I don't know if John Mugarn, I hope I pronounced that name correctly, who is in charge of the soccer tournament.
He was, he is, in charge of the basketball tournament, that tournament in the summer that somebody, one team makes a million bucks. It's coming here to the Triangle Wake Med Soccer Park this summer and I cannot wait. Rexham is going to be there and that's all you needed to do. You could have had Rexham and then 31 challenge, local challenge soccer teams and I would be interested in it, John. I appreciate your time. When do the betting lines come out?
That's a great question, Adam. I remove myself from all of that, both as a better and a tournament organizer, so I'm blind to all. I totally understand why you would be. Alright, let me, let's just get to the, I guess we can start with the teams. But when you, first of all, the basketball tournament's been going on for how long? It's like almost, what, 15 years, something like that? This is the tenth year now. It's just, I know, because I know people who are all about it, right?
They love it. You get national broadcast rights have been sold. It is a great event, especially for people who are basketball heads. Is the plan for this to become soccer's version of it? It is, yeah, and we reframe the format of this to be more in line with what soccer fans are used to, which is the World Cup format.
So that's the difference. Basketball is really modeled after March Madness, 64 teams, single elimination. This one, 32 teams, group play, and then into knockout. So it's just like the World Cup, except instead of over four weeks, this is over four days.
So a lot of action. Well, you've, I remember watching in a different sport, but watching Olympic rugby, and they do rugby sevens, and the games are over in 20 minutes, and they basically lay the entire rugby tournament in five days or six days or something like that. So you're going to play all of these matches, however many there are, like 60 some odd matches, I think, you're going to play them in a span of four days. You're playing, it's 7v7. So explain, just before we get into the teams and all that, and I know Rexxim's here, and that's all people really need to know anyway, if we can go through what the format's going to look like. 7v7, give me the name, how long are these games going to be? Is it going to be, we're going to have goalies at 7v7? How's it going to look?
Sure. Normal soccer is 11 on 11. So we are going seven on seven. One of those seven on each team is a goalie, and we have a shorter, smaller field.
So it's about half the size of a regular field if you flip it perpendicularly, and that's how we're going to orient the Wake Med soccer stadium as we play. So our rule set is two 20 minute halves. All of our games will get in in about an hour, and the scoring will be anywhere from five to 10 goals a game.
So lots of action, lots of shots on goal. And then, so we do two 20 minute halves, and at the end of the second 20 minute halves, we set a target score, which is the leading team score plus one. And then the first team to the target score wins the game.
Oh, and, and Elam ending it's, it's exactly like we do in basketball. In basketball, we do plus eight on the leading score, but since there's more scoring in basketball, but for soccer, obviously less scoring, we're going to do plus one. So five to four at the end of the second half, six becomes the target score first team to six wins. And that will play out in target score time. And to make sure those games don't go on for hours and days, we're going to appeal a player off the field from each team every five minutes in that target score time. So it's going to go down to six V six, five V five, four V four, three V three, et cetera, until the game's won.
They're getting, you're going to have some exhausted people on the field if it keeps going on, but I I'm pretty confident in it. It won't, by the way, was the Elam ending your idea? It was the idea of Nick Elam. He brought it to us. He called it the a hybrid duration format and we renamed it to Elam ending thinking it would have more market appeal. And we implemented it five years ago. It's now NBA all star game. G league is adopting it sort of taken off. Yeah, I really do.
I absolutely love it. So look, there's, I keep talking about Rexham because I'm fascinated by what the whole story and whatnot. First of all, is there's a rumor that Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney are playing, are you absolutely false?
OK, categorically false. Yeah, we're going to shut that one down pretty quickly. This is this is very high level, high level soccer. So I don't think that they would want to roll themselves out there in this environment, but we have some of the best players in the world playing. So I don't think that would work out well for Rexham because this is a million dollar winner take all tournament, which means everything to a club like Rexham, especially. So so million dollar winner take all. So if you finish the runner up, you get you get nothing. Yeah, you're good at math. It's one million to the winner and then zero dollars for second place.
I love that. Zero dollars for everyone else in the tournament. So what you see is incredible high intensity play all throughout this event.
The event will be sixty three games over over four days. And you're going to see every single second of every game matter. And these games are going to be going on simultaneously because the people who have not been out to Wakeman Soccer Park, all the fields are great, incredible playing surfaces.
And it's very convenient to see all of it. Borussia Dortmund, where Jude Bellingham plays, where Gio Reyna plays, where Christian Polisic used to play there in Wolverhampton is a solid Premier League side. West Ham will be out there. Clint Dempsey, who now lives in North Carolina, he's going to have a team right of former kind of U.S. national team and MLS stars.
That's right. He'll have Eddie Johnson, Jermaine Jones on his team. He's going to be grouped up with a team called Sneaky Fox, which is Nick Raimondo, which is another familiar name. Lots of I think there are twenty one players in the field with with the U.S. national team experience. And one of those teams is actually the U.S. women's team, a former a team of former U.S. women's national team was put in by Heather O'Reilly. So she's got Lori Lindsey, Christine Lilly, Kat Whitehill playing. And I think Mia Hamm will be coaching Mia Hamm.
Why couldn't they? Well, I realize why they couldn't drag Mia Hamm out. It's been a while since she's played Chad Ocho Cinco is also playing. I know he tried out.
He actually tried to get with who was it? A kid sporting Casey back in the day. Yeah. Yeah.
He'll he'll be on the Natty FC team, a team of a former MLS players out of Cincinnati. So I'm very eager to see that play out. I mean, this this whole thing is fascinating. How many teams did you have to turn down for this? We had over 450 teams apply for 32 spots.
So we had no idea what to expect. And we announced this event in October and we just got absolutely inundated with interest from all over the world. And that was a first for us with TVT, with basketball. The interest in the is mainly coming from the U.S. with U.S. players. But in this case, we have a field now coming from UK, Asia, all over the place. Israel. They have a team from from from Israel is here as well. John Mugar is joining us here. He is the CEO of the basketball tournament TVT and the soccer tournament TST.
First, what else can you tell us that? I mean, I don't think you have to really spark interest in this. We are a soccer mad world, especially here in the triangle. Are you hoping that this will hit big enough where it becomes something you take around the country?
Or do you like it here forever? We've been approached by people who want to take it and put it in different parts of the world and not the whole event, but have a play in in a different country. For example, what we love and why we ended up down there is, as you already alluded to, the quality of field. And we knew that we had this player base. We need to roll out an elite level field and they want to play on grass.
They don't want to play on turf. So this is a great spot for us to be. And I would love this for this to be a longer term plant here down in Cary. We love it so far. It is. It's a great facility. I look forward to this again. The the teams that are here, if you if you go read it and I know the I believe it's going to be released to the public if it hasn't already just been released to the public.
I was looking through it. There are incredible names here and some of the names are kind of hidden, like the whole Natty FC, which gives you former against Chad Ochocinco, Charlotte FC will be a part of it. Duke alumni is going to be here. NCFC, which is obviously local.
So we have a little bit of a local flair as well. It just it just looks like a blast. And four days, right? In what, July, June and July and June, June, June four. So in four weeks. And yes, it's over the course of four days.
And this is usually hyperbole. But just buy tickets now if you if you want to come because we're going to start selling sessions out, I think, within a couple hours. It's been a it's been a really, really hot ticket. So what the experience we're trying to achieve here and model after is the U.S. open for women, I mean, for tennis. And if you've been in that before, everyone always talks about the other main stadium is great. It is what it is. But people always talk about the side courts and coming up and being like top 100 players in the world up close. And that's exactly the look and feel we want to achieve with this event to multiple fields at the same time. Huge international soccer star Seth Fabregas is another one we haven't talked about coming out playing, coaching, soccer.
This is an awesome idea. I don't know what took you so long to get to it. Sorry.
Yeah, we have another sport coming up soon. Oh, do you? I can't tell you that.
Pickle ball. I'm just I'm just just a guess. John Mugar, I appreciate your time. If if I can be of any assistance again, let me know. Thanks a lot, Adam.
Appreciate it. You got it. John Mugar, who's in charge of the soccer tournament, TST, 32 teams, eight groups of four, just like the World Cup. Group play, knockout stage, top two teams in each group advance. Borussia Dortmund, Wolverhampton, West Ham, Wrexham.
I mean, just absolutely awesome. Charlotte FC and CFC in the same group. They already announced the groups. The Duke alumni is going to be in in the same group. Raleigh Rebels, another local group, all of that in the same group. Clint Dempsey, who again lives in North Carolina, is has got a team. It's going to be an absolute jamboree. And I am looking forward to that.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-05-04 18:07:31 / 2023-05-04 18:12:36 / 5