Roll your eyes, if you must, the next time someone claims that professional soccer is finally ready to take flight in North America. From where David Kaval sits, it's already happening.
As president of Major League Soccer's San Jose Earthquakes, Kaval works across the street from the team's current digs at Buck Shaw Stadium, a 10,000-seat bandbox so small it virtually confirms the sport's second-tier status.
But Kaval, '98, MBA '03, has only to look out his window to see a different future taking shape. A half-mile away, work has started on a $60-million, 18,000-seat stadium that will have flourishes like the league's only field-level suites and "North America's largest outdoor bar."
In short, Kaval says, the stadium finally will offer fans a home worthy of a major league, and adds the Quakes to the dozen-plus MLS competitors playing in venues designed especially for soccer. It's a huge leap forward from the league's early days when teams toiled in vast, NFL-scaled arenas that were mostly empty.
The more welcoming atmosphere is an oft-cited factor for MLS's growing allure. Last year, the league's 19 teams brought in more than 6 million fans for the first time since play began in 1996, and surpassed the average per-game attendance of both the NBA and NHL.
"The advent of these stadiums and the success we're having with them is really the inflection point," Kaval says.
Kaval has the hard-wired optimism of an entrepreneur. He may not be in tech, but the Ohio native is like so many other Silicon Valley veterans in his confidence that he can upend the market with a game-changing product.
A skeptic could find a contrary narrative in the Quakes' own history. Three times since 1974, San Jose has fielded a pro soccer team under the Quakes name; none lasted more than a decade. The current version started play in 2008, three years after their predecessors changed their name and moved to Houston out of frustration with their failure to get a new stadium.
Kaval sees many reasons that things will turn out differently this time: from the new stadium to the metrics indicating the sport's growing popularity. A 2012 study by ESPN showed pro soccer trails only the NFL in popularity among 12- to 24-year-olds.
At any rate, Kaval likes a challenge. Leading an MLS team isn't even his boldest attempt at cracking the sporting status quo. As an MBA student, he and classmate Amit Patel, MS '03, laid out plans for an independent baseball league for a class project, an idea they were soon making a reality.
A lifelong Cleveland Indians fanatic, Kaval had undeniable credentials as a baseball aficionado. After graduating from Stanford in 1998, he and classmate Brad Null, '98, MS '01, PhD '09, hit the road for a 38-day, cross-country blitz to watch games in all 30 big league ballparks, a feat they turned into a book, The Summer That Saved Baseball.
Neither Kaval nor Patel had business experience in the sport. Still, they raised $5 million from investors like venture capitalist Tim Draper, '80, and game-show host Pat Sajak to start the Golden Baseball League. It grew to a 10-team circuit featuring a mix of up-and-comers, wannabes and fading luminaries, including all-time steals leader Rickey Henderson, who ended his Hall of Fame career with the San Diego Surf Dawgs.
At its peak, the league had teams in Mexico, the United States and Canada, though it remained a work in progress. "[The sun] rarely sets on the Golden Baseball League," one sports writer joked. "Which is fortunate because the stadium lights are occasionally an issue."
Kaval was still commissioner in 2010—the league merged with two other leagues before the conglomeration folded—when he got a call from the Quakes. He accepted the job largely for the challenge of doing something in his home community, he says. Kaval lives in Menlo Park with his wife, Maria, '98, MS '99, whom he met the first day of their freshman year, and their two daughters, Stella and Annika.
His arrival brought the team a noticeable blast of energy, says Jeff Carlisle, who covers MLS for ESPN. Kaval got the stadium on track, shepherding it through the approval process and increasing buzz with things like the annual game at Stanford, which attracted 50,000 fans last year. "You could just sense the whole vibe of the organization change when he came on board," Carlisle says.
Nevertheless, the Quakes—and the rest of MLS—face serious challenges, Carlisle says. The league is rapidly nearing a ceiling on attendance gains from new stadiums. For future growth, they need to solve the television riddle.
Last year's MLS final drew less than a tenth of the viewers of the same day's top college football game, the SEC championship between Alabama and Georgia. It even lost to a replay between two top English soccer teams, an illustration of one of the league's quandaries: Soccer fans aren't necessarily MLS fans.
"For whatever reason, they have not been able to grow those ratings," Carlisle says.
Kaval isn't so sure that television is the best measure of a youth audience that increasingly consumes media online, a realm MLS aggressively targets. He acknowledges the league still faces a climb, which is part of its appeal.
But he only has to look at all the pro soccer jerseys worn by his daughters' friends to know something new is afoot. The kids in Cleveland weren't wearing them a generation ago, he notes. The stadium he's building today might not be big enough by the time they're adults.
"I wouldn't be surprised to see in 10 years we needed to increase the capacity."
Sam Scott is a senior writer for Stanford.
