Last spring, a few weeks after Diego Gigliani joined St. Louis City SC as the club’s new president and general manager, he flew to St. Louis to catch his first game. He picked a good one. Sporting Kansas City was in town for the first meeting between natural rivals. Downtown West crackled with the energy of 20,000 fans pulling for the good guys. The 4–0 St. Louis victory was thrilling enough, but it was the matchday revelry and full-throated support that opened his eyes to CITY’s potential. “I felt this recognition that if this is what the team is able to produce in the first year, after just a few months of existence, then the future is super bright for a club like this,” Gigliani says. “I recall walking away thinking, This is amazing.” The Argentina-born Gigliani spent the past decade working with Premier League powerhouse Manchester City, while overseeing teams across the world that operate under the City Football Group umbrella. He knows what a winning organization looks like from the C-suite to the training room, and in St. Louis, it’s his responsibility to steer CITY toward a prosperous future.
With City Football Group, you worked with clubs all over the world, including Premier League powerhouse Manchester City. Are there management strategies from your previous role that will work in the U.S.? Absolutely. There are a lot of parallels and synergies. Managing a soccer club here is the same as managing a football club in England, as it is in Uruguay. A lot of the decisions we face here are similar to what we might face anywhere else: How do you create a successful team and sign good players? How do you train those good players? Off the pitch, how do you bring in more fans and sell more tickets? How do you build new infrastructure? Those decisions are exactly the same across football clubs.
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What about differences? Surely, there are things that worked overseas that you must now let go. The resources are sometimes very different. Man City, in rough orders of magnitude, is like 10 times in terms of what an MLS club is. It’s 10 times the number of staff, 10 times in terms of revenue, and so it’s a different beast. But having said that, while I worked many years with Man City, I also worked many years with some of the City Football Group clubs around the world.
What did that teach you? It gave me the opportunity to work at clubs at the same level of an MLS club, and even at one-tenth the size of an MLS club. So I’ve not come here expecting to apply all the lessons that I’ve learned from working at the Man City level to the team here. I’ve been able to see what it’s like to operate clubs at the same exact size of an MLS club and even smaller clubs. I think it’s that variety in experience that can hopefully add value to this team.
The high prices and low availability of CITY tickets last year Were among the only complaints I heard from fans last season. How can the club make games more accessible? It’s something we want to address, but I think it will still be a challenge to satisfy all the demand that exists. So how can we engage with all the people who want to connect with us? One way is through the myCITY+ membership program, which gives some preferred access to buy. We want to do more to activate that program and deliver benefits beyond the priority to get tickets, like doing things on non-match days and offering more communication to make people feel more connected to our club.
Are there other ways to get fans more involved? I think the decision to have the CITY2 team play its matches at CITY-PARK is a way of making sure that we have more people coming to the stadium. Not just because there are more tickets available, but also because there are lower prices and different days and times that allow us to bring in more of a family audience. We’re also looking at merchandise and having more of a variety of products available as a way of engaging.
Professional women’s soccer continues to grow in popularity, and the National Women’s Soccer League is pursuing further expansion. Will CITY explore adding a women’s side? It’s a good question. For now, our focus is on this men’s team. We know there’s a lot of excitement around that league with new teams and investors. They’re doing some great things, and we congratulate them for that success. But for now, our focus is on our men’s team.
Without an NFL-size outdoor stadium in town, how do you make sure St. Louis remains an option for top international competitions? Do you have to get creative, given the Current capacity of CITYPARK? It doesn’t really require creativity as much as it requires the right fit with what competitions are looking for. If they’re looking for venues in the 20,000 to 25,000 range and all other things are neutral, there’s no question we will be on the shortlist of stadiums in the country. That, I say with confidence.
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