years. We have ours on eight years. Serie A has the same three-year deal, because there's an additional law in Italy, the Melandri Law, that creates another complication even though you could argue that doesn't apply here. But anyway.
Without getting into too much detail on that, at least for us, and I think it's the same case as you see for some of the others, you need a partner more than a deal. A deal you can get wherever, and for us in our current deal with ESPN, since the beginning we were talking about a partnership. And what could the company do beyond just paying the rights fee that we believed our rights were worth? And how were they investing in growing the product? And our understanding very simply was you cannot expect them to develop or put a lot behind the product if you're going to have Year One, that's getting to know each other, Year Two when you're getting into a groove, then you have another tender again.
So that feeling and sentiment of partnership is what ended up taking us to longer deals, which is the way that American leagues do it here anyway. So that's what a lot of these companies are used to. I do think that you're going to continue to see more and more of those properties doing longer-term deals. You're going to find that media companies are willing to spend more on an annual basis on longer-term deals than shorter-term deals, and you're going to get more people interested in bidding and participating in the offering of your rights.
Grant Wahl:
How's it going so far with ESPN?
Boris Gartner:
Incredibly well. Again, I think I've said it a couple of different times, we couldn't have had a better partner. They're amazing in the effort, the respect and the passion that they put to the product, not just again from the deal side of things, but just in the day to day. Everybody at ESPN from Jimmy Pitaro, Burke Magnus, Tim Bunnell, Sonia Gómez, who does our day to day. They're all incredibly committed to the product. We have weekly calls with different teams on their side just to keep a close eye on it, track it, improve it, tweak it. And definitely dealing with a company like the Walt Disney Company is a great privilege.
When they decided they're going to throw their whole machine behind something, they deliver. So I'll give you an example on the last Clásico, the promotion that they were running, spots on ABC around NBA games. They had Times Square billboards, they had on their theme park they were advertising, just everywhere. So when you have that huge machine, I think that builds your property in a much better way than just the traditional channels.
Grant Wahl:
Yeah, it's really interesting just how ESPN does what they do. It's interesting too to me that when we first learned that Lionel Messi was leaving Barcelona for PSG ahead of this season, it seemed like really bad news for La Liga and its first season on ESPN. But I don't feel like it has turned out that way. What happened to make Messi's departure less of a problem for La Liga than maybe expected?
Boris Gartner:
I think that there's always an initial reaction when something like this happens that it's blown out of proportion. I don't know if you remember when [Cristiano] Ronaldo left. It was kind of the same, Oh, this is the demise of the league and nobody's going to watch anymore. And two things happened. One, our viewership actually continued to go up, but two, Serie A viewership didn't go up. So yes, of course having stars on your teams and in your league is a huge plus, and we would love to still have Messi, still have Ronaldo, have Mbappé and Haaland. Of course, all that helps, and not even just on the players but on the coaching side.
Having Pep and Mourinho, like all of that helps. But when you don't have them, the negative effect is not as big as you would imagine. And I think that at the end of the day, it’s more important to have a competitive league and to have different storylines beyond just in this case, those two stars that help drive the narrative and the storytelling around the league. I mean, it's been, from that perspective with Messi leaving with Barcelona struggling, it was a perfect cocktail for things to have gone wrong. And I think of course, viewership has improved significantly.
There is a lot of interest in actually, taking on Barcelona for a second, on all right, are they going to really tank? Or are they going to come back and Xavi came in, and then the whole interest around Xavi. Even with Dani Alves coming back, a ton of interest in that storyline. And the other thing that we've actually done to kind of counter that a bit as well has been to focus on telling stories that are probably not the Real Madrid-Barcelona stories that you would think are the only ones that drive interest and viewership.
But specifically here in the U.S., for example, we focus a lot on Real Betis. Real Betis has Andrés Guardado and Diego Lainez, probably in the top five Mexican national team players. And there's a very interesting thing about Guardado kind of getting towards the end of career and Lainez coming up. Now we have Tecatito in Sevilla. So we've actually built the capability of telling all of these, let's call it smaller stories that resonate with a smaller niche audience.
But when you actually tell those stories in aggregate, you end up having the same impact as telling one Messi story or one Ronaldo story. So if you're doing it in that way, you're actually building community in a much more organized way to put it, an organic way. And that way, you also kind of decrease a little bit the reliance on the big two. Having said that, it's not that we're not going to continue to leverage the narrative and the stories that come from Real Madrid and Barcelona, because those are the two biggest brands in soccer.
Grant Wahl:
How many years total have you been working now in the United States? And what have you learned about sports fans and soccer fans in the United States over the past few years?
Boris Gartner:
Yeah, so I'm originally from Colombia. And I know that we're not releasing a video but as you can see from my jersey in the background. I moved to the U.S. in 2006. And my background is in media, so I spent almost eight years at Univision, worked at Televisa as well in Mexico City, and then at a joint venture between Univision and the Disney company. So I come from kind of that media background. And specifically, a lot of the work that I did before was in the younger Hispanic demographic, second and third generation. And so really understanding the type of behaviors and consumption habits from the core Hispanic demo in this country.
But again, the younger second and third generation, which in a way is the entry point to the general market, young multicultural demographic that this country is kind of seeing a huge growth in. And so coming from that experience, when what you realize is that the main two drivers for that demographic are soccer and music, soccer first. And so having the opportunity to work on a property like La Liga that has a huge core Hispanic fan base, both first generation and second and third generation, it was a very easy transition for me. And so the way that we structure the operation and what we have here, and what I can tell you, is the success of what we've done.
We have a content-centric strategy. So the first thing that we did was we stood up a content studio in Guadalajara. So we have close to 20 people working in the studio there, we're creating more than 20 digital shows every week in English and in Spanish that are focused on the storytelling around the league beyond the 90 minutes of the matches. And specifically thinking about this U.S. soccer fan specifically. And that has allowed us to grow the awareness of the league and actually learn a lot about what the future of soccer in this country will be, to be honest. And again, looking at the next four years as our primary focus leading to the 2026 World Cup.
Grant Wahl:
It's really interesting to me. This summer is actually an interesting summer because there's no major men's international tournament this summer with the World Cup being moved to November-December. So literally the biggest summer tournament is the women's Euros. So teams, European men's club teams in preseason, theoretically, will have all of their best players. And I assume we might see some more official announcements to come. How many teams from La Liga do you think we might see visiting the United States this summer?
Boris Gartner:
So there's that, but then there's also the fact that they haven't been able to come to the U.S. in the last three years. So we have those two things piling, let's say, and again, the clear priority of the U.S. being a key growth market for most of them. I think you're going to see a number of clubs. And we've seen some announcements already. I think the main problem with that is that the concept of the friendly games that are not part of a tournament or something that means something has gone down in value for the fan. And you can give me your perspective, but what used to be a great moment and opportunity to see those European teams come here and play in the U.S. It kind of has gone down a little bit.
So yes, it is a great opportunity to do marketing. But I think that the clubs and in our case, the leagues, have to really think more about the new soccer fan in the U.S. This is no longer a novelty. I mean, you can watch, I don't think there has been any other moment in the history that you've been able to watch as many soccer matches than now. Yes, it's fragmented, and you need to have a bunch of services. But in reality, you're not going to be watching everything.
But you'll be able to watch whatever you want to watch. So I think that also removes a little bit the novelty of seeing the teams here. The way that we look at it specifically is having the teams come is a good opportunity, as long as it's tied to a broader strategy of developing the brand, not only of the league but of those clubs here. If you're just showing up for two games, it's not really going to do a lot.
Grant Wahl:
Are we any closer today than in the past to actual games of La Liga potentially taking place on United States soil? Is that something that we should just give up on that idea? Or where are we?
Boris Gartner:
I don't think we should give up on it for many reasons, but I think that the first one is that I don't think there's anyone here that is interested in seeing the sport grow that can tell you that this is going to be counterproductive for that. Once you've established that, you might have specific interest, and mainly on the business side and the political side, that you could argue one way or another. But having official matches in the U.S. will help grow this sport, I think the answer is yes. Now, how do we do it so that it's actually constructive and it's more than just having the one event and you're out?
And in our case, we're not just looking to bring league matches and that's it. I mean, we've established that we have a long-term view and plan for the growth of not just La Liga in the U.S., but soccer in general. That we've invested a significant amount of money, that we're now generating more, and we're profitable. And that's great, but we've actually invested and we continue to invest every year. And so when you add an official game on top of that, then it makes sense. You know, there's some people that I remember when we're actually … parentheses, we’re still pushing for it.
There's two ongoing legal processes, one in the U.S., one in Spain. I don't think it's going to be a matter of if but when. And again, I think that as we get closer to that 2026 World Cup moment, I think that we all need to rally around making sure that this sport is as big as it possibly can be. So when we get to that 2026 moment, it’s going to be what all of us are expecting to be. And I don't think that league matches are the only thing that you can do. But it's definitely one of those key components. So having said that, I think that a lot of the misconceptions from we want to bring league matches and that concept was, oh, it's going to open the floodgates.
And all of a sudden, you're going to have 10 league matches from La Liga and 10 from Serie A and the EPL. And honestly, that argument is not really knowing soccer, and not really knowing the football culture in Europe. Because it's going to be already hard to take one game out. And I think that that ends up breaking the model. So I think that if you end up doing it in an organized way, it should be an added value for everyone.
Grant Wahl:
Is there anything else that we haven't talked about yet that you'd like to address, anything that's important to what you're doing or the future in the years ahead?
Boris Gartner:
Yeah. I think that the one other thing that we think about a lot is every time that I'm having a conversation like this, so your competition is MLS or Liga MX or EPL? And I think that's looking at it the wrong way. The sport is still at a stage here in this country that we need a lot of people to do as much as they can possibly do to help grow the sport. So I don't think I'm competing for the attention of the fan with MLS or Liga MX. And when you actually understand the soccer fan in the U.S., you're not only a fan of one league or one team. A lot of the research that we've done, if you're talking to a U.S. Hispanic from Mexican descent, their first team is América or Chivas or Tigres or whatever it is.
95% of the time they have a second team that they follow, happens to be a La Liga team if you're Mexican primarily. And that changes depending on your demographic, but there's not an either/or kind of approach to fandom of soccer in this country. I think that from the executive level, the journalists, the content producers, they all need to realize that MLS having a great audience and one of the games is not hurting USL or EPL or vice versa. It's all additive.
Grant Wahl:
I lied. I have one more question for you. I'm so sorry. One of the big sports stories globally of the last few months is the Barcelona women's team and how they have filled the Camp Nou for two separate games, more than 91,000 people. What is sort of the structure, like is La Liga connected to the women's league and the women's teams in Spain at all? I had a guest on recently who talked about a new formation of the women's league coming in Spain. Is that separate from what you do? Or is there any connection?
Boris Gartner:
No. So it's a bit nuanced. But most of the Iberdrola, that's the women's league in Spain, most of the teams are either affiliated or part of men's teams. So that's the connection. The competition itself up until now was organized and managed by the Spanish federation. But they've passed a law now actually allowing those teams to set up their independent structure in the same way as the La Liga has it for the men's teams. There has been historically a lot of coordination between the league and these clubs again, basically, just due to the ownership structure, and you’ll continue to see that.
But for the first time you're going to have an independent league, an organizing body, that's going to manage the women's game. That's huge. Because for the first time, the priorities of that team it's going to be managing is that in only that. I think you're going to see a lot more coordination with La Liga, of course, to leverage everything that the league is doing and that the same teams are doing on the men's side. But I think that it's a great moment for that to happen because there's a lot more interest from the fans, from brands, from media companies in just showcasing the women's game.
So this was the right time to do it. And in a way, I see the business opportunity in a similar way as how I see the business opportunity for the NWSL and the women's game here in the U.S. A lot of interest, even with the example that you're putting on the Barcelona women's team in Camp Nou, at the same time that these guys are or these gals getting 90,000 fans to show up, the men's team is getting 57,000, 58,000, which is kind of average of what they have been getting. So now it's no longer it happened once and that's it.
It's been consistent, you're seeing the fans actually show up and support it in a very similar way. So it's exciting. And I think that in the U.S., specifically in the history of the women's national team, now the NWSL, I'm really bullish on what's going to happen with the new management structure there and actually really pushing the league. I think that one of the big key drivers of the growth of the sport between now and again 2026 and even beyond is going to be the women's game.
Grant Wahl:
Boris Gartner is the CEO of La Liga North America, a joint venture between Relevent Sports and La Liga. Boris, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Boris Gartner:
Thank you so much, Grant.
Impressive gentleman