Q&A WITH MANAGING DIRECTOR ERIK STOVER

New Managing Director Erik Stover sat down with some local beat writers today to discuss his new position, the state of the team, and a number of other subject. RBR is sure you will be reading about it on the web and in the papers over the next few days, so we decided to get you a partial transcript of the Q&A session. We also decided that the writers shouldn't be the only ones that get to ask questions of the new Managing Director, so please send us your questions at NYRB@newyorkredbulls.com and we will get Erik to answer some of your questions to be posted later in the week (it will give us time to collect them, ask them, and post them). So fire away with those questions, and Erik will supply the answers.

On the global message of soccer for Red Bull:
Red Bull has a team in Salzburg, as well as our team (here in New York). They also have a developmental academy in Sao Paolo (Brazil) and Ghana as are building a new site in Fiji. That is a very aggressive approach to how they are managing their teams. The concept long term is that we are going to develop our own players whether in Northern New Jersey or New York, or out of Ghana or out of Salzburg and we are going to bring them up from a very young age and they are going to be First Team players eventually. We see that successful operation around Europe and the rest of the world, but to just buy into that as an owner and to start building that from scratch is an enormous investment and that investment should show the commitment that Red Bull has in raising soccer here in the United States. There is a lot of money (invested) that we will not see the returns on for quite some time. The amount of money that we are putting into this franchise is a 1000 times more than AEG or any of the other owners have put into it.

On Red Bull Park:
Red Bull Park will be ready end of summer/early fall of 2009. It’s hard for us to pin that down because we just do know what kind of weather we are going to have going into the winter. That is one of the challenges of building something like this in the northeast. Our goal is to make sure that we are playing games in 2009 in that facility. As an update, we are finishing up pouring concrete for our pile caps this month and we hope that at the end of the this month or the beginning of July, the structural steel will start to go up. At that point we will have symbolically turned the corner, and you will be able to see the structure going up out of the ground, and I think everyone will be able to take a deep breath and know that it’s coming soon.

On player personnel:
I am not at all hands off. I speak with Jeff and Juan regularly. I talk to Jeff several times a day. He is the expert. He is dealing with it every day and I take his decision to Austria for approval. There are a lot of resources with Red Bull. There are scouts and technical experts in Austria that we can rely on.

On what sold him on the job:
Probably the number one thing that sold me on this job is the concept of what this stadium is going to be. I had never heard of the a new stadium or arena being built in the last 20 years where the designers took suites out of the building. It has always been adding suites and adding clubs. We took them out and went from 60 to 30 so we can add more seats for the average fan to have a better experience. That is really a customer service focused business plan down to the average fan, and not as corporate aggressive. We will go after it but it will be more behind the scenes in the suites and club seats that we have and working on creating an environment where they can network when they are at our events and not be locked up into a suite with just their 12 ticket holders.

On how to attract new fans:
The most important thing is the new stadium, and that was why I was brought in, since we didn’t have the luxury of screwing it up when we opened it. You spend all this money to build this beautiful building. It will be the nicest building in North America for soccer and then you screw it up operationally. This is our opportunity. I think the grass roots stuff I think we do it pretty well. But putting a firmer message on it will help us a lot too.