Buffalo Pro Soccer President Peter Marlette Sits Down with Beyond the 90
An interview covering ownership group development, stadium plans, community outreach, and more.
On March 28, the USL announced an initiative to bring a USL Championship team to Buffalo, New York by 2026. The initiative was led by Peter Marlette Jr., a former executive with Union Omaha in USL League One, and promised a 10,000 seat soccer-specific stadium. The project also had the support of FC Buffalo, the region’s USL2 side. With only a few local media updates coming out on the project since the announcement, Beyond the 90 met with Mr. Marlette to see how the project has been coming along over the last two months.
BT90: Can you give readers a quick introduction of yourself?
Marlette: I’m Peter Marlette. I’m the President of Buffalo Pro Soccer, which is the group that holds the expansion rights to the Buffalo, western New York, and southern Ontario markets in the USL. Prior to starting this project, I was the general manager of Union Omaha in USL League One for three seasons, where I was in charge of both the on-field technical operation and the business operation.
What inspired/led you to start the project, and how long were preliminary talks taking place before the announcement?
I grew up in Buffalo, in the city of Buffalo. I’m actually sitting in a house that my wife and I bought a few months ago when we just moved home, like five minutes away from the home that I grew up in, in downtown Buffalo. This was always a place that I wanted to be. My wife’s from here, as well; both our families are here. We love it here, but the truth is with my career path it probably wasn’t going to work for us to be here, honestly. Without the professional club here, there really wasn’t the right job for me in the market. We wanted to get back, but the truth is we weren’t just going to move back for some random opportunity. I wasn’t going to take on a project in Buffalo unless I truly believed that it was going to be successful.
All of the demographic indicators suggest that this market is perfect for a USL Championship club, a stable, successful, financially and on the field, market for a USL Championship-level club. Once the opportunity came up with the league, I did a little research, but frankly I already knew that Buffalo was a great market for this. So, I negotiated that expansion agreement and came out.
We officially announced publicly about 5-6 weeks ago now. I have been working on it full-time quietly, prior to the announcement, for about 4-5 months at that point. Basically, when I officially resigned from my job at Union Omaha on November 17 (the day after the League One season ended), I begin working on the project on November 18.
How do preliminary talks work with the league? How is an expansion market offered up by the league (the “opportunity that came up”), and how do the expansion negotiations work?
The opportunity arose because I had been building towards something like this for a decade. It didn’t just come out of nowhere and get presented to anybody. I had been building my background and experience up in a way that would make me the right person for USL to trust to do a project like this. And that was all very intentional, I’ll say.
The rights to this market were previously held by a different group, an out-own town group based in Connecticut. I don’t know the details exactly, but for a number of reasons, they didn’t pursue it completely. At the League Board of Governors meeting in Colorado Springs last summer, it was presented to me that the rights in Buffalo were going to be available pretty soon, and am I ready to do it? Do I think it’s time to leave Omaha and start working on this project? The answer was an emphatic yes.
But then, the actual negotiations - you know, we had a verbal agreement and I was working on it full time - the actual expansion contract took 6 weeks, maybe even two months (it’s all kinda a blur at this point) to actually get it finalized and put pen to paper. That said, it was all moving in the right direction, so I was working on it before that contract was signed. But, it took a couple months.
Your group still needs an ownership group. You’ve told local media that you’ve been in discussions with potential investors, so what is the progress of those talks?
I am building that ownership group. It has grown significantly since the announcement. Investors are pretty excited about this project and they’re starting to write the checks to indicate that.
The requirement of the USSF is a principal owner who owns 35% or more of the club. I am in advanced conversations with two different individuals who certainly meet all the requirements, and we’re going to see where those end up. But truthfully, the timeline that I’ve put together as I’m building out the minority ownership group, which is going very well and I’m raising a lot of money there to fund the expenses and the startup costs of this, the timeline I set forth was that I was hoping to have the principle (owner) at least verbally agreed to by the end of this year, and I think we’re well ahead of that schedule. But again, you never know until the paper gets signed.
Let’s talk about the future stadium location. You’ve mentioned that there are 4 different locations, 2 of them in downtown. Are you allowed to get into specifics of where those are, and how is that process going?
I’m not allowed to get into specifics of where those are at this point. They are, as I’ve said in previous interviews, they are all in the city of Buffalo. Two of them are right downtown, but the other two are not far from right downtown.
I would say that two of those sights have really started to stand out as the conversations have advanced, but I think the stadium would work in any one of them. So, at this point it’s not so much going through a map, having interviews, trying to figure out exactly where it should be. It’s more trying to make sure that we’re picking the right location, and I think it would work in any one of those four, but you still want to choose the best one.
Do you have plans for training ground locations?
Depending on the site that we end up going with, we may be set. We may not need to build anything of our own due to existing infrastructure. Also, I have spoken to some groups who own or are building some indoor facilities that we could partner and work with. So, Buffalo right now has a ton of indoor “pretty-good” facilities that we could make work. I don’t know that there’s a perfect solution right now from a covered indoor perspective, but there are plenty of options that are all pretty good. For 70% of the season, for most of the season, we should be able to train at the stadium that we’re building, so that we won’t require a year-round training facility necessarily. But with the weather being what it is, you need some access to indoor facilities for preseason and then the occasional bad-weather week or whatever it may be.
So, yeah, depending on the site, maybe we build a separate training pitch or our own training facility. It remains to be seen and it’s gonna depend a lot on what our site selection is, honestly.
Do you have plans to begin establishing a front office?
The goal in the timeline is to start hiring the keys positions, the head of departments, at the end of this year, Q4 of this year, ideally have them before January 1 of next year, but if they start on January 1, that’s fine. I’m down to do a top-down build where I’m hiring the head of the departments first and then allowing those’re individuals to build their team around them. It’s my goal to hire front office heads, vice presidents, whatever their role ends up being, who know more than I do about the department that they are in charge them. I want to give them their budget and trust them to build the appropriate team around them within that budget.
So, yeah, towards Q4 of this year, it won’t be before Q4 of this year, but I think that’s probably about right and then early next year those heads of departments will build the team around them.
In the front office setup, do you plan to be the general manager of the club?
Yes. It will be largely the same role that I did in Omaha, which will be heading up the technical department and the business operation. Right now, I’m President of Buffalo Pro Soccer, that’s my title. Once the club is announced, I plan on being President and General Manager of whatever we decide to go with for the team name.
You’ve talked about having a partnership with the existing USL2 club, FC Buffalo. You’ve played there and said some of your favorite goals were scored there. Has a merger between the clubs been discussed, or it is more going to be more of a player pipeline partnership?
It’s all very preliminary. Nick Mendola, who owns that club and who owned it when I played for them about 15 years ago, he and I have a good relationship. We’ve had good preliminary conversations about what this looks like, and we both agree that we will collaborate and coordinate in some way. Whether that is an acquisition of the club by Buffalo Pro Soccer or just a partnership, we haven’t really gotten into those details yet. But, we both agree that having the USL League Two club is really important for the professional club, and vice-versa. Having the professional club at the top of the pyramid makes the USL League Two club all the more attractive to players and fans. So, we both agree that we need to work together and it’s in everybody’s best interest to form some collaboration. The exacts details of what that looks like, we’ve got to iron out still.
You have already started to work in the community and make the club known with town halls. What are your plans in the future to continue working in the community and make yourself known?
The town halls are going to be monthly, at least monthly, honestly. The initial plan in what we’ve built out is monthly, but that first town hall last Thursday, we were planning on roughly 60 people plus media being there and there were 120 plus media. So, if the appetite, the market, and the fans continue to show the interest, maybe we need to do it every two weeks or something like that.
Our next town hall is going to be Thursday, June 6, at Wayland Brewing, which is in Orchard Park, New York. The plan is not to host these in the same location in the city of Buffalo every time. There’s a ton of soccer being played and supported throughout Western New York; we don’t want to make those people who might not live in the city travel to us to get the information they want to know. We’re going to go to them.
So the next one’s in Orchard Park, and we’re going to hit every suburb around the city and probably further out, definitely go to Niagara at some point, cross the border and go up to southern Ontario at some point, probably this summer so we can hang out on the lake a little bit as well, which is beautiful up there.
But yeah, the town halls will be the most regular ongoing community outreach and engagement platform that we have. But at the same time, I have four season tickets to FC Buffalo. We’ll be giving those away, I’ll be going to games, we’ll be engaging with fans. Tomorrow (Sunday), I’m going to be at The Banshee in downtown Buffalo for the Premier League final day. We’ve going to be out and about plenty, but the town halls will be the most consistent touch point.
How do you want to use your experience from your time as Union Omaha GM to help build the club?
Union Omaha, we built on the field the most successful team in League One. Actually, the team that’s on the field this year, which I built with their head coach Dominic Casciato, who I hired last year and he did an amazing job (was Coach of the Year), this team this year I think is the best team that Union Omaha has ever had. Maybe this is a big statement, but I think it’d be tough to argue with statistically, means it’s probably the best team that USL League One has had. We’ll see how that plays out, but they are really good.
So, a lot of the on-field, team building, staff building, sporting operation stuff, I’m going to do exactly what I did there because it was successful. I’m just going to add the budget to make it fit the Championship model as opposed to League One, because the Championship is a more expensive league, unquestionably.
Then, I think a lot of Union Omaha, and it’s probably no fault of their own, it’s probably just timing, in their first year of existence - so I came in after season one, I was hired and officially started in February after the first season, so kind of in the middle of that offseason - it was COVID their first year. So, they didn’t, again, it’s probably not their fault, but they didn’t get the opportunity to get out into the community and to get all the community input that really matters, especially at this level. If you’re going to build a team representative of the city that you’re in, you need to get the input and you need to be engaging with the people and the fans in that city constantly. Union Omaha in their foundation didn’t do that or weren’t able to do that as well as they could have because of COVID, because everybody was stuck inside.
Luckily, we’re not having that health crisis so I’m able to get out into the community and engage with people and hear what this market wants. But also, I’m making a big effort to do so. I’m going to be out a lot. The town halls are obviously going to happen consistently, but that is not going to be it at all. Building that grassroots engagement from day one is really, really important. I’m from here, I grew up here, I know this market well, but I can’t assume that the way I think is the way that everybody else here thinks. I need to learn from the community and really try to build this team around them, not just what I perceive to be the correct vision.
Two months after the public announcement of Buffalo Pro Soccer, Peter Marlette has things ahead of schedule. With two possible majority owners, two favored stadium sites, and a plan to establish the club’s front office by the end of the year, the club seems destined to be on the field by 2026. But, the best part of all of this news is that this club will be grounded and built with the fans in mind, getting as much input from them as possible. It may be a Division II club, but they’re attempting to be a grassroots club, rooted in the voices of western New York and Canada, and that’s where they’ll truly succeed.
This was a pleasantly surprising nice read where the front of an ownership group gets it and didn't dodge any questions. That's the sign of a group is not only in it for the long haul but one that through sheer will alone will be successful.
Considering I have friends in the greater Buffalo area I might have to make the long drive to Buffalo and catch a game.
Well done! This is an area of the country that will have difficulty playing during winter months. But, I like to hear about their plans for potential training facilities to mitigate those risks.