Don Garber
| Don Garber | |
|---|---|
| Commissioner of Major League Soccer | |
|
Assumed office August 4, 1999 |
|
| Preceded by | Doug Logan |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
October 9, 1957 Queens, New York |
| Alma mater | State University of New York at Oneonta |
Don Garber (born October 9, 1957) has served as the Commissioner of Major League Soccer since 1999. Garber is also the CEO of Soccer United Marketing and a member of the United States Soccer Federation board of directors. He has been nicknamed "The Don" or "The Soccer Don" by his colleagues and the media.
Garber has spent his entire career in the sports industry, working in a variety of capacities in marketing, television and league administration. Before joining MLS, Garber was with the National Football League for 16 years.
Garber began his career in the sports business working for the National Wheelchair Athletic Association as the head of public relations before moving on to the public relations firm Ruder Finn and then Burson-Marsteller. While at Burson-Marsteller, he represented M&M Mars and met with the NFL about M&M Mars becoming a sponsor of the league. That meeting led to an offer from the NFL to be one of its first salespeople.
Garber spent 16 years with the National Football League, finishing his tenure as the senior vice president/managing director of NFL International, where he oversaw all aspects of the NFL's business outside the United States, including the NFL Europe League. Garber began his career at NFL Properties in 1984 as a marketing manager and became the League's director of marketing in 1988. In 1992, he was appointed the NFL's senior vice president of business development and was responsible for a variety of television, special event and marketing activities.
Garber was appointed as the league's new commissioner on August 4, 1999 becoming Major League Soccer's second commissioner, succeeding Doug Logan. One of his first moves as commissioner was to bring the league more in line with the international standard, eliminating the shootout and letting the referee keep the time on the field. Overtime and a fourth keeper sub were the only surviving non-standard rules, and both would go after the 2003 season.
Don Garber appears to be following a much longer-term growth strategy than all previous soccer league commissioners of the NASL and MLS have taken. He has emphasized slow, steady growth of the league over many decades rather than attempting to force its way into the headlines (Beckham deal included) like the NASL did. Before Garber came into the Commissioner's office, the league had only one team in its own stadium, the Columbus Crew, whose Crew Stadium was built by Lamar Hunt in 1999. Due to this, most clubs were losing money. Garber met with league owners Philip Anschutz, Lamar Hunt and Robert Kraft around the turn of the millennium to decide what future actions should be taken to ensure the league's survival. Their decision was to build the sport following the model given by Lamar Hunt's Crew Stadium, and create Soccer United Marketing, an agency designed to manage rights to international soccer games and broadcasts in the U.S. The entire episode is characterized as critical to the league's survival. In 2003 another portion of the plan began to be implemented. This was the building of soccer-specific stadiums for all the league's teams. In 2003, the "cathedral of American Soccer", the Home Depot Center, was built to house the Los Angeles Galaxy, and both senior national teams. It was the second (behind Crew Stadium) of many soccer-specific stadiums in America, with four more built by the start of the 2007 MLS season. At the start of the 2015 MLS season, 15 of the league's 20 clubs play in soccer-specific stadiums or venues renovated with soccer in mind.
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