

Posted by

Steve Bottjer ,

November 4, 2014 Email

Steve Bottjer

On Twitter:

@BottjerRNO

Professional soccer takes off in Ottawa at long last.



While the newest professional club in Canada was unable to achieve the lofty goal of qualifying for the playoffs in their inaugural year in the North American Soccer League, it would nonetheless be an understatement to classify the Ottawa Fury’s 2014 campaign as anything other than a great success.



According to Ottawa Fury FC President John Pugh, his club’s first season competing at the professional level in the North American second division has been very much a dream realized.



Furthermore, in Pugh’s estimation, the Fury have now completed a first season in which a strong base for future success has been laid both on and off the pitch, as well as with respect to literal rollout of the marvelous pitch on which the squad now competes.



“I previously ran the Ottawa Fury soccer club prior to having this opportunity to join the four other (Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group) businessmen who are responsible for the complete refashioning of Lansdowne Park and the stadium and the urban park, retail and condominiums,” Pugh told RedNation. “I was invited into that for a good reason – that is that everybody in Ottawa plays soccer. At the participation level, soccer is number one by a long, long way. To be invited in and given the opportunity to go after a franchise in the NASL and bring professional soccer to Ottawa was a dream that I had a decade before.”



“More recently the dream has been along the lines of can we build a team from scratch that is competitive in the league, that people like to come and watch and that will draw a decent crowd and that will do Ottawa proud,” he added. “I think we have kind of achieved that. That’s not the ultimate goal. As (Head Coach) Marc Dos Santos would tell you, the ultimate goal is to definitely to make the playoffs and win the league.”



Interestingly, the success story that is Ottawa Fury FC’s first professional season is one that is just as much about the work the club did off the pitch as it about the results the team’s players delivered on the pitch in a campaign in which the squad was competitive in pretty much every game it played.



“I think we have achieved a lot,” Pugh explained. “Of course, as an organization we are bigger than just soccer and, with that in mind, the crowning achievement has been the opening of TD Place. It was an enormous effort to bring that to fruition ever since we put a spade in the ground in October 2012. I think everybody in Ottawa is rightly of proud of what we have there now and they are happy that we finally have a stadium back for CFL football, for the birth of NASL soccer and a refurbished arena for the Ottawa 67’s.”



“Ottawa is on the soccer map now,” he added. “15,000 people watched the Fury against the Cosmos in the opening game at TD Place and almost 9,000 people came out to watch Glasgow Rangers in an exhibition game in arguably the best stadium in the league.”



While Pugh is a savvy enough businessman to know that you can never take anything for granted with a new venture, he also wasn’t shy in admitting that with respect to the Fury and TD Place he very much subscribed to the belief that ‘if you build it, they will come’.



“I think Ottawa has always been a soccer town in the sense that if you put on really high quality soccer events, people would come out for it,” Pugh said. “In 2007 we had the FIFA U20 Men’s World Cup here and people came out and it was five straight sellouts of 27,000. We’ve had Women’s National Team matches here in the past and those attracted big crowds as well.”



“The real test was having your own team and building your own fan base,” Pugh continued. “I think we have done well. We obviously started off at Carleton, where we didn’t have a lot of seats and it holds only 3,000 people. We also started with some pretty ropey weather. I think the reaction of the fans has been kind of a double whammy – the reaction has been that these games have been good and that NASL soccer has been very good. So they have enjoyed the quality and the standard of play. And then they have also been enjoying all of that in the midst of an absolutely brand new stadium with all of the latest digital facilities, with Wi-Fi in every seat and a big screen and digital advertising boards and a brand new field turf field. What’s not to like about that for the entry of soccer into Ottawa?”



Asked how the organization plans to build on the excitement generated for a club that had both its first season and a new stadium as part of the inherent atmosphere in 2014, Pugh is confident the Fury has both the right approach and the right people in place to build upon a solid first year as a professional club.



“There is no doubt that Ottawans like winning teams,” Pugh stated. “So it will require the mix of a winning team on the field, a team that plays attractive football and that has some interesting characters on it and an organization that integrates significantly into the community. We’ve made a major effort to work with the community clubs to make sure that they have access to bring their players and have them play on the field at half-time and be the player escorts.”



“We’ve also tried very hard to make the experience at the game as attractive as possible,” Pugh explained. “We’ve tried to integrate with what our three supporters groups want to do. That’s a building experience as well because most soccer fans realize that they are part of the game and part of the experience. That’s something that our fans our learning and they are getting more involved in the game stuff that would come naturally if they went to an EPL game. You wouldn’t be sitting and not singing for very long because that is just the way it is there.”



In addition to the club’s dedication to both a sound business strategy and a focus on cementing the team’s identity within the Ottawa community, the Ottawa Fury FC President sounds particularly confident that he has the right people leading his soccer club towards achieving the type of successful results on the pitch that are the basis for enduring overall success in professional sports.



“I don’t think anybody can underestimate that,” Pugh said. “The (soccer professionals) we have been able to hire have been a coup for us and we were extraordinarily fortunate to be able to initially hire Marc Dos Santos. Here is a guy who speaks English, Portuguese, Spanish and French, with French being very important in our market. He has coached and won at the second division level with the Montreal Impact and has won the Amway Canadian Championship. He has many contacts worldwide and he spent a couple of years successfully coaching in Brazil before he joined us.”



“Marc is also incredibly magnetic with the media, so he has been a dream come true,” he continued. “He came in wanting to build a team from scratch and relishing that opportunity, as he had a very clear vision of the team he wanted and how he wanted to play. On top of that he was choosing the right people to come into a new city and to integrate with the community and to basically be good people.”



“It was obviously another coup to bring in Martin Nash and have him begin his coaching career at the pro level in Ottawa,” Pugh added. “He has loads and loads of experience. More recently we were able to bring in Bruce Grobbelaar as our goalkeeper coach. And Marc’s brother Phillip Dos Santos is in charge of the academy. I think it is quite a lineup and one that I think many clubs in North America would be happy to have.”



With the club’s first season now in the books, the Ottawa Fury FC President is already looking forward to building on what has been a successful inaugural NASL season for his organization.



“Generally, it has been a great year for soccer in Ottawa,” Pugh said. “We’re optimistic about the future.”