Hoover council turns down proposal for international SoccerEx convention

The Hoover City Council on Thursday night turned down a proposal to host an international SoccerEx convention next year with a 4-3 vote.

Councilmen John Greene, Casey Middlebrooks, Derrick Murphy and Curt Posey voted against the measure, while Councilmen John Lyda, Mike Shaw and Gene Smith voted in favor of it.

The proposal was for the city to pay more than $500,000 to host a two-day soccer convention that organizers said likely would bring 1,000 to 1,500 prominent figures in the soccer industry from 41 countries in North America, Central America and the Caribbean to Hoover in September 2018.

Greene said he wants every venture that Hoover undertakes to be successful and for the city to continue to have a reputation for excellence.

However, he had numerous concerns with the SoccerEx proposal. First, the full council had only one week to consider the idea and was not presented the final 21-page resolution authorizing the mayor to negotiate and sign a contract with SoccerEx until Thursday morning.

“I do not think that one week is sufficient time to research and review the data and make a good decision for our city,” Greene said.

Second, council members had very little data to review, he said. An agent for SoccerEx gave a 30-minute presentation to the council a week ago and met individually with some members, but the only written information he had was two SoccerEx brochures, two impact studies from SoccerEx conventions in other cities and a magazine article about SoccerEx’s 2017 global convention, he said.

“I have not seen a business plan or any financial records and cannot imagine investing in anything based on such incomplete information,” Greene said.

Third, there is a very clear difference between Hoover and other cities where SoccerEx has had conventions, such as Paris, London, Manchester, Johannesburg, Los Angeles and Rio de Janiero, he said.

“Each of these cities is already a popular tourist destination, already has a solid reputation as a global event and conference destination and already has an established and proven business tourism strategy successfully in place,” Greene said. “I believe that Hoover can and should develop its own tourism strategy plan and work toward becoming a global event and tourism destination, but those necessary elements are simply not in place right now.”

Hoover Mayor Frank Brocato didn’t have a vote on the project but said he absolutely would not sign the proposed contract with SoccerEx.

Brocato and Greene both said SoccerEx, a global leader in soccer conventions that has been endorsed by the U.S. Soccer Federation and Major League Soccer, was asking Hoover to take on all the risk associated with the convention.

Brocato said it was almost absurd for the organization to ask Hoover to put up $500,000 to host the convention, provide 250 free nights in luxury hotel rooms with breakfast provided and pay international airfare for SoccerEx officials to make an advance site visit from London.

Brocato asked the Greater Birmingham Convention and Visitors Bureau to analyze the proposal and said a bureau official told him that if their organization was considering the deal, it might pay $50,000 for the right to host the convention.

John Oros Jr., president of the visitors bureau, said in a letter to Brocato that the “tourism impact from the SoccerEx conference would not be worth the dollars invested.” From a tourism perspective, that money would be better used to pay bid fees to secure new youth sports tournaments that generate a far greater economic impact in the Hoover community, Oros wrote.

Brocato said this is a pretty good conference and the city ought to try to get it, but he can’t see investing that much money in it. Hoover has other avenues to reach the global market, whether through international visitors who already stay at the Renaissance Ross Bridge Golf Resort & Spa or through the international companies that already have a presence in Hoover, Brocato said.

“Don’t sell yourself short, gentlemen,” he told the council. “We are a world-class small city. We’re on the world stage, and we have been for a long, long time.”

Posey said he liked the idea of the convention, but he thinks it’s too big for Hoover to tackle alone. He would rather have seen Hoover pull in some partners, such as Dr. Larry Lemak (the medical director for Major League Soccer), the Alabama Sports Foundation, the state of Alabama, the federal government and the governing body for soccer in North America, Central America and the Caribbean, he said.

Posey said he also didn’t feel good about moving forward with the convention without the support of the mayor and other council members. “Without his signature, it’s dead,” Posey said of the mayor. “He is the negotiating party. All we can do is authorize him to negotiate it.”

Both Dr. Lemak and Gene Hallman, president and CEO of the Alabama Sports Council, spoke to the City Council tonight about the SoccerEx proposal.

Lemak said he couldn’t speak to the economics of the proposal but confirmed a SoccerEx convention is a “major, major event” that has an international draw.

Hallman said he, too, didn’t know enough details about the SoccerEx proposal to render an opinion about it but said soccer is really catching on both in this area and nationally. The U.S. soccer community developed an affinity for the Birmingham-Hoover area after the 1996 Olympics and other international soccer matches at Legion Field over the years, he added.

As the council was debating the merits of the SoccerEx proposal, Shaw said everything he had heard about the organization legitimizes it.

“What makes this big is not that it’s a big event,” Shaw said. “What makes it big is the people that come here. We have the high-level executives from the largest sport in the entire world.”

Hoover can easily handle a convention with 1,500 people, he said. Opportunities like this to be on the world stage don’t come around very often, he said.

“We have a Ferrari of a sports complex,” Shaw said. “We have a high-end, world-class sports facility, and we’ve got to give it fuel. … If we balk at the opportunity like this, we starve that facility of opportunities that we need to really ramp it up to the things we need it to do.”

Lyda said there’s a distinct difference between short-term payoff and strategic vision. The city has invested $80 million in a facility that’s world-class and that needs strategic vision, he said. He thanked Smith for taking the lead on this project.

“This is an opportunity to give Hoover exposure on a global stage like we’ve never had before,” Lyda said. The $500,000 price tag brings a degree of sticker shock, but “opportunity knocks, and it doesn’t knock often.”

Greene said he found it difficult to spend more than $500,000 on a project when city departments had to cut their operating budgets for 2018 by 10 percent and this project may or may not break even.

“The bottom line here is that there is too little time for consideration, too many maybes and not enough certainties for me to support this project,” Greene said.

After the vote failed, Lyda said the city missed an opportunity to showcase its world-class complex and what the city has to offer, “but there will be other opportunities.”

Lyda said he’s sorry the mayor and some of his colleagues on the council didn’t have a chance to go with Smith and himself to Manchester, England, to see firsthand the SoccerEx global convention in September. That trip helped him see the global reach that SoccerEx has, and he wishes he had done a better job of sharing that vision with the mayor and his colleagues, he said.

Smith said he was disappointed in the vote but not upset. “I don’t want anyone to walk away from this process upset,” he said.

The mayor had his own choice to make and that’s part of the process, he said. “I don’t fault anyone. I really don’t.”