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Peter and Debbie Moore are a power couple in Santa Barbara with extensive experience in leadership and marketing. They both worked at EA, a video game publisher, before moving on to other companies like Sonos. They are now the owners of the Santa Barbara Skies Football Club, bringing professional soccer to the community. Debbie has a background in consumer packaged goods and channel marketing, while Peter has experience in gaming and sports. They have a strong connection to Santa Barbara and are excited to be a part of the community. Bay Area always felt like home until I moved down to Santa Barbara for Sonos, and then it was like, why have I not been here? Welcome to the Santa Barbara Effect, I'm Josh Narva, and together with Rob Gross, this podcast is gonna highlight businesses, entrepreneurship, and innovation in Santa Barbara, companies, current, former, big and small, and the people behind them, the stories they have to share and the lessons that they have learned. This is gonna be really interesting, because we're not sure what we're doing, I've never done a podcast before, but we're very happy for our first episode to be joined by Peter and Debbie Moore, thank you for being here. For our first episode, we're joined by a real Santa Barbara power couple, Peter and Debbie Moore. Peter brings a wealth of leadership experience, from being the COO at the Liverpool Football Club, to gaming experience at Microsoft and EA. Debbie is a global marketing expert who spent time in leadership roles at Fitbit, GoPro, and Sonos. But one of their most significant contributions to the Santa Barbara community, and a major reason we wanted to have them on the show today, is that they're bringing professional soccer to Santa Barbara. Peter and Debbie Moore are the owners of the Santa Barbara Skies Football Club. Peter and Debbie, welcome to the show. So you guys met at EA, maybe we start with your story and how you guys met, and then the connection coming back to Montecito, Santa Barbara, all the connections here. EA, Electronic Arts, world's biggest video game publisher. I joined EA in 2007, about the same time as Debbie did. The same month. Yeah, I was previously, as you mentioned, up in rainy Seattle, I was running the Xbox business for Microsoft, but got an email from my executive recruiter in the summer of 2007, time to come home. You always remember these things, these little beats in your life that change, that provide a crossroads and a road you need to take or not take, and it was an executive recruiter I had known previously in my life and said, EA is looking for a president of EA Sports. And I had been at Xbox, totally enjoyed my time at Microsoft working for Gates and Vollmer, and bringing Microsoft, which we can talk about, away from just being a computer on your desk at work and into the living room and part of the entertainment play, and we were worried about Sony owning the living room, and so it was very much a fascinating period for me, but bringing my previous world of sports together with my video game experience at Sega and then at Xbox, and then coming back to the Bay Area was important to me, so I took on the role. It was important because it was a real stretch for me because not only was it marketing, publishing, but also the development. I had about 2,500 employees. The franchises that we were managing, of course, everybody knows Madden, the NFL franchise, but it is dwarfed by FIFA, the game formerly known as FIFA, and EA Sports FC, and we could talk about a tremendous business case there of an entity overstepping its bounds in what they thought they were worth by several hundred million dollars, all separate conversation. Debbie came in around the same time, was in trade marketing, and it's important to note that during this period, we at EA were still selling, as the industry was, millions, tens of millions of discs. This was prior to really high-speed broadband and large hard drives and the direct-to-consumer model that we're all very familiar with now in gaming that has driven gaming to a $200 billion global industry, but in this period, it was still very much, you go to GameStop, you go to Best Buy, you go to Walmart, you go to Target, you buy a disc, you take your disc home, you put it in your drive, and you play, and so trade marketing was critically important to us because when we launched, those retailers that would make a break, we needed to get our orders in, we needed to fill our warehouses, and get those discs out on day one, and gamers would queue up, as you probably remember, at midnight to get their disc and go home and play their game and Debbie was instrumental in making sure that our relationships with these retailers, that we got our biggest orders in, because that day one was so critical, it's like a movie release, what do you get on day one, and what did you sell through on day one? So positioning in-store demo units with you would send out discs a month out that you could play a level of the game, this was all critical. That business model has completely changed. Debbie, where were you at previously that led up to, I guess, a connect with gaming world, if you will? Right before EA, I was at HOT. So it's like, and before that was Clorox, so sort of classic CPG training, and so when Peter and I came in, EA had just moved to what they called a label structure, and so they had just moved all the sports titles into EA Sports, and I didn't know much about video games, I had two young boys, and that's about the extent of me watching them play video games, but like what Peter was describing, you needed to use data and analysis to go into these different retailers to try to say why you should claim more space, whether it's their online business, whether it's their flyers, whether it's their retail footprint, whatever it might be, and so we would do that all day long at Clorox and Heinz. So there was a lot of us that had come in at about that time from P&G, from Clorox, from Heinz, you know. J&J? Yeah, there were loads, and I don't know if they're still kind of pulling from that area still, but that was like why I was brought in, was because I was in that mix. But prior to that, I spent about 10 years at Costco, like loved Costco, it was great. Their early days, when did they start? Early, early days, because I was an undergrad at Berkeley, and that's how I paid for school, was I was working at Costco, started out pushing carts, and then moved my way up into management and then into marketing, opening up new warehouses. So you're from the Bay originally? Born East Coast, born in Pennsylvania, and lived Pennsylvania, New Jersey, until I was about 10. And then we moved to LA, and I was in LA until I started high school, and then we moved up to Northern Cal into the Bay Area. So yeah, Bay Area always felt like home until I moved down to Santa Barbara for Sonos. And then it was like, why have I not been here? A few more about that. Yeah, I know, I could. I loved everything about it, except I was working so damn much at Sonos and traveling. There was a lot going on at Sonos, which I loved, but I didn't get to spend the time in Santa Barbara that I really wanted to. And my personal life was kind of unraveling at that point as well, but I always knew there was something super special about this place. So fast forward to when Peter and I were living in Liverpool, and it was time to come back. And we knew we wanted to live somewhere near the ocean and for me, there was like no question in my mind, it was Santa Barbara. Yeah, just back up for a moment on the Sonos piece. I'd like you to talk for a minute about Green Street, but prior to that, you ran basically channel marketing. Yeah, global channel marketing. And it was at a time when we had just rebranded and become consumer-facing. So the marketing team that had been assembled was really to take the Sonos brand out of being an AV specialist brand to becoming more of a plug and play and all the music in the world in every room of your house, all through one controller. It's so emblazoned in my brain. And the business was bigger in Europe at the time. We had just gotten Target. I think Target had just come on board and we were just getting Best Buy on board, which is so funny to think about that they weren't key retailers of the Sonos brand. So Debbie, you went directly from EA to Sonos. No, I had a couple little hiccups in there. Peter, where he was going, there was a transition. My team was really all about selling these discs and it was fun to hear him talk about it because we would coordinate these huge launch parties. We took over the Rose Bottle in Pasadena for a Madden launch with Walmart as the final sponsor. And it was amazing. A hundred thousand people. Oh, huge. And then the sales that happened that go along and it was just fun. And it was one of the first times in my career that I realized how much passion could be involved in a brand. Because listen, we all loved our bleach and our ketchup at Heinz, but it was a little different when you were launching the lemon scented bleach. It didn't quite line up the same way Madden did. So there was a shift that was happening and moving to a digital platform. So discs, as we know, kind of gone the way of vinyl as far as the gaming category is concerned. And my team was eliminated to shift all of those resources into moving to digital. And so what I realized at the time, living in the Bay Area, I was not that far from Napa. And this is 2010. And we were just coming into a recession. And at the time, alcohol was kind of recession proof. It was just people would change the type of alcohol they would drink, the cost of the wine or whatever it might be. And I moved into, it was at the time Foster's Wine Estates and became Treasury Wine Estates. But I also learned the alcohol business is not pure play capitalism. There's a distributor network that's very deeply entrenched in that business. And so my role was to work with the big retailers on how you distribute more of your products. And so you have to not just talk to a Costco, for example, you have to talk to the distributor who is selling to somebody like a Costco. And Costco, as an example, they have so much leverage. They're always trying to find a way to save their members' costs. So how can they legally eliminate that middle person? But that was my role, was in marketing, selling these wines to retailers into on-premise and off-premise. So I was there for about 18 months. And I loved wine, but I realized I didn't really love working in the wine industry. Interesting world. Because- Is agriculture mixed with business? It's totally agriculture, but then you have this layer of this distributor network in it, which was really unlike anything I had ever dealt with in either CPG or coming from technology at EA. And so I got a call from Sonos, and that's what got me out of the wine industry and down into Santa Barbara from there. So EA, I'm just curious about in terms of, did you guys leave at the same time, Peter? And what was your relationship there? Like, what was the working relationship? How did you guys meet? So I was president of a vertical silo called a label as Debbie pointed out. So it's a movie company that have a label where everything reports into you. So think of me as president of the movie company, if you will. My focus was all of our sports titles, Tiger Woods, NHL, at that time NASCAR, but NBA and NFL and Madden, and then FIFA, as it was formerly known, the soccer title. Oh, wait, Tiger Woods. That and Tiger Woods. There's a whole separate podcast there to be had. And so within that, then in a very large global organization, you have support structures. Channel marketing is the example here that we're talking about, which is how do you position your products in your big retailers? And here in the United States, it's obviously a juice shop, but a Best Buy, very important, a Target, very important. Each of whom, and this is what Debbie's challenge was, has their own merchandising mentality. Target, for example, locked behind glass. I always remember these things were the consumer, and we always fought that. Target's shrinkage on games was immense. So the last three feet of the sale, as it's known, which is the reach and grab and read, it was tough at Target. Game stock, immense. And during this period as well, to Debbie's point, some of this stuff was starting to move online, so you had e-commerce. But still, you're getting a disc shipped to you. Same time, EA, at this moment in time, my first ever meeting at EA was the seminal moment that I always remember. At Microsoft, I was still a Microsoft employee. Allow me to fly to New York for this meeting that John Riccatello, my new boss-to-be, said, you need to be here because we're gonna go through this moment that you need to understand. And this was a classic case of what's known in business of creative destruction, which is there was an Austrian-American economist, Peter Schumpeter, and Schumpeter said, basically, if you're not ready to eat your own lunch, somebody else will. And the concept of creative destruction is everything is going fine, but if you can't see what the future holds, you end up being Polaroid or Kodak or Xerox, where, look, we were selling tens of millions of discs. The meeting was called The Burning Platform, which should have tipped me off from the get-go that this wasn't gonna be something that says everything's hunky-dory. EA was flying, selling tens of millions of discs at retail, but Riccatello's point was, five years from now, we're going direct-to-consumer, that discs will go the way that they had already started to go in music and certainly had in movies, and that physical media was not going to be how people would access our content going forward. As a result, we needed to shift the entire 8,000 employees to a direct-to-consumer model, direct billing systems, direct customer service, get rid of the warehouses, get rid of the salespeople. We will tell our retailers that we're quite willing to sell you a disc, but we're gonna take your customer. How come you guys didn't share that knowledge with Blockbuster? From the perspective of Blockbuster, we used to call on Blockbuster, because they rented video games. So I would fly, I think I went to Dallas to see Blockbuster and call on them and say, look, we, you know, we'll, because they would buy 50,000 copies of the game and then rent the game out. But games were becoming bigger and longer and connected, and that didn't fit Blockbuster's model, rented for the weekend, just didn't work. So Blockbuster went their own way. But we saw this, it was classic creative disruption, said we're gonna blow up our own retail business as big as it is, multi-billion dollar retail business, and we're gonna restructure the company. And there's words for the 140 VP plus in that room in the W Hotel on 56th and Lex in New York. He says, a lot of you are not gonna be here next year. Go find something else because this company's changing and your skillsets may not fit what we are going to be as a company, which is direct-to-consumer. We're gonna be looking for global network engineers, data scientists. We're gonna be looking for customer service specialists, and we don't want people writing orders. We don't want people shipping boxes. Just not gonna work. In some circles, that's quite a famous meeting and speech. I talk about it all the time. Anyway, but back, it was called the Burning Platform. The first slide was a photograph of Oil Rig in the North Sea. Click, Oil Rig's on fire. So the classic Burning Platform is that you can choose to stay on that platform. It's smoldering. There's a bit of smoke. There's some flames. It's gonna hang around for a while, but eventually it's going down. A lot of publishers decided to stay on the Burning Platform that don't exist anymore and said, we're gonna hang out because we can't envision how we can change to being a direct-to-consumer operation, delivering our content via the internet at high speeds. What was the term creative destruction? Creative destruction is a business term, schumpeter, an economist that said you have a choice always in business and you can either hang on to your existing business model, no matter what you see coming forward, but you hang on because you're doing well, but you cannot change. And it's also tied into what's known as the innovator's dilemma. Yeah, of course. Right, of course. So you have that, but creative destruction is, you have a choice. You basically say, we're gonna blow this shit up right now and we're gonna move on and we're gonna be built to last and we'd be ready for the future. Or we're just gonna stay cozy and just eventually, that oil rig falls into the shock-infested, oil-slick-on-fire sea and you're done. And that's a classic Burning Platform. That is what creative destruction is about all the time. What more do you wanna get out of how you are either professionally or personally connected to Santa Barbara? And do you wanna transition to the foundation and or the club or is there a step in between? Debbie's channel marketing group supported EA Sports. So they would go in, particularly Madden, as she referred to the Rose Bowl. Remember that day, Busta Rhymes was there. I mean, yeah. Oh, Busta Rhymes, that was so fun. We would do massive things. So the biggest example, Thursday before Super Bowl, every Super Bowl, Thursday night goes Madden Bowl. Oh yeah. Madden Bowl is Thursday night. Did you guys get to spend time with John Madden? Oh yeah. Oh, sorry. He said he'd make the ads every year and he has a studio in Pleasanton. He's a Cal Poly alumni. Yeah, well that's why he's there. Well, you know the story there, right? I do. That's why he's on a basketball, I guess. So before John passed away, we would go over to Gold Line Productions, his production company in Pleasanton in the Bay Area. And the team would fly in from Orlando and sit with him and talk through what they were planning for the next Madden game. And he would give his input of tactics, the way that we were presenting and rendering the line of scrimmage and things that he was seeing. Was he actually helpful or were you guys just paying him respect? In the later years, it was a little bit more of the latter and paying respect, but he always had those little gems. He would sit and watch just about every NFL. Once his commentating career was over and he was getting older and he couldn't travel as much on the Madden Cruiser anymore when he was absorbed in the Madden game. And our team would sit there and they would get those little jewels that he would come out. They would sit there for hours with him and they would show him the game and he would give them input of what he was seeing in relation to what he was seeing in the real game. That's what John would do. LA Raiders. John Madden. LA Raiders. Yeah. So now into the Santa Barbara chapter. Yeah. So you got a call from Sonos. What year was that? I think it was 2011, 2012. That's right, because I was in the wine industry and I'd been there about 18 months. It was like, yeah, 2011, 2012. Do you remember who called you? Was it a Sonos recruiter, an executive search person? Do you? I can't remember. It was a great experience for me. It was not a great experience. I do remember, because I lived up in Danville, which I don't know if any of your listeners know Danville. Lovely place. Danville is a lovely, lovely place. And I do remember coming down and having this great recruiting experience, but then it was time to talk numbers. They kept pushing this Santa Barbara lifestyle. You don't need salary. You get the Santa Barbara lifestyle. And it was like, okay, wait, I got expenses in your Santa Barbara lifestyle, and don't you know I live in Danville? Don't you know where I'm coming from? At the time, it was probably similar markets in terms of the cost, too. Yeah, I think it probably was. I had a young family. We had a house that we were selling, and real estate just wasn't moving. We ended up carrying our house for like 30 years. Not a good time, then. So it was, yeah. But in the end, Sonos came through. So then I was- So you moved here. Yeah, moved my family down here. And Santa Barbara was your Sonos base, but you were traveling. I was traveling a ton, yeah, because it was a beautiful job. New York, LA? I was in New York. More international is what I remember at that time. I mean, I would go and see all the customers here, but there was a lot to learn from the international customers. And as we were trying to promote products where you could hear them in the retail environment and getting not just the right audio, but you would have the voice that would tell you about the product and having that right, not just right tone, but the right accent. I remember us really spending a lot of time, for example, in England. And depending on where the stores were, whether it was in John Lewis or wherever, it might be in the country, making sure that it was that right accent that would be relatable to the people. So getting all of those voice actors to be able to talk and have that reported and have it be an authentic experience in store. I mean, there was a lot of detail. That's one thing with Sonos, no detail was left, like unthought of. Everything from the design aspect, the hardware to the experience in store was always considered and belabored until it was absolutely right. Debbie, could you compare that to like the EA experience or the Fitbit experience? I'm just curious because you have similar businesses, similar models in a sense, direct to consumer, but at the same time, you have these incredibly innovative businesses. Doing unique things. Yeah. Debbie also worked for GoPro. Yeah. So, oh wow. And Sonos really paid attention to what GoPro and Fitbit and what other hardware companies were doing. Yeah, it was funny. It was a very similar circle at the time. However, Sonos was privately held. And so we could delay launches. There were prices to pay for that, but there wasn't shareholder backlash like you would get in these other publicly traded companies that I worked in. So that was like one of the main differences. Better to be right than be on time. Yeah. Maybe not an exact quote. But it was along those lines. Get it right, because you only have that one time to get it out there and it's really hard to pull it back. That was a core principle. Yeah. Back to the Santa Barbara piece, as you reflect on everything you just said about moving here. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that local companies really wrestle with is this question of how you get people, do you need people here? So as you think about anyone that you've hired to work for you, or as a peer, another executive, talk a little bit about what it was like to move here, to try to recruit people here, to try to build a corporate culture here. Was it easy? Was it hard? Was it sustainable? Yeah, I'm sure. It's so different now. I mean, COVID changed everything. For a lot of jobs, you don't have to live where you work. But coming to Santa Barbara was not inexpensive. And you're in sort of this little tribe, this little community here. You're not in the San Francisco Bay Area. You're not in an LA. So if something gets sideways, and if you're a couple for either you or your spouse, what are your other alternatives? I think it's a very different place now because there's so much more opportunity for remote work. Yeah, when we were doing this, I remember talking to you about it. You had Sonos, you had Decker's, you had maybe Abfolio. Yeah. But now there's a million other companies roughly about that size. Procore is hiring a lot. Yeah. There's lots of other companies in the area. Yardy for sure. But there's been this somewhat underground, somewhat deliberate attempt to have these companies stay connected so that talent can come here and stay here. Did you experience that at all? Yeah, I mean, I think there were probably a number of people from Decker's that were in our organization at the time. Decker's was the other big company that was just maybe, like you say, the underground, but Decker's was so obvious that it was here. And they were big then too, so. What about a Patagonia? I think we did have one or two people from Patagonia at the time. And then I think the gal that ended up taking over marketing came from Patagonia. Yeah, Joy Howard was a big hire for the company. Yeah, that was. And also Demetri Siegel, who later ran Olive Brand, was at Patagonia at one point. He's actually now the CMO at Urban Outfitters. Oh, okay. But Santa Barbara was a place that did collect creative talent. Yeah. I wonder if it still is. Well, that's a really good segue to what you guys are doing right now. And I don't know if that has a lot to do with, well, I'd be wondering about the foundation, but the player acquisition. What does that look like from a player acquisition standpoint? Because I assume, can they live anywhere or do they need to live here, playing at a Harding Stadium? Before we talk about that, do you want us to call it soccer or football? No, no, we wanted to ask you. It has got to be your right answer. You have to say it, the house. Yeah, what do you say? No one's listening. It's a football. Football. Okay. Football. I knew it. But did you always say football? I'm a huge NFL fan. I love American football. But when you live in England for four years in Liverpool, you can't call it soccer. People don't like that over there. It's just, they don't know what you're talking about. You call it football. And you know what? I have so much respect for the game. Having been so deeply immersed, not only in the sport, but the lifestyle, the culture. I mean, how deep meaning it has for people. Respect them in football. What was the show that did a really good job of depicting that? Ted Lasso. Yeah. I think there's another really important chapter of yours for Santa Barbara, which is in addition to all the other things you've shared, you are the only people to bring a professional sports franchise to this area. So tell us about that. How hard has it been? And what are your hopes? Well, creating from a clean sheet of paper. So there has been a professional sports team here, a soccer team 30 years ago, Rail Santa Barbara to play for one season, I believe. And the league went bust. And it was in those very early days of soccer in the 70s and 80s where people were trying, immigrant populations were flooding in, bringing the game with them. And people thought there was an opportunity to create a professional system. The NASL, if you remember Pele in the New York Cosmos in the 70s, came in with a huge splash and the Meadowlands had 70,000 people, but it collapsed as fast as it came in. I've lived here for 42 years here in the United States and came here to play and coach. And I've been involved in the game, either professionally or personally for every single day since. I've never seen anything like it as regards the understanding of the game, the interest in the game, the power of word is now built at a professional level. And perhaps most importantly, creating a pyramid of youth leagues to semi-pros, to pro, all the way to, we all know, MLS, the LA Galaxy, and LASC. And I think you add to that the power of content of where there is a Ted Lasso from Apple TV, Jason Sudeikis plays this character, but literally NBC asked him to play 10 years ago to promo their Premier League where he played the cliched, American who knew nothing about soccer. And then that character disappeared for four or five years. And then he reinvigorated that character for Apple TV and created this feel-good that arrived right as COVID arrived. And it made us all feel good about life in the way that Ted would give these little life lessons as we've gone through these very difficult periods. Debbie and I joke, we could watch two Ted Lasso's for one Ozark. And then that Ted Lasso was the sorbet for the Ozark during lockdown. I like that. You add Welcome to Wrexham more recently, which I was involved in because I grew up in Wrexham, long story, but I helped Ryan and Rob get Wrexham going and that documentary series, The Power of Content, again, if you look at it, how media can drive interest, can drive engagement, can drive lifetime value. I mean, it's just the way, probably the best example is Drive to Survive and Formula One. Americans have to learn how to share about Formula One until all of a sudden Drive to Survive comes along. You were a big influencer of getting Wrexham here to play in that European League match. There was a few different games on the back of it. Rewind. So Wrexham were here recently to play against Bournemouth. Mike Bournemouth, Bill Foley owns Bournemouth. Bournemouth is a Premier League team. Wrexham were on a West Coast tour, the Rex Coast tour as they called it. UCSB, Kelly Barsky, who we all know is the athletic director doing a brilliant job there, and I, because this goes to Santa Barbara Sky, will be playing at Hargis Stadium. And the idea was, can we get Wrexham here to play? There's a lot of work needs to happen with the playing surface, whatever, but it happened. And they came, announced crowd of 13 and a half thousand, probably more people than that, and it worked out really well. You were sold out within an hour, sure, right? It was all gone within 24 hours. And look, a lot of people came from out of town. A lot of people came from Wrexham, believe it or not. I'm wandering around, and I'm seeing, I'm listening to accents that I grew up with. That's where you're originally from, right? Born in Liverpool, grew up in Liverpool. My dad had a pub in Liverpool. My dad moved just when I was 10 in 1965 to Wrexham. Gotcha, that's where, and you were in Wrexham until you moved to United States, I'd say, 1981. Yeah, but going back, when Debbie and I left Liverpool after three and a half years in Liverpool and arrived in Montecito, USL, which is the league that sits below MLS, realized the ex-CEO of Liverpool was all of a sudden in Santa Barbara. They had been trying rather unsuccessfully for about a year and a half to establish a foothold here to get a professional team in Santa Barbara. Reached out to me, October 2021, met them at the Hilton on the waterfront, and I said infamously, I'll be an engaged minority owner. Off we go, a few months get into it. I said, I gotta jump in here with both feet and sort this thing out and get it going because it's the only way. You can only do so much with volunteers and well-meaning people and people who sit on the periphery. Very long story, cut amazingly short. We spent about six months trying to work with Santa Barbara City College. Did not work out for a lot of reasons. Immediately moved to conversations with Kelly Barsky, who at that time was the interim Aesthetic Director for UCSD. It was brilliant and we wouldn't be here today where we are without Kelly having the doggedness and stubbornness to fight her way through the UC system and to do something that's never happened here, which is to bring in onto the Isla Vista campus a third party tenant that will come in and have the stadium for use for not a gaucho team. And so long story short, we'll be playing in March of 25 of the men's team and then in 26 of the women's team. One's demographics, so going from SBCC on the water to UCSB, Isla Vista, they won a national championship there. The demographics, the data has had to change quite a bit in terms of where you're gonna go. Now, I mean, look, let's talk about that. La Playa Stadium, beautiful location on the beach. A lot of control for the Coastal Commission. Not ideal as a soccer aficionado and purist for what I think the current American fan who he or she is sophisticated. They know what they're looking at. They spend a lot of time watching world-class soccer on television because you can watch just about any game in this country now. La Playa artificial surface, football coach that refused to leave the football lines off, wanted the end zones, wanted the hash marks, wanted the football goalposts, track coach that did not want any stretches on his track and bleachers there that predate cavemen from the perspective of a classic community college in California, one side of a massive wall of bleachers, many of whom were kill seats, which means that can't use them because they're dangerous. And then no other, people fell in love prior to me with the location, but the practicality of La Playa as a professional soccer stadium did not work. Having said that, we went all the way through despite being told you're not welcome and fought my way through, did a launch event at the Moxie in downtown Santa Barbara, but the board of trustees was still not convinced that this was the right thing. And in the end, I said, you know what? Any business relationship requires trust and respect and mutually aligned objectives. We don't have those. And moved, and not a free kick away from where we're at right now, met with Kelly Barsky in Goleta Marketplace. And we hashed out a plan to use La Playa stadium, soccer specific, natural grass, no track, 17,000 seater stadium. And I laughed when people said, it's out there in Isla Vista, which I thought was its real name at first. And it's like, it's 10 minutes down the freeway. Having been to the Wrexham game, it ended up where I think it should. That place was packed. Yeah. I don't want you talking about it in the ground. There were old people, there were young people, and it was a very hot day. Yeah. We had people walking around, couldn't wait to get to the sideline. I mean, the level of engagement, I think, bodes very well for the club. I'm really glad that you mentioned Kelly, who I know, and I will say here and now, we will get on this podcast. Yeah. She is a wonderful person. She's a leader in the community. The UCSB had, I think, probably an opportunity to go out and get someone else during her interim role. Made the perfect choice. Yep. Wonderful for men's and women's sport. And I'm glad to hear you say that, because the connection to Kelly and UCSB is a big part of what we're trying to capture here. Look, I haven't lived here but a few years, but it's very clear to me that there is a disconnect between the SB and UCSB, and SB itself are not inextricably intertwined like I would think that campuses should be. And Isla Vista, again, people, it's like it could be in San Luis Obispo when you hear people talk about it, but it's right there. And I said to Kelly, I think you have something you need to resolve, which is integrating Santa Barbara into the University of California in Santa Barbara. And people don't come to campus. And my two eldest kids, Debbie, her eldest son, they're UC Berkeley golden bears. I always use that. You go to Berkeley, you have no idea where the campus ends, where the town begins. It's all one ecosystem that's amazing. It's Berkeley. Here, you don't see it. I always remember when I first came here, I said, I want to buy UCSB gaucho gear. Well, let's go to State Street. Need more finances. And I talked to Kelly about this. So what we're trying to do, A, it's great that we've got a top class, I think the best in the league stadium. It's soccer specific. The crowd is on top of the pitch, as you saw in the Rex and Bournemouth game. It's a great atmosphere. There's no way you could replicate that at Woodfire. Thirdly, you've got a campus there with 8,000 kids that can walk to that stadium. That you've already got soccer heaven, as it's known. Tim Gonstig has done a tremendous job. If you know the history of Harder Stadium, Spud Harder, the athletic director and football coach from the 1960s, that's why it's called Harder Stadium. 1987, they have a really good American football team, but the decision has to be made. You're going to play division one. This stadium isn't good enough anymore. And you need to build like the Coliseum in LA or the Rose Bowl or Memorial Stadium at Cal. You need to build a stadium that will represent you at a division one level. And the campus goes, we're not paying for that. We're going to be soccer and basketball as a result. So no American football has been played on that campus since 1987. Tim Gonstig comes along 25 years ago and builds soccer heaven at National Championship caliber team. National champions have been played there. And it's a soccer specific environment. That has emanated to this community of being a soccer community. I kind of laughed when I first sat down, no disrespect to Santa Barbara City College, but somebody says, this is a football town as in American football. I'm going, I don't quite see that. Well, and they're so close to each side where I think that you have, this is a soccer town. Both Santa Barbara Soccer Club, 3,500 kids, tens of thousands of parents and extended family is a part of that. Teams that travel every weekend to Vegas, to Phoenix, to Dallas to play what's known travel teams, club soccer. This is a soccer town. Yeah, this is exactly where I wanted to go next. Both of my kids went to the club. But you're right by far the most expansive youth sports program with the most experienced coaches. Greg Wilson, who runs it, who's also one of the top assistants for UCSB. For Tim. Yeah, for Tim. What are the plans for the benefit of Santa Barbara Sky and for the youth community to integrate potentially the club and the team in some way? Well, you get what we see is, and I'll call it a pseudo-academy. And the thing that really compelled Debbie and I, you talk to kids and when you first get here, like everybody, you talk soccer because we're going to watch soccer games at Doggins or the Cruisery or wherever we happen to be. And then you talk to kids at Santa Barbara Soccer Club and you go, what's your plan? I mean, as a kid, I'm growing up on the streets of Liverpool in the fifties. I'm going to play for Liverpool. I was never going to play for Liverpool, but I was going to play for Liverpool. I'm kicking that tennis ball around thinking that I'm my hero and I'm going to wear that red shirt one day and I'm going to play for Liverpool, as do millions of kids. You talk to the kids in Santa Barbara, I want to play for LAFC. I go, wait a second. And it's like, well, I can't, there's no team in Santa Barbara. So you need aspiration. You need kids at five years of age dreaming of wearing Santa Barbara Sky on their shirt. I'm going to watch their heroes on a Saturday night or watching them on CBS, which covers the league and dreaming as we all did. And billions of kids around the world dream of being that Messi or Ronaldo and wearing that shirt. And that is what you need in a community to provide an aspirational affinity to something. I don't want to play for LA or the San Jose earthquakes. We're a community that can survive and flourish with a professional soccer team. So when it's up and running, how can the youth of Santa Barbara watch Santa Barbara Sky? Just do what over 1,100 people have already done. Put your deposit down for a season ticket and come watch us at Hotter Stadium. There will be activations at a community level. Debbie will be running the foundation that will be focused on primarily disadvantaged families that want to be part of the game. This is a wonderfully diverse community. But as you know, as a parent, it ain't cheap to play club soccer. And can you watch the games on TV? CBS, Paramount Plus, and ESPN Plus. ESPN Plus. So those are the current league media deals right now. So ESPN Plus, which is a paid, which if you're a soccer fan, you have to have, is streaming. But CBS, even now, you turn on the TV this weekend, CBS on a Saturday evening, early on, you'll see a USL game. Well, it also dovetails nicely back to UCSB because you want to watch, for example, men's basketball, ESPN Plus. Yep. The streaming networks have changed the way we consume sports in this country. Whether I like it or not, I have to have Peacock, I have to have Paramount Plus, I have to have ESPN Plus, and I would not pay my money to any of those services other than my need to watch live sports. Yeah, that's right. Do you have a coach yet? No. Now, we're at a point, like any good business, we're interviewing and getting ready to hire, but you're still, what are we, seven, eight months away, and you have an optimal moment when you need to bring people in and start paying them. This is, as we've said all morning, a wonderful community. It ain't cheap. And so you've got to manage your finances to bring people in at the right time so they can be effective, but you don't want to get your op-ex out of control from the get-go. How similar is that, let's call it, the corporate, publicly-traded world to a Liverpool soccer club to a Santa Barbara Sky soccer club in terms of how they operate and your experience at an EA and in Microsoft? It seems like that world of sports is, there's so much money in the game now and that digital side of it and ESPN Plus covering everything has just gotten massive, but I guess what pieces of that business world has really helped you with a Liverpool and now with a Santa Barbara Sky? Well, you take away, when you do a job, and when I arrived at Liverpool, which was in the spring, Debbie and I arrived with our suitcases and our Great Dane into Liverpool in the spring of 2017, ready to start my job for the new season. And it was going through a period in sports and in particularly in soccer where the organizational structure of these massive sports teams was changing. Data and science was creeping in to a sport, in particular soccer, that had been very traditional. Scouting was a guy sat in the stands with a notepad watching a player play and then sending his notes back to the manager. The kid can play or he's got a good right foot. Data and science in particular with Liverpool because of the Boston Red Sox linkage. The Red Sox parent company, as it was known, their New England Sports Ventures acquired Liverpool Football Club in 2010. Their goal was to apply what we hear in American sports and in baseball called sabermetrics, which is the utilization of, Moneyball is the movie. But Moneyball is the utilization of data to identify undervalued assets or to identify how you put the best team on the field, bluntly, for the least cost. And when I say the least cost, maybe only cost you 500 million instead of 600 million. And so when I arrived at Liverpool, my job as CEO was evolving rapidly. My predecessor had a very different job than I had. And my job description, Silicon Valley guy, very used to having four pages of a J.B., basically my job description is run the business. I mean, not much more than that. And by the way, don't get involved in football. Leave it to the experts there, which I didn't get involved in football. I got involved in the business of Liverpool Football Club, one of the biggest sports brands in the world by far and one of the most successful football clubs in the world's biggest sport by far, but with a history rather than right there and then was very successful. So in the end, and it was more as my role evolved and I looked back as we left, I figured out that I'd focused on what I call the four Cs, community, culture, civic, and commercial. That became my focus, but I evolved into those roles seeing what the needs is. Community, 300 million Liverpool fans, 400 million, who knows? We think it's about three to 400 million people around the world go, I love Liverpool. I get up early in the morning. Mohamed Salah is my favorite player. I mean, all of these things. And so we built this concept, which I then turned local heart, global pulse. You go to Anfield and it's a lot of Liverpoolians there and it's a great atmosphere. We also recognize, or I recognize pretty quickly, 99.9% of those fans will never, ever, ever see Liverpool play live, ever. I want to come back to that too because there's so many connections here, Santa Barbara, Sky, and then you've got your EA background, Sonos. You mentioned Liverpool. So this is right around the time that Debbie and I worked together, but if you rewind, I guess maybe seven, eight years, I think one of the most impactful partnerships Sonos ever did was with Liverpool, where you had these sort of high quality social media highlight clips go out on Twitter with enhanced audio. And it was literally quote unquote, so this highlight powered by Sonos. So I hope that worked for the club as much as it did for Sonos, but can you talk about the genesis of that and what the impact of? You go all the way back to my Microsoft Xbox days, Edelman was our PR agency that helped me launch the Xbox 360. And the gentleman that was running Edelman was our account senior executive at the time was a guy called Pete Peterson. And Pete and I- Wow, really? The Sonos Peterson? Yeah. I never knew you originally introduced us. I hired him. We like, you know, I worked for him. This is incredible. He came after I was gone. This is a great story. I had no idea. So Pete and I remained close. We really worked, his team and my team, we were going up against the PlayStation hard. This is a multi-billion dollar bet. We needed to get the Xbox 360 out and get it right and get the marketing right and get the PR right. Edelman, Seattle, where Pete worked, was part of them. McCann Erickson, New York was a media company. And together, my marketing team, we worked to get out ahead of that PlayStation 3 and what turned out to be a massively successful launch of the console that eventually sold 120 million units. So Pete and I were very close, always stayed in contact. Fast forward, we're back in Montecito. I get an email one night from Pete Peterson at Sonos.com and saying, can I talk to you about Liverpool? And I'm going, sure. And I'm going, Sonos, sports? What's this all about? So I emailed Pete back, hadn't heard from him in a while, told him where we were and said, look, we should get on the phone. And this is different than I've seen a Sonos get involved in because it's going to be a big deal. And I said, what segment are you getting? He said, official partner in home audio. And I said, okay. So we talked about it. And I talked about activations, about what Sonos could be, who Liverpool was, what our fan base was, what they would be looking for and how you should activate against this. Because it just can't be the LED screens. You need activation that would be pertinent to what Sonos is looking for and what the Liverpool fan was willing to accept. Because a lot of the stuff that you see that professional sports teams have, the official color printer of whatever, why? And then they go, it's just a money grab. They didn't apply. Yeah, but I said, you need to understand who Liverpool is because this is a brand new segment for them. And you need to understand how to be perceived because it was going to be a big deal. The moment you start talking LEDs when 200 million people are watching a Premier League game, I knew the money was in the multiple millions of dollars a year. I said, Peter, do you know my successor, Billy Hogan? Have you talked to the CEO of Liverpool Football Club? He said, no. So I introduced the two of them. Billy knew that Sonos was looking, but it was very much with the London office that was there. And it was, as you know, a little bit of a real breakaway from Sonos' usual marketing that are involved there. And so we put them together and then pretty quickly thereafter a deal was struck and it seems to be certainly still working and it seems to have resonated. And I talked about, look, you could do branded Liverpool stuff which flies off the shelf and whether that's part of what Sonos wants to do. But Pete then came to the house and we chatted and I started to explain about Santa Barbara Sky and Sonos' involvement there. But yeah, I helped Pete in his previous role there at CMO at Sonos introducing to the CEO so they could have a C to C conversation and hash out that deal. Pretty quickly thereafter, the deal was hashed out. That's great. Amazing. Yeah, so favorite restaurant in Santa Barbara, go. Annabar. Excellent. Why? Ambience, get there, have a drink outside, people watch. Top class service. You know what the menu is. You're walking in there, you know what you're going to get. You have the choice of inside, outside. Debbie and I sit there, we meet fascinating people. If you know Annabar, you sit on the sidewalk or if you're really lucky, you can sit by the fireplace and we've been 30, 40 times where we haven't sat and talked and met interesting people. The food's important, but the ambience. And sometimes, it happened to us two nights ago, they said, your table's ready. We don't want to sit down right now because we're having such a good time sat here. You can bring the dogs, as long as you're on the sidewalk, that works out well. Other places, I mean, food, we love Loquita, but nine times out of 10, we'll go to Llama Dog for a great beer. I would say it was going to be one. There's 500 different places. So I would go Annabar for service and ambience and sociability, Loquita, because I think it's just got a great vibe and then Llama Dog, because we can go have a beer and watch a game. So I want to go to Debbie, but I just have to say, Ann, Annabar, best chicken sandwich in town. I chose salad. And this is all that Josh eats, by the way. I have been to the Annabar, not as many times, I have never not ordered Bing's crispy chicken sandwich. I was going to try that. Debbie, I just said it. Now, I was going to say, Llama Dog. Dip 2 Otis Dog. Okay, Dip 2 Otis Dog. Go ahead, thank you. Stop talking. Llama Dog, we love Greg at Llama Dog. You can bring your dogs and it's fantastic food. It's fantastic company. It's super fun. But burritos on the go, Moni's. Moni's is incredible. I've been introduced to a bunch of these places recently. My wife fell in love with Boquita. One of our best meals that we've ever had. But Moni's is the one that stands out to me because it's just such a hole in the wall. And then they bring the burritos, they have the breakfast burritos at dark, right? Yeah, they do. You can't get them at Moni's. Which is incredible. Yeah, they have them there. I stumbled upon that as well. One thing this town needs, this is a perfect way to wrap, no pun intended, more breakfast burritos. Peter and Debbie Moore, thank you very much for being here today. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. We recorded this episode of the Santa Barbara Effect at the Goleta headquarters of Sonos. Sonos helps the world listen better and has a mission to make listening to music easier, more immersive, and more rewarding. Thanks for listening. Make sure to search for the Santa Barbara Effect in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen to your podcasts. Don't forget to click subscribe so you never miss an episode. On behalf of our team, Sophia Gane, Dan Hedden, Josh Narva, and me, Rob Grost, thanks for listening. Keep celebrating the business of Santa Barbara.
