Orange County SC aim for success in continuity as 2024 season begins
USL Championship club begins 14th season with core principles in mind.
Orange County SC kick off their 14th season in the professional tier on Saturday, as they head to NorCal to take on Sacramento Republic FC. Led by Danish manager Morten Karlsen, OCSC bring back about half of their roster from 2023 as they look to add a second star above their crest for another USL Championship league title.
Before long, the week to week business of soccer will largely take over at the club, but during the preseason media day the club held on Tuesday ahead of the season opener, the long-term blueprint was laid out.
OCSC president of business operations Dan Rutstein highlighted the 10-year agreement the club entered in recent months with the City of Irvine to make Championship Soccer Stadium the team’s home for the foreseeable future.
“The stadium will look and feel very different this year as a consequence of doing the 10 year deal. This is our home now. And we can do things in our home that we couldn't do in the stadium previously. So it remains the City of Irvine’s stadium but it's Orange County Soccer Club’s home as the as the fans know and fought for,” Rutstein said, alluding to the battle the team and its supporters successfully fought in 2022 to avoid being evicted from Championship Soccer Stadium in Orange County Great Park by the LA Galaxy’s reserve team.
“And so when you come to the stadium, you know it's already beginning to look different and it will look and feel different we've changed some things in certainly as well. There'll be very different food and drink options this year. There'll be different fan engagement opportunities with different partners. So we're going to keep innovating and we're trying to make it fun,” he added.
OCSC has tried to find a niche in a packed sports and entertainment market in Southern California, and since local businessman James Keston became principal owner in 2016, the effort has been to drop deep ties to Orange County overall and Irvine in particular. That effort has paid off, with best-ever attendance figures in 2023 and Rutstein committed to raising the number of fans at games even more.
“Between 2016 and 2022 at this stadium, we only sold out two games. Last year we sold out the last seven games of the year. And we're hoping we're already trending towards a sell out for the home opener on the 23rd of March and I'd be disappointed if we don't sell out more than half the games this year,” Rutstein said.
The offseason saw Orange County sign a kit deal with Hummel, featuring a terrific away kit for the season, the “County Roads” kit, pictured above, which features a street grid of Orange County across the jersey.
On the sporting side, OCSC have found a way to do what seems impossible: Sign and develop young players to eventually sell abroad, while also remaining highly competitive in the league season after season. Now, after seeing OCSC sell and send several players to Europe the past few years, other USL clubs are looking to replicate the model themselves.
While the public front office face of that initiative for OCSC, Oliver Wyss, has moved onto the USL league office to help the overall program of developing young players around the country, president of soccer operations and general manager Peter Nugent, whose tenure extends to the club’s days as the Orange County Blues, said the core project will continue.
“We've had a lot of success over the past three or four years, especially with the player development model. That's something that was really important to the club,” Nugent said. “We wanted to implement that European-style academy model of trying to get players from a young age turn professional and ultimately make that transition to Europe. So initially, we've had some some really good success. And I think, with that comes a lot of challenges to try and replicate that success, which is the hardest thing to do in sports is replicate being successful. So there's a lot of teams now trying to do a similar kind of pathway. But I'm very confident with the pathway that we put together that we're slightly ahead of the curve in terms of what we've built over the past three or four years. We've now established a kind of proper program, and ultimately showed that this pathway works and we've now got four or five players who are playing in Europe regularly.
“So just basically we're going to continue to keep doing what we're doing and be at the forefront of player development and try and find that balance of having senior players and ultimately young professionals and try and find that balance to help educate them to become elite professionals and ultimately succeed at the European level,” Nugent added.
It may be a new season, but Orange County SC will aim to get better all around.
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