Every soccer club, team or franchise has a thing like Soccer Prom, a sort of live hype video for the upcoming season, and yet in my experience Soccer Prom is entirely unique, a perfect example of everything that makes Detroit City Football Club the most authentic organization in American soccer. It is a transmutation of the commerce function into something more than functional, something fun and shared and spreadable. It threads a vanishingly small needle, delivering massive corporate sponsorship news in the loosest, most affable way possible, uplifting and simultaneously undercutting the backing of these monetary behemoths.
Small’s Bar, the place where Soccer Prom happens, is instantly recognizable to anyone who’s made their living making music – it’s a gig bar. There’s the bar space in the front and the gig space in the back. As supporters drank and chatted in the well-lit front bar, the guy who runs the whole thing, DCFC President & CEO Sean Mann, was among the people struggling to get a projector lined up so its image would strike a sheet saggily arrayed as a screen on the back of the stage; good-natured hoots greeted every misalignment. A few players, here to model the new kits, looked on wryly.
It is difficult to express how unusual this kind of unstructured gathering is in big-time sports. The money involved, which can be astonishing, tends to push every public outing into the laps of Brand Management bots who favor structure. Every angle seems pre-calculated, every possible edge shined to the height of its gleaming possibility – and it is possible, if you stand in the right places, to hear those same calculations taking place around DCFC, but this is where City takes a hard left turn away from the sports-business pack: Those reports are one voice among many, and not the loudest one. This gathering remains resolutely unmonetized.
Then the announcements come, the presentation as unpretentious as everything before, before reality hits: Detroit City Football Club is far past its infancy, now an adolescent and growing like a weed in every direction – more charitable giving, more community programs, more kids in the proto-academy; more infrastructure; more sponsors, more revenue streams, more business ventures. It’s like watching your child address the UN. A kit sponsor that is the envy of North American sports business. A 20-minute data dump on eight months of business triumph that ends with the new kits coming out like a goal celebration. If you walked in not caring, you’re not that person anymore. And then it’s over, and the greetings and arrivals which marked the previous two hours reverse themselves in double-time, the farewells made impossibly light by the great adventure just around the corner.
That’s what Soccer Prom is like.
Sean Spence writes about soccer and everything connected to it (which means everything). He and his wife Sarah have been Detroit City season-ticket holders since 2015, and live in Flint, Michigan. Follow Sean on Twitter here.
