AFA / NBV Partnership Detailed in National Sports Media's "The Athletic"

National sports site The Athletic recently featured the forthcoming NBV - AFA partnership to build a community center and sporting fields in conjunction with AFA's US headquarters, right here in North Bay Village.

The project of course has the usual political detractors, but this story does the best job yet of digging down into the details of the what, where and why on the AFA side, for those who ask the questions about "what's AFA's side of this?," and "how did this come to be?"

One thing I often hear from constituents is that our city lacks a developed sense of community. This project will go a long way towards addressing that need. In the long run, as the AFA project unwinds across the US, NBV will consider itself lucky to be the first on board for this community building project.

A few years from now, communities will be lining up and begging for this. We will have been first.

The full story can be found here: Argentina prepares to build Miami training facility as it targets major U.S. expansion - The Athletic

It's behind a pay wall, so -- with apologies to the author -- I'm including the full text below. It's an important contribution to our community that everyone should have access to.

It's a long read, but in order to have an educated opinion on the project -- rather than the usual kneejerk superficial response -- it's a worthwhile investment of time. It will answer a lot of your questions, and provide for a more informed, educated dialogue on the issue as it makes it way along for revision at the Miami-Dade School Board.

On the local side, we will be scheduling another town hall in the month of May, to get your continued feedback and input as this project moves towards becoming a reality.

______________________________________________________

Argentina prepares to build Miami training facility as it targets major U.S. expansion

Felipe Cardenas

Apr 26, 2023

15

Four months ago, Gonzalo Montiel’s game-winning penalty sent Doha’s Lusail Stadium into delirium. A group of Argentina players surrounded their captain, Lionel Messi, in an embrace, as their countrymen and women in the stadium celebrated in a frenzy.

His teammates remained kneeling on the pitch, still in disbelief, when Messi managed to wiggle away and jog toward the far touchline.

He searched for his family, who were seated high above near the Lusail suites, and when he found them, Messi waved his arms above his head and said “Ya está, ya está.”

It’s done. That’s it. Messi, almost unbelievably, had won the World Cup. Argentina was world champion for the third time, and for Messi, it seemed as if there was nothing left for him to achieve.

But Argentina is not done, yet.

The World Cup in November is part of a 10-year project to transform the Argentina Football Federation (AFA) brand, which includes a global commercial expansion strategy that has already begun to take root in China and the Middle East.

Now, the AFA has circled the U.S. market as its next frontier — and they’re not being subtle about their introduction into North America.

A brand new AFA training facility will soon break ground in Miami. It will serve as the entity’s U.S. headquarters and establish the federation’s footprint Stateside. It also means that Argentina will have a dedicated training facility in the U.S. before the U.S. national teams do. The AFA’s U.S. expansion also includes plans to create youth academies throughout the country.

(Image: NBV – AFA project)

Each academy will be led by AFA coaches, who will train players and local coaches based on the latest Argentine football methodologies. In the long term, Argentina will do something that it has never done before: scout dual-national talent in the U.S.

“Yes, that’s part of it,” said Leandro Petersen, the AFA’s chief commercial and marketing officer. “We know that there are many players in the U.S. who have Argentine parents. It happens in Europe, too. (Alejandro) Garnacho (Manchester United), Franco Carboni (AS Monza), players who have been brought up in Europe because they were born and raised in Europe, but they identify with Argentina.

“We believe that those types of talents will appear in the U.S. Argentina is going through a very serious and negative financial situation. We’ll be evaluating that. We’ll continue to track those players who leave Argentina at a young age. If not, they’ll end up representing another country.”

Over coffee, inside a busy meeting space at the Marriott Marquis in downtown Miami, Petersen explained the AFA’s sporting and commercial strategy for the U.S. market. Poaching dual nationals is just one aspect of the globalization of the AFA. Messi and his World Cup-crowned teammates are the face of the campaign.

When the national team and the AFA’s senior delegation visit other countries to make their pitches, interest in partnering with Argentina is viewed as a unique business opportunity.

“Foreign governments roll out the red carpet. It’s a big responsibility,” Petersen said. “That’s the standard and we’re representing an entire country. It’s our brand image. We’re happy to be where we are.”

But Petersen said that positioning the AFA brand to potential commercial partners has been challenging. Petersen, who previously worked on the marketing side for Argentine clubs Rosario Central and Vélez Sarsfield, was brought on board by AFA president Claudio Tapia.

“Before Tapia’s administration, a FIFA-led commission had intervened in the AFA during a serious institutional and financial crisis,” Petersen said. “I believe it was the most serious crisis in the federation’s history. When Tapia took over and installed an executive committee, they made a historic decision to professionalize every area of the federation.”

Tapia is now as much a national hero in Argentina as any of the current world champion players. The AFA has long had a reputation for political corruption. Its former president, Julio Grondona, who held power for 35 years, was a controversial figure with an authoritarian style of leadership. Grondona had public spats with Argentine legend Diego Armando Maradona, who often referred to Grondona as a “mafioso.”

Unlike Tapia, Grondona was not viewed as an ally for Argentina’s players, but rather a powerful international figure with deep ties to former FIFA president Sepp Blatter and the organization’s executive committee. He served as a FIFA vice president for 26 years until his death in 2014.

A year later, FIFA claimed that Grondona had authorized a $10 million payment to former FIFA official Chuck Blazer, who, after becoming a U.S. government informant in 2013, was later convicted of racketeering, wire fraud, income tax evasion and money laundering, among other charges. Blazer received a lifetime ban from FIFA.

In South America, the AFA was infamous for its infighting. Being tied to the biggest FIFA scandal ever wasn’t a positive brand builder, either.

“When we started this, it wasn’t easy to sell the AFA or the Argentina national team brand,” Petersen said. “And we already had Messi, (Ángel) Di Maria and (Paulo) Dybala. It’s a myth that this product can sell itself. We have a very popular product but it’s not easy to close big deals all over the world.”

According to Petersen, the AFA has over 150 commercial partners around the world. “We have more global sponsorship deals and commercial partnerships than any other federation in the world,” he said. Those partnerships began to accumulate after Argentina won the 2021 Copa América in Brazil.

When Messi was seen lifting his first-ever senior national team trophy on enemy soil, it skyrocketed the national team’s brand ascension around the world. Petersen said that the AFA has 10 commercial partners in China, and a strong e-commerce presence in the country. The AFA has three partners in India and five in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

Interestingly, Messi is a tourism ambassador for the Saudi government, but Petersen doesn’t believe that Messi’s agreement with the Saudis is a conflict of interest for the AFA or for CONMEBOL, South America’s governing body. Saudi Arabia will bid for the 2030 World Cup jointly with Egypt and Greece, and look to derail CONMEBOL’s bid to host the 100th-anniversary edition of the tournament (the first World Cup was held in Uruguay in 1930).

“We don’t see it as a conflict,” said Petersen. “In fact, we’re currently evaluating many things with Saudi Arabia. We’re going to establish agreements there similar to the types of deals that we have with companies in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Messi’s presence in Saudi Arabia helps us. It doesn’t hurt us.”

Petersen said that the more than 50 million Latinos in the U.S. and “the rapidly growing football market” is one of many reasons why the AFA has pinpointed North America as a strategic location. He said that the AFA is well aware of the growth of Major League Soccer. MLS clubs continue to recruit in Argentina, so the connection between the two brands is already established — Thiago Almada, who was on the World Cup team, is currently starring for Atlanta United after being part of Argentina’s World Cup win.

“We’ve established ourselves in the United States over the last few months,” said Petersen. “The development of the AFA brand on a global scale is continuous. It’s all part of a master plan that we execute daily. It took more than four years to get there.”

Yet, clearly, the timing of the AFA’s launch in the U.S. is no coincidence. For the AFA’s ambitious brand push to succeed in the U.S., there must be commercially viable competitions that the AFA can take advantage of and pull revenue from.

“Two of the next major events of the football calendar will take place here. The Copa América 2024 and the 2026 World Cup,” said Petersen. “When the national team arrives in another country, it’s practically a revolution.”

That includes when Messi and his teammates play in the U.S.

Argentina’s pre-World Cup tour last September featured games against Honduras at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium and another friendly versus Jamaica at Red Bull Arena in New Jersey. Both were sellouts, with the match in Miami particularly feverish.

Argentina will be the defending champions in both tournaments in 2024 and 2026 and the Albiceleste will no doubt be the top draw for fans and sponsors in the U.S. But in order to stay relevant in America well beyond those competitions, the AFA needed a home to call their own on North American shores.

Drive through Miami’s trendy Design District and continue north, and you’ll pass by modest neighborhoods that haven’t yet been gentrified. A few miles past Little Haiti is West Bridge, which takes drivers to North Bay Village, a city of roughly 10,000 people.

It’s one of three islands in the middle of Biscayne Bay, situated between Miami and Miami Beach. North Bay Village has a seedy past as a mob town where police corruption and political scandals mingled with La Cosa Nostra. It’s a reputation that has plagued the area for decades. Today, the city is working to shake that image.

Mayor Brent Latham, winner of two uncontested elections, has been at the forefront of those efforts.

“We set out to fix that immediately and turn the city around from a poorly run, shadowy city to one that’s now in the early stages of professionalizing our administration, and becoming a nicer place to live with a higher quality of life,” Latham said.

Latham has targeted public works, sports recreation and youth soccer as long-term initiatives in North Bay Village. He has an extensive background in soccer. He’s a former head of media at CONCACAF and also served as a FIFA media officer at the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Latham had a stint as a football writer based in Guatemala for ESPN, as well.

He described North Bay Village as a diverse and progressive community that is trending younger.

“We have a very large percentage of citizens who are of Argentine origin,” Latham said.

Post-pandemic, an influx of resources to help upgrade the infrastructure and various developmental projects have come to the city.

“Literally billions of dollars in investment is coming into North Bay Village,” Latham said.

Despite all of that cash, Latham needed more resources and support to improve the limited land for a modern-day public park on the island. The largest green space in North Bay Village is Treasure Island Elementary School, which belongs to the Miami-Dade school board.

The Philip Schonberger Memorial Playground, including the pirate ship, will remain adjacent to AFA’s main Miami offices. (Photo: Felipe Cardenas)

The aforementioned green space on the school’s property is an athletic field in need of major enhancements.

There are a number of rundown buildings and tennis courts whose surfaces have cracked over the years and remain unusable for the children of school or the community. However, the budget wasn’t large enough to invest in a refurbished athletic field and its surrounding areas, so Latham got creative.

“We found that we could sort of cut corners and make the budget stretch if we simply didn’t improve the athletic field,” Latham said. “So we thought okay, let’s build the park but not the athletic field right now, but I’m going to go out and look for partners who might be able to invest in this field, and at the time, I had more nonprofit partners in mind, maybe a foundation or something that would invest in a school field, but we didn’t find that.

“What I did find, in speaking to different contacts, were various athletic organizations that were interested in some sort of mutual use or public-private partnership, and one of those was the Argentine Football Association.”

Latham said that the proposal that the AFA approved had first been presented to the U.S. Soccer Foundation, but they showed little interest in the project. Notably, U.S. Soccer does not have an official training facility, although they’re currently exploring Atlanta, Georgia and Cary, North Carolina as potential locations for new construction.

Standing outside the elementary school on an April day when flash flood warnings were active around North Bay Village, Latham said that his office is still in talks with the school board to approve the AFA project. Discussions have been ongoing since November, but Latham believes that they’re nearing a compromise.

“That could take a few more months to sort that out,” Latham said. ”We want to go at the school board’s pace and answer their questions in terms of what they want to do because this is revolutionary for them, too. This is a change of paradigm for the school system.”

Latham estimates the total investment for the AFA facility, the pitches and additional recreational spaces to be approximately $10 million.

“$6.5 million is the number that’s been thrown around,” he said. “That is sort of like the baseline, but the AFA has agreed as far as the specs of what they’re going to put in, to pay the price necessary to construct that building and construct the fields. And then we’re thinking above and beyond that to make a lasting project here in North Bay Village that’s really going to be amazing.”

The AFA is currently evaluating a number of proposals for the naming rights of their Miami facility. They’re in no rush to begin construction, although Petersen said that unveiling the new facility before the Copa América next summer would be ideal. It would serve as the national team’s tournament headquarters and be modeled after the AFA’s sports complex in Ezeiza, roughly one hour from Buenos Aires. Petersen mentioned Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Atlanta as potential locations for the AFA’s next phase.

“We always want to be first,” Petersen said. “In 2018 we were the first brand to make a serious push and establish a permanent presence in Asia. And the way we’ll do that in the U.S. is by building a training facility.

“North Bay Village won’t be the only facility that we build,” Petersen added. “It’ll be the standard for how we’ll expand throughout the United States, with more training centers and academies around the country. We want to be part of these communities. We want people to be proud that the AFA is in their communities. We’ll create public spaces for families.”

The obvious question is how Messi’s potentially earth-shattering arrival to MLS would impact the AFA’s U.S. plans. When posed with that possibility, Petersen leaned back on the leather sofa that he was seated on and exhaled.

“That would be revolutionary. Hopefully that happens,” he said. “We can’t get involved at all, because it’s his decision. It would be a boon for our project, but no one other than Messi knows what’s best for him. We’ll be ready if that takes place. If it does, our project will grow exponentially faster, but he makes decisions based on his own ambitions, his career, his body and his family. We’ll create a strategy that maximizes any decision that he makes. Hopefully that takes place in the U.S.”

In the meantime, Petersen and his team are actively pursuing new sponsorship deals with U.S.-based companies, as interest in partnering with the AFA may be at an all-time high. Credit card companies and other financial institutions, gambling companies, the automotive industry and popular consumer goods are all looking to do business with the AFA.

After all, who wouldn’t want to be associated with Messi?

“The sporting and commercial strategies go hand-in-hand. There are 300 million consumers in the U.S.,” Petersen said. “These brands will listen to our pitch because of the possibility of doing something with the Argentina national team in 2024 and 2026.”

During his most recent trip to south Florida, Petersen met with the Miami Heat to discuss a multi-year branding partnership. The deal would include digital and in-person activations with the NBA team and Argentina national team players.

“Here in the U.S., we want to work with all the top sports leagues,” said Petersen. “The NBA, the NHL, the NFL, MLS, local governments, corporations. We want a seat at each one of those tables to truly grow our presence in the U.S. market. We’re not just giving a speech. We’re not competing with anyone, not even with the U.S. national team, because we have plans to collaborate with them, too. We met with them in Qatar. The possibilities here are endless.”

Petersen added that the AFA would like to establish permanent agreements between Argentine clubs and their MLS counterparts over the next four years. There’s also interest from the AFA to bring Argentina’s SuperClásico between River Plate and Boca Juniors to the U.S. But Petersen said that playing an official league match in the U.S. would be difficult to pull off.

“There are a lot of regulations to consider. (La Liga’s El Clásico) could never get done here. That’s really hard to do,” he said. “A summer tour like what La Liga and the Premier League will do in the U.S. would be fantastic. There’s a market here for that. We want to work with Liga MX in the U.S. We know Liga MX is an important brand here.”

The Argentina Supercopa between Racing Club and Boca was played in Abu Dhabi in 2022. The match pits the league champion against the winner of the Copa Argentina. It was the first time that an official AFA competition was played abroad. Petersen said that the AFA is brainstorming similar ideas for the China, Saudi Arabia and U.S. markets.

It helps that, aside from Messi, the entire 2022 World Cup roster and its staff, led by upstart manager Lionel Scaloni, have become legendary figures in their homeland. This version of Argentina represents the true culture of Argentine football. They’re showman, rugged and creative. The national team’s success over the last two years has been inspirational. It’s proof that success is possible without infighting.

“If you go to Argentina today, all of the kids are wearing Argentina kits, and not just Messi jerseys,” said Petersen. “To the people of Argentina, the national team represents the good of the country. The national team is one of the few things that functions properly in the country.”

After decades of disorganization, the AFA has found the institutional stability that had previously held it back. On the pitch, Argentina has as positive an outlook for its future as any national team in the world. Scaloni has extended his contract through 2026, which should prevent the managerial turnover that is commonplace at the national team level.

And while Argentina relied heavily on Messi’s magic in Qatar, the current generation is capable of moving forward, bolstered by a young, exciting corp of national team prospects. On the commercial side, the AFA’s intercontinental expansion plan is similarly positive.

¿Ya está? Not quite.

“Our North American project begins in Miami,” Petersen said. “But it won’t stop there. We don’t know where it will end.”

(Top photos: Dan Mullan/Getty Images, pawel.gaul/iStock; Design: Eamonn Dalton)