The connections that Stillitano brings to the tournament, and that have made it a success, mean he is full of stories like Bradley’s. So many of them, in fact, that he frequently interrupts the telling of one to begin another, making even a few hours with him a veritable matryoshka doll of Charlie stories.

He will tell you about playing against Bradley in high school and alongside him at Princeton. He will introduce you to Martin O’Connor, a lawyer whose clients include the former Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson and who has known Stillitano since they became fast friends as 13-year-olds.

He will tell you all about dining with Ferguson — “Sir Alex says the best restaurant in NJ is Charlie’s house,” Bradley texted — or how he served as a ball boy at a 1973 friendly in Jersey City between Lazio and Santos, the Brazilian club then featuring Pelé. The stories have become so synonymous with Stillitano that if you Google the Santos friendly to check a fact, you’ll find a number of the top results about the match are Stillitano’s recalling it for other reporters.

This is Stillitano the salesman, the marketer. A man who has remade his career selling European teams on the commercial promise of America, and American sports fans on the promise of top-level soccer. And it is temping to conclude that with his stories, Stillitano is selling you, too. But this isn’t entirely true, because he has the track record to back him up.

He will ask Pirlo to spend time with you, and Pirlo will dutifully comply, shifting his daughter onto his lap so you can ask him about the value of preseason friendlies. (“It’s not important, the result, but the speed and for the young guys,” he said.) In a different setting, he might introduce you to Ferguson, an irascible Scot who calls Stillitano “good people” and “lovable” in two of his books. The Italian manager Carlo Ancelotti wrote in his 2010 book about the time Stillitano brokered a meeting between him and the Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich in 2008, resulting in Ancelotti’s hiring as the Blues’ coach.

He knows all of these men because, on behalf of some company or another, Stillitano has been persuading top European managers and the biggest European teams to spend their preseasons in the United States for the past 15 years.

His first company, ChampionsWorld, was financed with a mortgage on his house and began with a single friendly, between Real Madrid and Roma in 2002, that surprised even Stillitano by drawing 70,000 fans. (That he began with an Italian club was not accidental; Stillitano is the son of an immigrant, and he eagerly and effortlessly shifted between English and Italian with his guests at the Juventus game.) The company put on matches for four years but filed for bankruptcy in 2005, owing creditors more than $2 million. Its biggest outstanding creditor was the United States Soccer Federation, to which ChampionsWorld had to pay sanctioning fees for each match it ran.