By Paul Kennedy
Managing Editor, Soccer America
It's a long way from Cheshire, Conn., where Sunil Gulati started out in soccer as a child, to Las Vegas, site of U.S. Soccer's Annual General Meeting, at which he was elected its 29th president.
Gulati was so young when he began working in soccer administration that a few years ago he says his U.S. Soccer biography was changed because no one believed it.
Gulati was 16. He and a friend wanted to play on a travel team, and because there wasn't one, they organized a team. Gulati had a driver's license but his friend didn't, so Gulati did the driving and the scheduling. They had their art teacher do the stenciling and painting of T-shirts, but neither they nor the teacher had figured out that the paint would run when the players sweated.
It would be one of the few times in his 30 years of soccer administration that Gulati didn't get it right the first time.
Gulati's 20 years of work at the national level span the modern history of U.S. Soccer, from the federation's insolvency in the mid-1980s to today when it has a surplus of $45 million.
In those early years, Gulati essentially ran the administration of the national team on a Macintosh computer, doing the scheduling and arranging the travel just like he had done a decade earlier in Cheshire.
''It's impossible to talk about it in a meaningful way because we're light years different,'' Gulati says. ''It would be equivalent to all our parents' stories about going to school uphill both ways.''
For one early national team camp, the decision was whether to give national team players $5-a-day per diems or forego them so the players could get in two extra days of training. Now players get all the training they need – and are paid millions of dollars for their services.
''We now pay our national team players, both men and women, at rates that is not commensurate with but virtually better than anywhere in the world,'' Gulati says. ''Certainly with the women it is far beyond anything in the world and on the men's side it's in the top two or three.''
U.S. Soccer has long since moved past the days it depended on Gulati and his Macintosh to run its programs. It needs the 46-year-old Gulati to take the game to another level.
That was no more evident than in Las Vegas, where NASCAR was in town the same weekend as the AGM. Gulati points to strides American soccer will have made with 10,000 Americans – his guess – at each U.S. game at the World Cup this summer, but they pale in comparison to the 100,000 NASCAR fans who took over Las Vegas.
Soccer prides itself on its diversity, but it was hardly apparent at the AGM.
''When you look at the room today and you see perhaps one African-American out of 400 people, 500 people in the room, that's unconscionable,'' Gulati said. ''There certainly weren't 11 percent Hispanics in the room.''
Gulati's challenge will be to broaden the base, but he must first ensure that everyone already in the base is represented.
The U.S. Soccer Gulati takes over has the money it didn't when he began 20 years ago, but it's not money that will turn soccer into the next NASCAR.
Millions have been spent to fund startups like MLS, the WUSA and a proposed successor to the WUSA and to get stadium projects off the ground. But Gulati recognizes that U.S. Soccer can't buy success.
U.S. Soccer and MLS can throw all the money into player development, but the United States is just too big and too diverse to give every teen, whether it be a white kid from Kentucky, an African immigrant in Minnesota or Mexican-American in Arizona, the opportunity to get the support he needs to fulfill his potential. But the more inclusive U.S. Soccer becomes, the more likely that someone can at least speak up for that young player.
Gulati says no amount of money can buy the respect the national team got from getting to the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Cup, but there's no assurance that the USA will return to the quarterfinals, or even the second round, in Germany.
Over the last two decades, U.S. Soccer has been lucky with its choice of presidents, from Werner Fricker, the former carpenter who built the foundation, to Alan Rothenberg, the Los Angeles attorney who did the deals, and Dr. Bob Contiguglia, the Denver kidney specialist who mended the divisions.
U.S. Soccer is lucky to have picked Gulati, the economist who understands the limitations of money.
U.S. Soccer is far and away the most successful business proposition in American soccer with millions in the bank, but that isn't enough for Gulati.
''I don't measure our success by how much money we have,'' he says, ''but what we do with our money.''
But the most extraordinary measure of his leadership is he recognizes the limitations of his own talents.
Gulati championed a move to reduce U.S. Soccer's board from 40 to 15 directors – and most important, make three of them independent directors.
''For volunteers who are absolutely essential to the game to vote themselves out of positions doesn't happen very often,'' Gulati says.
If U.S. Soccer is to grow the sport, it must enlist the support of those outside its volunteer ranks, the CEOs who are involved in soccer through their kids or played in college or are going to Germany on their own.
Says Gulati, ''We'll find a few of them to serve on our board and get us access and thoughts and abilities and language training, all of those things all of us well-meaning volunteers don't have.''
(This article originally appeared in the April 2006 issue of Soccer America magazine.)