A conversation with new US Soccer VP Nathán Goldberg Crenier
Is American soccer's generation gap closing?
Something surprising happened when U.S. Soccer Federation held its election for vice president at its annual general meeting in Dallas on Saturday.
When respected US Club Soccer executive Mike Cullina dropped out of the race just before the townhall event held at the United Soccer Coaches convention in Anaheim, California last month, the election became a two-horse race, between:
Dr. Pete Zopfi, chairman of U.S. Youth Soccer, a veteran member of the U.S. Soccer board of directors and a familiar face to USSF insiders via his long service on multiple committees and governing bodies, and...
Nathán Goldberg Crenier, who worked as assistant general manager & chief soccer officer at NWSL side Gotham FC for the past year and a half, and served as a special assistant to two the last two Federation presidents, Cindy Parlow Cone and Carlos Cordeiro.
On first blush, most who’ve watched elections like this would likely shade it to the elder Zopfi, a familiar, experienced face compared to Goldberg Crenier, who is just 28 years old — which counts as wet behind the ears by the graybeard norms of USS governance.
But Goldberg Crenier won, in a relative landslide.
Perhaps it was his impressive efforts to travel to all 50 states to meet with representatives from all 55 state associations and other USSF membership bodies. Perhaps it was his connections with higher-ups like Parlow Cone and members of the powerful Athletes’ Council, which under federal law holds a hefty share of the fed’s voting body, and thus an outsized influence on USSF proceedings. Or maybe voters were just won over by his impressive resume relative to his age and the obvious intelligence that undergirds it.
While attending the coaches’ convention, I sat down with Goldberg Crenier, who lives in Austin, for an interesting and wide-ranging half-hour conversation about his campaign, his life in soccer and his contributions to Gotham’s storybook chumps-to-champs rise from the NWSL basement to winning the 2023 league title.
To my chagrin, not a single media outlet picked up my pitches for an article based off our chat. But in the wake of his election success, I decided to throw this one up on the web pro bono so that interested readers could learn more about the fed’s new VP. Here it is, in streamlined Q&A format.
*Photo courtesy of Gotham FC
Q: Five years ago you worked on Steve Gans’ campaign for U.S. Soccer president during the chaotic election that was eventually won by Carlos Cordeiro at the AGM in Orlando. It sounds like that was a key milestone in the path that led you to run for federation vice president?
Nathán Goldberg Crenier: Yes. So when I was working on one of the presidential campaigns, I got my first look into how things work and how the sausage is made. For a long time. I was looking at the spreadsheets of this organization, that organization — you need to call this person, that person. And then I showed up in Orlando, for the first time meeting these people in person that Steve was calling on the phone. You walk into the big ballroom and you have the Pro Council, Athletes’ Council, Adult Council, Youth Council, and I just was like, ‘oh, who are all those people over at the Youth Council? Oh, that IS the Youth Council.’ That's not what I expected, given who is the Federation itself and who are youth organizations meant to serve. There is just a big age disconnect between the people who make up the Youth Council and the people they are serving. What I also knew from that race is, we talked to a lot of them. They are doing it for the right reasons, their hearts are in the right place. They're volunteers, they want to do things like grow the game for kids. And it's very admirable. They put in a lot of their time and energy and effort for no compensation.
But if you think about, well, can we complement the people with the experience with people with the perspective of, what do things look like for youth players in the 21st century, then you can have a really powerful combination of experience of the legal, business, financial, professional type, and experience of what does being a youth player look like? You put those two together, then you have a more informed decision-making body, at the youth council level, at the Federation level, at the board level of any of the US state associations. So it was really impactful to me to walk in there and say, oh, like the people for making decisions on behalf of the people who play soccer are not entirely representative of the people who play soccer. So that that was a kind of pivotal moment in how I thought of soccer in this country and soccer governance in this country.
Before starting to work at the Federation, I put together a proposal saying, hey, maybe within the structure that exists, there is room for younger voices to add to the mix, to provide a different perspective that will make better informed and more fully thought-out decisions. So I wrote a proposal saying what if you created a young adult advisory committee, where you get people in their early career to get together and discuss some of the changes that are being proposed, think through them, provide their opinion and then help inform the board or the youth council, this is how we see things — y’all can take it however you want, and continue to just better inform people. That would also then serve as a pipeline, a pathway, for talent development. You find the young people who are motivated, interested in how soccer governance works, and you bring them in, in some way, when they're young, then they can grow into larger roles over the course of time. So it can be both something that makes governance bodies more informed today and also paves the pathway for younger, more diverse voices to come into governance over the course of their careers.
So I wrote that up, sent that around to a couple board members. The feedback was generally positive, but also, I mean, it's hard to implement governance changes like that. Then I started working at the Federation [in 2019-20]. So it was one of the things that I had proposed was, well, we should have someone who is under the age of 30 in board meetings, to be able to offer that perspective. Fast forward a year and as the assistant to the president, I was sitting in on board meetings all of a sudden. It wasn't what I had envisioned or proposed, but effectively now there was a younger perspective in the room, just by happenstance, like, the way that life worked out. And so I wasn't a board member. It wasn't my place to be saying things, except for when there were specific things about, ‘we're trying to connect to Gen Z with this marketing campaign,’ and people would turn and look at me.
Since then, I've gotten the chance to learn about what things look like at Federation level, from the inside out, from the top down, however you want to visualize it. But also what things look like from the different membership organizations and councils. So over the last year and a half, I've worked at Gotham, so I've gotten the experience of working in a leadership position at a professional club. I've also advised the US Youth Soccer board pro bono on creating an athlete advisory committee. So something very, very similar to what I had proposed for U.S. Soccer, USYS came up with on their own, and essentially announced, we're going to create an advisory committee of athletes. In that case their athletes are actually under 18, so teenagers who will help make our board more informed.
We’re not delegating them legal powers or financial powers, but when we are thinking about creating new competitions, when we're thinking about, what do we do about declining rates of enrollment, or how do we entice kids to sign up to be referees, to sign up to be coaches, getting that perspective from the kids themselves is as valuable as anything else that you could be doing. So I've been advising them on how to set that up, given my background in getting young people involved in organizational governance. And I still consider myself a soccer player. So I am an adult soccer player, and I've been able to build strong relationships with a lot of members of the Athletes’ Council. So I have the vantage points of what do things look like from all the different angles, what do things look like from the inside right now in the Federation. And the thing that I keep coming back to is, if we have a more representative governance, then I think we will be making better decisions.
Q: Spend any time in and around soccer governance in this country and you notice that these leadership positions and councils and boards trend significantly older than the soccer community at large. It seems to have led to a generation gap of sorts where someone like you, regardless of your competence levels, may face headwinds strictly because of your age.
NGC: Definitely, in some quarters. I mean, there are people who will see my age as a detriment just from what they call lack of experience. I think the experience that I do have is very relevant, and deeper than most of them realize, which is why one-on-one conversations have really helped me with members. As they come in and say, ‘Oh, what does this 28-year-old know about anything,’ and when they're whispering to each other about that, it sounds bad. But when they ask me, ‘well, what DO you know about it?’ I say ‘How much time do you have? We can talk about my soccer experience, business experience, nonprofit experience...’
They come out of that saying, OK, well, he has got more experience than I anticipated — more relevant experience, which is also key. I think by the same token, many of them see my age as a benefit. There's a lot of people who feel that things have gone gotten worse over the last several years, and that we're going down a path that leads to more fracturing rather than more positive outcomes for kids who play soccer, and that seeing someone who is not burdened by the phrase, ‘oh, this is how we've always done things before’ is actually a chance to rethink our approaches to youth soccer and other parts of the Federation. So I've encountered a lot of people who think thoughtful, measured, intelligent change, is a benefit and that my youth is an asset in that direction.
Q: You decided to quit a pretty good job at a pretty good soccer team for this, to wade into this political swamp and vie for an unpaid position. Why?
NGC: [Laughs] I think it's because the type of impact that I see soccer making happens at the Federation level. I love the game. I love playing soccer, I love watching soccer, I love working in soccer. But what I love the most is the power of soccer to bring people together and to have a social impact. And when I'm thinking about how I can achieve that, somewhere like Gotham, for example, and how I can achieve that somewhere at the Federation, where you have touch points with 4 million registered players, the vast majority of whom are kids who are, through soccer, hopefully learning about things like teamwork and leadership and working hard to reach your goals. That type of impact through sport, through soccer, is what really gets me excited. And I want us as a soccer country as a Federation to be able to maximize that impact and to be able to reach as many kids as possible to make them better kids, better citizens. So even though it was a fairy-tale season at Gotham, and I'm very proud of the work that I did to turn the team around, and I'm also very happy about how things ended up — going out on top has been great, going out on top with my friend Ali Krieger is also great — the type of impact, and seeing soccer as a vehicle for social change, social progress, social impact, that happens at the Federation level. And that's where I want to be making my impact.
Q: On the growing power of the Athletes’ Council — obviously there's very good and understandable reasoning behind the federal action that imposed that shift in the voting distributions, but it also has had a lot of cascading consequences on like the dynamics and the relationships among USSF stakeholders.
NGC: So I'm very proud to have a lot of support among the Athletes’ Council, and even prouder of the fact that I know that I have aligned a lot of the other member organizations. And I think sometimes we use state and state associations as shorthand for a member associations, but there are several member organizations that are not state associations. So I've aligned a lot of our grassroots members organizations on the same side as the Athletes’ Council, because they are excited to support me and what I bring to the role. So even though the Athletes’ Council posts big numbers based on federal law requirements, my campaign has been about going and listening to all of our members equally, learning about what their corner of the American soccer landscape looks like, what their issues and challenges are.
By doing that, I've gotten both people on the Athletes’ Council and people among our grassroots members organizations excited about the vision of someone who can come in, helping unify membership, helping to make sure that every community is included in the growth of the game and helping to shape the future of soccer in America. So we have a chance in this election to break the gridlock that has characterized the last several elections, of the grassroots members organizations on one side and the Pros and the Athletes on the other side. And if I can do that, then that by itself will be a massive step forward for the Federation.
Q: If you were talking to a non-NWSL watcher or a casual soccer viewer, how do you describe what you did at Gotham to help them win that championship?
NGC: I would ask if they have seen the movie Moneyball. And if they haven't, I would say it was just like Moneyball, except we actually won the championship. But the way that we approach things was twofold. My boss Yael Averbuch, who is also on Athletes’ Council, coincidentally, is one of the smartest, kindest, nicest people I've ever met, which in soccer is even more rare, I would say. And her emotional intelligence is just off the charts. She also is a soccer player who loves the game, and what she has been able to do is create an environment where players want to be. Like, the way that we approached coaching search was. who was a coach that would get her and me excited to play — in our conversations, we were like, Oh, we should go get our boots on, because we want to play — they're talking about a fun style of soccer that, if it makes us want to play, it will make other players want to come play for us.
And then on top of that, layering a culture that is really people-first. Our players are people. They're also athletes, but they're people first. They have personal, family issues that always comes first and we want to make sure that they feel cared for, especially after the last couple of years of NWSL, that that's not been a feeling that players have been able to have. And my contribution to that is that over the last two years, I've held a research fellowship appointment at Harvard, specifically on women's soccer issues and on athlete well-being specifically within that. I've had the opportunity to go on and interview with my co-author, who also now works at Gotham, 24 players that have played in 24 teams around the world, 19 different countries around the world, and ask them, what goes into making you feel like you're being taken care of by your club?
And there are a lot of things — when you're thinking about harassment and abuse, that is very important. It is one of many things that impacts the player experience. And so what we're trying to do at Gotham is say, OK, if we've created an environment where there’s no harassment and abuse, that's actually step zero, like, we actually haven't done anything — that is the minimum baseline. How do we then create an environment where players can flourish as people and as athletes? It includes approaches to compensation, medical care, the housing that they're put up in, what we do to support them off the field, the relationship between the player and the front office and the coaching staff. And so not only do we have very good instincts from Yael as a former player about what players want, we actually now also have data and research that shows we've asked players in a lot of different experiences across a lot of different countries and playing levels — national team, Women’s Champions League to third-division semipro. And these are the common themes that have come up. And so to be able to implement that in a real club environment has given us a competitive advantage over other clubs, because we are prioritizing the things that players themselves want us to prioritize. So that's one side, is creating the environment where players want to come play. It includes good coaching, it includes trust with the front office and it includes listening to what players have to say, rather than trying to guess.
The other piece was rebuilding the soccer side of things. My background is in data analytics: I studied statistics, I was a data analyst for Orlando City and Orlando pride while I was still in college, and I've done other soccer analytics projects just academically and in my spare time. So coming in and saying, soccer is behind other major sports when it comes to analytics. Women's soccer is further behind than men's soccer. So if you, the club, the ownership, give me a chance to come in and apply some data-driven scouting, we’re going to hit other teams so hard and so quickly, they’re not even going to know what hit them. We had a lot of roster turnover and in the last offseason — I mean, our [2022] season, which I came in halfway through, was a historically bad NWSL season. We broke the league record for the most consecutive losses in a row … that meant that we had more leeway to make a lot of decisions instead of tinkering around the margins. So we swung big.
We dug into the numbers — so as an example, when you look at the value of the MLS draft over time, it has become a less reliable way of securing talent for your roster in terms of how many players actually get contracts, how many minutes those players end up playing. I think on the women's side, that is still one of the primary avenues for roster building, just based on the dynamics of the talent pool that exist. But I think it's going to go that same direction as the MLS draft in a couple of years, or sooner than that, because of the opportunities that exist to not just play in the NWSL but to go play overseas. And the fact that we have the deepest talent pool, so those are players that could skip NWSL to go play Women's Champions League. So I wanted to know, how long does it take an NWSL draft class to start performing at an average NWSL level? When do young players become indistinguishable as a group, not individually but as a group, from their NWSL peers? And across a lot of metrics — minutes played, value created on the ball, the answer was three years on average. So I said, OK, well, I don't have three years, I want to be good now. And we're armed with the No. 1 pick. So rather than try to rely on the draft as our way to turn things around, if we go and look for players who are entering their third year in league, that had been undervalued by other teams, then we have the possibility to find some hidden gems and hope that this is going to be their breakout season.
Fast forward to when we started the final against San Diego, our midfield three: Yazmeen Ryan, Nealy Martin and Delanie Sheehan were all players in their third year in the league, who were not starters for their clubs the previous year, and who were not ‘big stars’ a year ago. And they were lining up against Rose Lavelle and Emily Sonnett and Jess Fishlock. So I was sitting there watching our starting lineup with these three players as the core of our midfield also lining up next to Lynn Williams, Midge Purce and Esther González thinking, wow, this is what Billy Beane must have felt like. So that's one example — there was a lot of other decision points, but just illustrating kind of what the approach was to building the roster and how quickly it paid off. We got very lucky, I think we made a lot of very good decisions, and also got very lucky in a lot of different ways.
If you look at the day data is used in other major American sports, we have the tools and the infrastructure, we have every piece of the recipe to be the absolute leader in the world in terms of soccer analytics — on the field, off the field. And that's something that I would like to bring as a skill set to the Federation, is a plan and level of ambition to say, we should be the best soccer analytics country. And if we do that, it's going to help us with our performances on the national teams, it's going to help us with raising the level of MLS play relative to other leagues in the world, it’s going to help us keep the NWSL at the forefront of the women's game. And it's something that can stem as a policy decision from the highest level at the Federation.
Q: One question an average member might ask about your campaign, which has featured marathon, coast-to-coast traveling to all 50 states to meet face-to-face with members from all 55 state associations, is how a 20-something can afford to do so much time and travel? What would be your response to that?
NGC: That’s a totally fair question and it’s come up a few times! I spent down my paychecks and minimized the marginal added costs of each trip with lots of airline miles, couch surfing with friends, and planning strategically around travel I was already doing anyway; for example, driving my car back from New Jersey to Texas at the end of the NWSL season.