5 Questions with Jordan Gardner

The pursuit of wisdom in any walk of life quickly reveals that what you think you know is not nearly enough to get you to where you want to go. As I'm starting out in my football scouting journey I challenged myself to reach out to those already working in various roles in football to answer a short list of questions. My goal wasn't to get answers but relevant perspectives on the game within the game.

Here is Jordan Gardner, chairman and co-owner of FC Helsingor and co -owner at Dundalk FC.

What are some inefficiencies in American soccer pyramid that can be leveraged by European clubs? 

There are three main reasons we have invested our time, money and energy in Europe versus the United States. 

1) The promotion and relegation structure - this gives us an opportunity to buy a smaller club, use our expertise both on the business and football side to add value and move up the pyramid into hopefully one day the top levels of European football. Obviously this structure does not exist in the U.S. with the franchise model, which is both expensive and doesn't offer the upside the merit based system does. 

2) Player movement - In Europe, players are bought and sold at all levels in all leagues. In the U.S., only recently have we started to see player movement from lower divisions to Major League Soccer, and even so it's very limited. Hopefully over the coming years, this system can be more developed and structured like in Europe, but I don't foresee that happening anytime soon. 

3) Media Rights - Even in the lower divisions of European football there are good revenue streams from media, which at the moment don't exist in North America. Major League Soccer has a new TV deal coming due in a few years, but at the moment the levels of income are not high in comparison to similar sized clubs in Europe. The lower divisions in the U.S. have no paid media rights at the moment as far as I'm aware.

What clubs have inspired the vision or certain elements of FC 

Helsingor? 

Brentford in the Championship in the U.K. is a club that we've tried to emulate in some ways. They have a strong management focused philosophy (versus coach focused). They consistently punch well above their weight in the Championship compared to clubs spending significantly more on wages than they do. In Denmark, a club I really respect is FC Nordsjaelland. They have done a fantastic job with youth development and leveraging their connections to Africa.

How do you position building an academy, developing players and sustaining on field success for the long term? 

Player development is a long term process. It can take upwards of 8-10+ years to build the groundwork for an academy and doing player development the right way. The challenge is the significant financial investment that such an endeavor entails, however those committed and with the right vision have seen huge success with a development focused model. It's not easy to sustain long term success, but have a pipeline with talented young players coming through every year makes the chances of success much higher.

Where do  US college grads/players fit into the vision? 

We feel the U.S. college system is very much untapped when it comes to potential professional players heading to Europe. It's not even just young Americans, but plenty of talented European players from top academies have decided to head to the States for college and then by 21 are ready to jump to the professional ranks.

Red Bull and the Man City Group have built a network of clubs with an infrastructure that systematizes success to certain degree. What value do you see in that model and could it be replicated, specifically in Sweden and Norway? 

I think the multi-club model makes a ton of sense, using economies of scale and leveraging different assets in terms of clubs and academies to create a larger vision. The challenge in Sweden, is they have the 50+1 rule, so you could not buy a majority stake of a football club there, so that would be difficult to implement. Norway could work, although they are not on the European calendar so that would create some challenges.