Club Eleven is the latest platform to appear on SportsBiz Spotlight! The series is all about speaking to businesses in the sports industry and learning more about what they do.
Introduction to Club Eleven
Club Eleven is a brand for players, creators, and supporters, telling the untold stories of soccer. We aspire to be the tide that raises all boats in American Soccer. We are storytellers.
Tell us about the business: what do you do, when was it founded, what’s the inspiration?
Club Eleven was founded in September of 2018 in College Park, Maryland. Back then, and still today, we felt like there was an opportunity to tell North American stories in a different way. Often, North American soccer is regarded as lesser-than or simply neglected because of its unique and different nature. But that’s exactly what we want to highlight, the stories that fall beneath the cracks, the untold stories of soccer.
Internally working as a growing collective of 25+ creatives made up of photographers & writers, we all share a similar passion for these stories, and as the year 2020 came to a close, we decided to completely rebrand and go full time at searching and presenting these stories in an editorial fashion, to a much wider audience.
Today, we work on releasing one issue a week, varying editorial pieces between NWSL, MLS, USL, fan stories, and collaborations with like-minded brands in the North American soccer space. You can find our weekly newsletter issues here.
We are inspired by the stories we are fortunate enough to tell on a weekly basis, and learning from each of them is truly what pushes us forward as a brand.
What’s your main purpose?
Our job is to find all the stones in the North American soccer landscape and unturn them. We work for the players, the creators, and the supporters. Our ultimate goal is to inspire them through the stories we tell and grow the game of soccer in North America together.
If failure wasn’t a possibility, what would be your biggest ambition?
We’re going to tell every North American soccer story, no matter how long it takes. Everyone has a story to tell.
What’s your USP?
We know the landscape. As a brand whose core is made up of fans, players, and creatives alike, we present the game and our stories in a way that can only be done so with such a collective group pulling the levers of the brand.
What we mean by this is that to really understand the game in the United States, you need to live it, you need to immerse yourself in the worlds outside of just Major League Soccer, outside of the headlines designed to attract European viewership, which really never tell the whole picture for what it is.
We’ve done the hard work, we’ve been on the ground, and we can genuinely say our team understands what it takes to grow the game here.
It starts with respecting our history and those making history in the present and future of North American soccer. That kind of transparency and unwavering belief in the possibilities this game has to bring in North America is what sets us apart as a brand.
How many people work at Club Eleven and in what capacity?
We are currently a collective of 25+ creators.
How to connect with Club Eleven…
You can find us online at clubelevenmag.com, and receive our weekly issues here.
Lastly, make sure to check out our Instagram grid here, I promise you’ll learn a thing or two about the game of soccer in North America there.
Thanks to Gabriel from Club Eleven for speaking to us about what they’re getting up to!
If you would like to feature your sports based business or know of an organisation you would like to see feature, get in touch.
