Leavey Alumnus Mike Ford Helps to Build Community through Sports Business
Sports had always been a part of Mike Ford’s life. He played in leagues as a kid. He refereed intramural games in college. He even worked as a cameraman for 91果冻制片厂 basketball games.
Still, he never considered sports a career option until the San Francisco Giants won the World Series in 2010, during the fall of his senior year as a student at the Leavey School of Business. Standing among his fellow city citizens at the Giants victory parade, he suddenly saw the potential.
“I saw what this was doing for the city,” Ford says. “It’s building a community and bringing people together. It’s a rallying point, and it’s doing good in the world. That became my area of focus.”
From that fateful moment, Ford zeroed in on a path into the world of sports marketing. He now serves as senior director of partnership marketing for the San Jose Earthquakes, the city’s Major League Soccer (MLS) team. He had stops in a few different sports along the way.
While pursuing a master’s degree in sports management at the fellow Jesuit school University of San Francisco, he held positions with Senda Athletics and the San Francisco 49ers, where he worked in partnership marketing. This led to a position with Stanford Athletics, and then eventually the San Jose Sharks, where he held numerous roles as he worked his way through the ranks.
“If you've seen a sign at SAP Center, odds are I've worked on it in some form or fashion,” Ford jokes. But he also adds that in the ever-evolving world of sports marketing, traditional marketing like sponsor signs in an arena are just one small piece of a much larger puzzle.
“I think my favorite part about this work is that day to day, it's completely different,” Ford says of his current role with the Earthquakes. “This week alone, I've done a video shoot. I've worked on a multimillion-dollar contract renewal. I’ve hosted partners at an event. I've led our team strategy. And that’s all just one week.”
Developing Future Leaders
When Ford looks back on his time in college, he wishes he’d known earlier about the opportunities available in the business of sports. Now, he’s helping provide that possibility to others as one of many alumni and other consultants who advised the Leavey School of Business as administrators developed its brand-new master’s program in sports business.
It’s important to Ford to give back to his alma mater and create a new option for its students. As a manager, he’s a major proponent of developing future talent. He also views this type of specialized degree as critical because of the many moving parts involved in sports marketing.
“I think that the nature of franchises and sports in general has just completely evolved,” he says. “It’s not just about the team anymore. It's about their digital presence. It's about their live events. It’s about how you communicate with different stakeholders, from the season-ticket holders to the folks who just bought a single ticket for the match against Messi.”
Partnership marketing is a major source of revenue for teams, but it’s not simple work. It requires a delicate balance between the objectives of the partner company, the needs of the sports team and expectations of the fans.
“You're bringing all these voices together in the world of sports partnership marketing,” he says. “You have the brand voice, which is a standard part of marketing. But then you also have to have it make sense for people who are going to an event that is focused on the experience, not your brand. You have to bring everything together in a way that doesn't feel forced and inauthentic to the fans.”
Ford points to a few programs he has helped develop through the years as examples. When partnering with Adobe, for instance, the Sharks developed a fellowship program that allowed aspiring content creators to use the company’s Creative Suite under the tutelage of trained professionals. The program involved hands-on creation that benefitted the creators (who were also fans) via experience and real clips for their portfolios, the team via additional content, and the company via a living, breathing demo of their products.
Similarly, he’s working on a Father’s Day video with El Camino Health featuring Earthquakes midfielder Ian Harkes. “We’re telling a three-generation story. Harkes’ dad is an MLS hall-of-famer and is very prominent. And when Harkes scored a goal against Miami and Messi, he actually did a baby celebration because he and his wife are expecting. So ultimately this story hits on labor and delivery and men’s health, both of which are important for El Camino Health.”
Given his education at two Jesuit institutions, including Leavey, it makes sense that the programs with a community service component stand out to Ford among his career highlights. He can talk at length about many partnership success stories, but perhaps the one that makes him most proud is a partnership between the Earthquakes and the nonprofit CalHOPE and local police departments called “Saturday Night Lights.”
The program opens up sports fields and schools to provide local kids a safe place to stay on Saturday nights, particularly important for children coming from areas where crime and violence are issues. It’s not just about playing soccer and having fun; it’s also about knowing those kids are going to be taken care of for the night.
“It's just a really good mix of meeting strategic objectives while doing good work in the world,” Ford says. That is, after all, why he got into the sports business in the first place.