Eddie Carvacho: Building a Hispanic Fan Base for The Columbus Crew

For years, businesses have tested new products in the city of Columbus, Ohio. The capital city is known as a good test market because its population largely resembles that of the United States as a whole. So perhaps it’s not surprising that in the past few years, like many places that did not traditionally have much of a Hispanic population, Columbus has been an ever more popular destination for immigrants from Latin America (the city’s Festival Latino last year drew 300,000 people).

The local MLS team, the Columbus Crew, has taken note of the growing Hispanic population in the area. This year, they appointed Eddie Carvacho, the team’s former goalkeeper coach, as their Director of Hispanic Development. Upon his appointment, Carvacho said, “My objective is very simple. I am the connector within our organization between the growing Hispanic community…” While his objective may be simple, achieving it is anything but. Carvacho spoke with me recently about the challenges of attracting Hispanic fans to the Crew.

Eddie Carvacho (photo: Columbus Crew)

Unlike other demographics that MLS teams are trying to attract, Hispanics are already soccer fans. Eddie Carvacho himself loved soccer from the time he was a child. Growing up in Chile, he says, he would often go to the stadium, make sure no police were around, hop the fence, and watch his team play for free. Now, his job is to get people like him to buy tickets to games.

Doing so is no simple task, says Carvacho. Hispanics, he says, “don’t communicate by email so I can’t send a mass email.” Instead, he has to “entrench himself in the community.” He does this by meeting with local community leaders, putting up promotional material at stores frequented by the Hispanic population, going to local Hispanic soccer leagues, doing publicity with local Spanish-language media, and talking with people he meets on a daily basis. The local Hispanic community is quite mobile, and this requires a multitude of strategies to reach these potential fans.

More than anything, Carvacho insists that his job is about building bonds with the local Hispanic community. “It’s not just calling up someone and saying, ‘Do you want to buy some tickets?’ It’s relationship-building.”

The Crew has used Hispanics’ soccer fanaticism to their advantage by organizing a tournament called Copa Victoria that attracts Hispanic teams. Carvacho says he uses the tournament as an opportunity to talk to the players and their families about the Crew and he hopes that some of them will buy tickets to a game.

The 2006 winners of the Copa Victoria at Crew Stadium (photo: Columbus Crew)

The main strategy that MLS as a whole has used to attract Hispanic fans is to bring in high-profile players from Latin America. The Chicago Fire’s signing of Cuauhtemoc Blanco is the latest example of this practice, which has been fairly successful (Blanco’s first match in Columbus drew a healthy crowd of over 20,000 fans). Eddie Carvacho approves of this approach, saying that whatever brings Hispanic fans to the stadium is fine with him. “If it’s Blanco, great. … If it’s Ivan Guerrero, great for the Hondurans. If it’s Wanchope, it’s Wanchope. If it’s Guillermo Barros Schelotto because of the things he’s doing, fantastic. Whatever it is that’s going to bring [Hispanic fans].”

Hispanic fans may recognize some of the players on MLS fields, but the stadium atmosphere often differs dramatically from what they saw at home. Some Hispanics, says Carvacho, are surprised to find that the stadium is largely family-friendly, in contrast to the often dangerous arenas that dot Latin America. It may be different, but Carvacho says that, “Once they come and they have a good experience in the stadium, they like the environment. They like the fact that they can get a cerveza and they can stand and drink it while they watch the game.”

The Crew is also working give its stadium a more Latin feel. This year saw the development of Turbina Amarilla, a fan club made up of mostly Hispanics, complete with drumming and singing in Spanish. It has added a new element to the stadium that Carvacho and others at the Crew hope will attract more non-Hispanic fans as well.

The Turbina Amarilla fan club (photo: posted by crewfighter on Big Soccer)

Carvacho says that the Crew’s outreach to Hispanics has been successful overall (he estimates that the team has brought in about $80,000 worth of revenue from this population). But quantifying ticket sales to Hispanic fans, he says, is a challenge. In many of their home countries, the idea of buying season tickets or even buying single-game tickets in advance of a match is relatively rare. “The biggest challenge is trying to educate them about and affect their buying behavior. The Hispanic community is very reactive and spur of the moment. They don’t understand being a season ticket holder.”

The main way Eddie Carvacho judges his success is by looking at the same-day ticket sales. He says the team’s walk-up ticket sales have been higher this year than in the past and he believes many of these are due to the increased number of Hispanic fans.

Carvacho is proud of the work he has done. “I would love for people from the league not to look at Columbus as a Midwest, small market. I want them to look at us as a progressive club that is doing things differently.” He credits Crew general manager Mark McCullers with having the foresight to reach out to the Hispanic community in Columbus, which he estimates at around 60,000 to 70,000. This Hispanic community may be small compared to that of LA, Chicago, New York, or Washington DC, but its potential impact on the Columbus Crew far outweighs its size.

Eddie Carvacho uses nearly every strategy he can think of to attract Hispanic fans to Crew games. But ultimately, he says, he has a simple message for Hispanics in the area. “We know you’re from another country and your first love lies with another team, but now you live in Columbus. There’s room for a second love.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Economics, Ethnicity/Race, Immigration, Latin America, North America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.