In the beginning, recalls David Patey, soccer was like sushi. In order to be able to suffer the offending morsels, he would have to pinch his nose before allowing himself to swallow.
But then we all know the malleability of the human palate. Expose it long and often enough, et voilà.
Which is just as well. Because Patey had just placed himself center stage in an ownership group which had taken over a high-profile soccer club. Stranger still: he became the gringo frontman of a beloved team in a ferocious soccer hotbed. Costa Rica.
“I didn’t even follow football,” says the Jerusalem-born, Utah-raised American. “I didn’t follow football in the States, I didn’t follow football in Costa Rica. I didn’t even like watching the game. It sounds so silly that I would end up owning a club.”
But Patey isn’t just some neophyte American. Far from it.
Back toward the tail end of 2012, CS Herediano, one of the most storied clubs in Costa Rican soccer, were reigning champions. But they were also in severe financial straits. The club was mired in a legal dispute between the association that owns the club and the then holder of the rights to run it.
Patey had been living in Costa Rica for a number of years. After first moving south from his home in Utah primarily to learn Spanish, he and his young family eventually settled in Central America, where he began to assume several business interests.
In 2012, as Patey tells it, soccer was not on his radar. But he had met the existing rights holder while working on other business deals, and a group of Herediano fans had cottoned on. Maybe he could help, the story went. In short order, he was being unveiled as the presumptive new rights holder as part of an ownership group that also includes his US-based brothers Mike and Mark, a Costa Rican named Orlando Moreira and Aquil Ali, a Canadian.
By the following April, they had officially taken over after signing a 30-year management agreement with the association.
“So I tell people I got tricked into it – but I liked it,” Patey says.
Today, he presides over a successful outfit. In his three-and-a-half years at the helm, the club has won two titles and consistently performed well in the Concacaf Champions League. That’s no mean feat for a club from a provincial city, Heredia, a short drive north of the capital, San Jose. On the domestic front, they must compete against a more popular and resource-rich big two: Deportivo Saprissa and LD Alajuelense.
On the financial side, Patey says, the club is now in rude health – a far cry from when he took over when players hadn’t been paid for months. The books are balanced. A stadium renovation is in the offing. Back on the park, they currently sit one point off top spot in Costa Rica’s Premier Division.
“Our investment really was very little,” explains Patey. “The club has every element for success. Players to export, fans to come and watch the games, sponsors who love to participate, a television station which since has increased their broadcasting rights with us. It’s like a household: if you make 10 and you spend 11, in three or four months your credit card’s fallen and you can’t pay your bills. If you make 10 and you spend nine, you have one left over for a rainy day.”
The club makes money every month, Patey says. Of the 146 legal issues pending when they took the reins, two remain.
But finances are one thing; the local soccer culture another. Patey says he didn’t fully comprehend what he was letting himself in for. Like in most Latin American countries, soccer, or fútbol, is akin to a national religion. So Patey bought himself instant celebrity. As news was breaking of his group’s letter of intent to go through with a purchase of the club’s management rights, the rumor mill went into overdrive. Details of who they were came out piecemeal. some of it erroneous.
Correct was information of Patey’s faith: the fact he is Mormon. False was word he was the leader of the LDS church and the owner of the temple in Costa Rica. Not only was Patey buying into a top club, he was also helping save an institution teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. The local press declared him a savior. He knew at that point life as he knew it was about to be upended.
“A local reporter summed it up later that week,” says Patey. “He said the idea that someone could be their lifeline, for a then 92-year-old club to not go away, it means a lot to people.”
So he has captured the hearts and minds of an often fanatical fanbase. Part of that is also down to the fact he chooses to ensconce himself in the middle of them.
“He was well received by the people since he likes to join the people during the games and blend with them always,” says Heredia native and team diehard Johatson Montero.
Even fans of rival teams were enamored. Many marked him out for his amiability and honesty, says Alajuelense supporter Gadiel Alvarado.
Which would perhaps come as a relief to local soccer fans who’d become acquainted with how else things could turn out. In the past, the Costa Rican game has attracted ownership figures whose business dealings were later called into question. At least one ended up in jail in the United States for crimes involving fraud and money laundering.
Not long after Patey and his group took over, national newspaper La Nacion raised the point of previous owners of Costa Rican clubs found to be involved in murky business activity, forcing Patey to vouch for the integrity of the group and their cash. In previous media interviews, he has taken pains to distance himself from such notorious characters of yore, which raises a general sentiment of goodwill that seems to surround his persona in Costa Rica.
“Someone once put up a picture on social media,” says Patey, “and it said: ‘No matter what your team is, it’s impossible to hate this guy. And I took that as a compliment.”
Patey’s own non-soccer interests include the loan brokerage business, car dealerships and an adventure park. Often he is a minority shareholder in the ventures of which he forms a part, sometimes an architect of deals, at others a public relations guru, he tells the Guardian from France, where he is traveling on business.
“My day job is I’m a loan broker. People who need money and other people who have money to lend, I marry them up. I don’t touch other people’s money.”
At Herediano, he is more PR face than architect but his involvement can’t be described as figurehead.
“As a group, there’s not one who makes decisions,” adds the 39-year-old father-of-five. “We make decisions on a board level.”
His involvement has seen changes in other ways. Intriguingly, it led to a reduction in the number of Herediano games played on Sundays, including all home games. But not at his request, he points out. Rather, TV executives noticed he wasn’t attending Sunday matches. When they inquired, Patey informed them he reserved Sundays as a family day. So they switched. That got some gentle approval from a local Catholic priest, who remarked about an upsurge in Sunday mass immediately after the change.
Elsewhere, he tries not to interfere in football matters, preferring to leave the coaching staff to coach. Except when the matter falls within the financial realm. If head coach Hernan Medford wants a new player and the budget is blown, the retort invariably goes: “Well who are you going to can to get him?”
His general knowledge of the game has improved. Back then, he thought goals could only be scored from a corner kick. Now he is immersed in the culture, even having found himself in the thick of testy encounters between rival gangs of fans, or barras, as they are known locally. He has also been around for some of the country’s headiest times in soccer.
The Costa Rican national team made great waves at the last World Cup in Brazil in 2014. The current generation of Ticos players might be the best ever. The country’s domestic game pales in the shadow of the bigger and financially bountiful leagues of Mexico and the United States regionally, but Patey senses great potential for development from the grassroots up owing to a significant pool of talent. In the case of Herediano, the commercial aspects of the planned stadium redevelopment aim to make the club not only self-sustaining but provide excess for team affairs. He offers a terse commitment: “Our goal is that this club will never go through financial trouble again.”
Still, he has no desire to get involved in another pro soccer venture – back home in the United States or otherwise.
“There’s a lot easier ways to make money than in sports teams. I mean, these are passions. A lot of people get involved in a sports club because they love the sport, they’ve got a check book to do it. I was just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.”
