A Market With Built-In Kick : Soccer Specialty Stores, Big Chains Grapple With Problem of Catering to World’s Most Popular Sport
You’re a jugadore in dire need of a great pair of zapatos. Chances are Oshman’s won’t have those $89 Diadora Casio model shoes for your futbol match this Saturday. And you can bet your pantalones that you won’t find a vast selection of soccer gear at Big 5.
What’s a player to do?
Point those cleatless feet toward Pla Sports in Anaheim, Ruvalcaba Sporting Goods in Santa Ana or one of the other soccer specialty stores that dot the Southern California sporting landscape.
Many of these shops started out serving the Southland’s Latino soccer leagues. But the growth of the sport’s popularity has helped these one-time ethnic markets to reach a crossover clientele, from suburban kiddie players to high school and college teams.
Major Chains Increase Inventories
Although top soccer gear is still hard to find at America’s sports emporiums, many of the major chains have made efforts to increase their soccer inventories. In addition, a slew of suburban soccer shops have sprung up to tap the expanding market.
“I don’t know of any one large chain that has a real marketing plan for soccer,” said Sandy Briggs, executive director of the Soccer Industry Council of America. “That’s the reason there are so many soccer specialty stores.”
What does Big 5 Sporting Goods have to say of the charge that it and its massive retail compatriots give short shrift to the most popular sport in the world? Not much.
The quantity of soccer gear in Big 5’s 107 outlets has “increased in the last couple years,” said Tom Schlauch, Big 5 hard goods merchandising manager. “And we run more soccer equipment in our ads at soccer season. . . . As far as what relationship it has to (the rest of) our business, they don’t want us telling that.”
Still, the chains are not leading the race for America’s amateur soccer dollars, industry experts say. But many of the specialty outlets are running into serious obstacles, too, including the difficulty of marketing sophisticated gear to a relatively small audience and competition from cut-rate sporting goods smuggled up from central Mexico through Tijuana and sold in Latino neighborhoods.
‘A Very Intense Marketing Effort’
“It’s inconceivable to me that anyone can make it just selling soccer gear, but they do it by becoming very involved in the soccer communities,” Briggs said. “It’s a very intense marketing effort that they have to make.”
Few proprietors know the vagaries of the soccer market and the need for promotion as well as Maria Pla, founder of Orange County’s first soccer store.
When Pla, a native of Cuernavaca, Mexico, first came to Orange County in the mid-1970s, there was no place to buy soccer shorts, jerseys or cleats for her athletic children, Nancy and Juan-Carlos. And no adult leagues existed, she said, for the two to shoot for when they improved their skills and outgrew youth soccer.
“It was really hard to get something nice,” she recalled. “We had to go to Tijuana,” an awfully long drive to replace that ripped jersey or worn-out shoe. So in 1976, Pla and her husband, Carlos, started the kitchenette-sized Pla Sports in downtown Anaheim.
“When we first opened, some days we made only 25 cents selling the La Opinion newspaper,” Pla said.
To fill her store with customers--and give her children a future playing outlet--Maria Pla started the Golden Soccer League. Several years later, the league had grown enough to spawn the Major Soccer League, which catered to players of lesser skill. Today, the leagues together boast nearly 3,000 players.
Who outfits them? Maria Pla.
“And when the players come to the store to find out where they’re going to play,” she says smiling, “they buy socks, shin guards. . . . “
The Plas started out catering to the Latino athletic community, working long hours in the store and keeping full-time jobs outside of it. Carlos, however, made a pact with his wife that when “Americans start coming to the store too, we would quit our jobs,” she said.
Americans Show Up, Ready to Buy
Maria handed in her resignation in 1978 and Carlos in 1981. “At first, the American people didn’t show up,” Maria said. “They didn’t show up until the last five years. Now, it’s mostly Americans.”
Between 1983 and 1988, Pla’s annual sales nearly tripled, from $55,000 to an expected $250,000 this year. Business has been good enough to support three store expansions, the four Plas and a toy--a sleek, silver 1986 Corvette with the license plate “PLA SOQR.”
Although there is no official count, the Soccer Industry Council estimates that Pla Sports is one of about 500 soccer specialty stores nationwide, of which about 30 are in Southern California. If small sporting goods stores with large soccer departments are included in the count, the number rises to about 40.
Orange County, with its vibrant youth soccer leagues and large Latino population, has four dedicated soccer stores. In addition to Pla and Ruvalcaba, there is Soccer Warehouse in Anaheim and the Soccer Shoppe and Specialty Sports in Mission Viejo. At least five more shops cater largely to the soccer buff, according to distributors and manufacturers.
While the competition appears to be as cutthroat in these stores as it is on the field, purveyors of soccer wear can take heart. According to a recent study released by the soccer council, about 15 million Americans over the age of 6 played soccer at least once in 1987.
Nearly 6 million of those players were classified as “frequent” participants, dribbling the ball at least 25 days out of the year; an additional 2.3 million were considered “serious” participants, playing 52 or more days.
Sales Increase 30% in 5 Years
Those players bought $105 million worth of soccer balls and shoes in 1987, according to the National Sporting Goods Assn., which does not keep track of soccer uniform sales. That’s up 30% from the $81 million purchased five years earlier.
Local sports experts estimate that upward of 50,000 soccer aficionados reside in Orange County--30,000 kicking their way through the American Youth Soccer Organization, about 7,000 in five Latino leagues, some 6,500 on high school teams, about 200 on college teams and the rest on a variety of city-run leagues.
These minions have transformed the sport and its players into perfect specialty store customers, according to Lynn Berling-Manuel, associate publisher and editor-in-chief of the newspaper Soccer America.
“The tradition of soccer in America is working class, lower income, very male, very ethnic,” Berling-Manuel said. “It’s the same profile in the rest of the world. That original market was very small any way you looked at it. It was not upscale. But in the last 20 years, we’ve had a new market come in.”
Enter what Berling-Manuel calls “the nouveau fan,” middle-class to upper-middle-class adults who got involved in soccer through their children. About 43% are professionals, administrators or entrepreneurs, she said, and nearly 50% have annual household incomes of more than $50,000.
Which comes in handy when you look at the costs of outfitting a player. At Soccer Warehouse in Anaheim, for example, store manager (and soccer player) Ian Sawyers sells shoes ranging from $15 to $130, uniforms from $20 to $50, shin guards from $10 to $34.
Soccer Warehouse offers about 50 different shoes from a dozen lines, eight lines of clothing, three of shin guards. While costs can run high, the store is doing well because “it’s the specialty, top-of-the-line stuff,” Saywers said. “It’s like going to a good bar.”
Orange County players find that steep prices generally cause only mild hardship, contends Colin McNeill, a manufacturers representative who covers California, Nevada and Arizona for the Lotto line of soccer gear.
To those in the soccer gear business, “Orange County is very much classified as a quality soccer area, with a much larger percentage of club soccer,” McNeill said. “Club soccer” is a term that describes highly competitive leagues frequented by the better players and unlike the egalitarian American Youth Soccer Organization, in which everyone who signs up plays.
“This is a growing club soccer area; putting that in terms of dollars, they (club players) tend to spend more money on shoes and equipment,” McNeill said.
But not every team can afford to spend $700 to outfit its players. Those who cannot often find ways to circumvent retailers, a situation that causes some merchants to steam and others to go begging.
Maria Pla contends that her toughest competition is not a store like Soccer Warehouse. Instead, she says, her business is most affected by two other sources. The first is the manufacturer who goes directly to the teams to sell his goods, an entirely legal practice.
The second problem, Pla said, is the entrepreneur who smuggles gear up from Mexico, thwarting retailers and avoiding duties and taxes at the same time.
“Most of the time,” she said, “they go to Tijuana, hide the gear, bring back a couple of sets of uniforms and sell them on the fields.”
While local police have fielded no complaints about such practices, the U.S. Customs Service in San Diego stops several such soccer smugglers each week, according to Bobbie Cassidy, a customs spokeswoman.
“It is a problem,” Cassidy said. “Basically, what happens is that we find people bringing small amounts, 20 to 100 uniforms at a time. They fail to declare them. We seize them. They have to pay a penalty up to domestic value of the items.”
Although the Customs Service does not keep statistics on such seizures, Cassidy said, smugglers generally try to sneak shirts, shorts and socks manufactured in Central Mexico through the border-crossing at Tijuana. Once in the United States, she said, the gear generally stays in Southern California.
Duties on soccer goods headed for sale in the United States range from 19.8% of retail value for cotton socks to 35% for jerseys made from synthetic fabrics, Cassidy said. Paying such duties increases the generally low price of the Mexican goods, which cost anywhere from $150 to $200 for a team, only a fraction of the cost of gear bought in America.
Henry Buenrostro is coach of the Broadway Saints soccer club, one of about 80 teams playing in the mostly Latino, Santa Ana-based Orange County Soccer League.
Although Buenrostro outfits his team with gear from a South County manufacturer or Anaheim’s Soccer Warehouse, he estimates that about 25% of the teams in his league wear uniforms brought legally--or illegally--from Mexico.
Often the gear is sold directly to the full teams, he said. “Then there are the people who have a bag full of shoes and sell them around the park,” Buenrostro said. “Twenty-five dollars for a pair of shoes is better than buying them for $60 to $70 from the store.”
A WARDROBE FOR THE WELL-DRESSED PLAYER
Carlos Pla is dressed for soccer action. These items from Pla Sports in Anaheim cost a total of $165.20.
Pla soccer ball $26
Nike Air Strike shoes $78
Nike shirt $18
Captain Arm Band $2.90
Nike shorts $12
Adidas socks $4.50
Brine shin guard $12.90
Puma tote bag $10.90
