Columbus Crew: MLS original rises to model club status | OneFootball

By Charles Boehm

EDITOR'S NOTE: In celebration of Major League Soccer's 30th season, MLSsoccer.com is exploring untold stories about all 30 clubs. "30 Clubs, 30 Stories" will be unveiled throughout 2025.

Dee Haslam will be the first to admit that she and her husband Jimmy carried little background in the beautiful game when the opportunity arose for them to lead a new ownership group to purchase the Columbus Crew in 2018.

They did, however, know quite a bit about what professional sports teams can mean to a city, and how painful their departure can be, from their experiences as owners of the Cleveland Browns, whose original iteration relocated to Maryland after the 1995 NFL season before a rebirth as a new organization four years later.

“We didn't know anything about soccer,” Haslam told MLSsoccer.com this week. “[But] when we read about that [the Crew] were going to be leaving and going to Austin, it piqued our interest, because we know from our Cleveland fans how devastating it was when the Browns went to Baltimore.

"So I think for us it was, ‘Oh, well, that can't happen.’ A city can't lose a pro team. You just can't.”

The Haslams had the benefit of Dr. Pete Edwards, a well-known orthopedic surgeon in the area and the Crew’s longtime team doctor, and his family on board as co-investors. They had also witnessed fans' passion and desire to keep the club in Ohio's capital city.

“We talked about community and about fans, and about shared experiences and how to make the gameday experience good, and about the culture of soccer in America, which is growing,” Edwards recalled to MLSsoccer.com of his early conversations with the Haslams.

“Every generation of kids that grow up with MLS will have their own kids, and the soccer culture becomes embedded in our overall culture and country. So it was really a wonderful thing to see people that understand the value of a sports team in a community.”

Current Crew midfielder Sean Zawadzki can attest to that. He was a teenage academy prospect back when the relocation discussions began.

“It was obviously a devastating time, not only for the fans and in the club, but also for us as academy players,” the homegrown told MLSsoccer.com on Tuesday. “We didn't know what was going to happen.”

Building from the ground up

The Haslams’ group spearheaded a plan to invest some $650 million into acquiring the Crew, bankrolling a new downtown stadium that would become Lower.com Field and constructing a state-of-the-art training facility, the OhioHealth Performance Center, adjacent to Historic Crew Stadium, the club’s former home and a living monument as the first soccer-specific venue in modern US and Canadian history.

Thus the future of this founding member of MLS – officially the league’s first chartered club, as Crew folks will proudly point out, a result of Columbus being the first and only city to hit the threshold of 10,000 season-ticket deposits in the wake of the stateside 1994 FIFA World Cup – was assured. Yet even the most optimistic backer could hardly have dared to imagine where the Crew would go from there.

Today, the Crew are one of MLS’s model clubs thanks to:

The gains made over the past six years are particularly breathtaking given the scale of the task the new owners encountered upon arrival, and lingering perceptions of Columbus as a humble ‘small market’ with limited upside despite Central Ohio’s rapid growth and economic dynamism, with the region’s population having nearly doubled since the Crew first took the pitch three decades ago.

“We needed to start from zero with the Columbus Crew,” said Dee Haslam. “I mean, we had to build a staff, we had to build a soccer stadium, we had to build a facility. We had to get our leadership team together, and we had to get our players. So it was pretty much from starting from scratch.

“But we started out with, we think our job is to win, create a great experience for our fans and really give back to the community.”

Reshaping an identity

Hiring the right leaders was key. One of the new Crew’s first moves was recruiting Tim Bezbatchenko, an Ohio native who’d engineered Toronto FC’s rise from perennial doormats to 2017 treble winners and MLS Cup finalists three times in four seasons, to return home as Columbus’ president and general manager.

Issa Tall joined up as well, working as the right-hand man of ‘Bez’ before succeeding him last year when Bezbatchenko moved on to become president of Black Knight Football Club, a group which operates English Premier League club Bournemouth AFC and other soccer investments in France, Scotland and New Zealand.

“The situation was not too dissimilar to what we experienced in Toronto,” Tall told MLSsoccer.com. “After the Save The Crew movement and the new ownership, when Tim talked to me about this project and the ambition of the club, it was kind of the same feeling of, ‘Yes, it’s an established club, but at the same time, it's an expansion team, in a way.’ Because there was no longer an academy, there was no scouting department per se, so everything needed to be built.”

With ownership funding big-ticket signings from overseas like Lucas Zelarayán and Cucho Hernández in addition to the infrastructure investments that made Columbus a more attractive destination for players of all stripes, Bezbatchenko, Tall and their staff quickly reshaped the Crew from also-rans to contenders.

One of their most important acquisitions, however, was a homecoming of sorts.

Eyebrows raised across the league in 2019 when Darlington Nagbe sought to move on from Atlanta United – at that time the reigning MLS Cup champs and widely perceived as the most ambitious club in the league – and return to his native Ohio to join the Crew, arriving via a blockbuster trade for more than $1 million in allocation money after contract renewal talks with ATLUTD reached an impasse. The tempo-setting, All-Star midfielder wanted to be closer to his roots in the Cleveland suburbs, but it was more than that.

He’s still wearing Columbus’ black and gold, and anchoring one of MLS’s top engine rooms as club captain.

“I definitely remember those questions,” Nagbe said this week of his Atlanta exit. “But I knew the vision that the club had in terms of facility and stadium and things like that, and where they wanted to be in a couple of years. So the team was always there, the town was always there, the players were always there; I think now you attract more players when you have certain facilities and you know the product is good on the field.

“Having friends around the league, the way they view Columbus now is completely different than when I first came into the league. So credit to the owners and the staff and people that they've put in position to execute.”

Meteoric rise

Josh Glessing is another of those people. The Crew’s president of business operations originally learned of the Haslam and Edwards families’ ideas for the club when he was part of a team at Goldman Sachs they consulted for strategic advice, and eventually the project drew him to move to Columbus to join up directly.

“Five years ago, the Columbus Crew was effectively last [in MLS] in any meaningful revenue category, effectively dead last across the board,” Glessing told MLSsoccer.com, “to where we stand today, which is at the top of a lot of categories.

“In a lot of categories, we've gone from being behind in the league to being the North Star for a lot of clubs, certainly smaller, middle-market teams, showing what you can do in a market like Columbus, who six years ago was really struggling to stay afloat and was dealing with the threat of relocation. To go from that to what we have today takes a lot of vision, a lot of meaningful investment from our ownership group. And we believe that if we can do that here in Columbus, there's a lot of other markets who have really bright futures ahead of them.”

Glessing can reel off a litany of major events that have come to Ohio’s capital since Lower.com Field opened, from last year’s MLS All-Star Game to US men’s and women’s national team matches to visits from several Premier League clubs. He’s even more effusive about the ongoing development efforts around the stadium, with hundreds of units of new housing construction, tentpole business tenants, community parks, public art installations and more underway for the emerging Astor Park neighborhood.

“What does it mean to keep this team in Columbus? We very quickly realized that it was much more than just a sports story, and it was more than just a sports team story. It very quickly turned into an economic impact story,” Glessing explained. “You think about the first time we toured the site that now is the home to Lower.com Field, it was a barren wasteland of abandoned municipal buildings. So to stand on that site and have the vision of what it could be, took real vision, and that vision started at the very top.

“We've used soccer to shine a light on Columbus. We've also used it to unlock this real, meaningful economic impact that otherwise wouldn't have been there.”

Rising tides

Linda Logan has witnessed all this in her role as CEO and president of the Greater Columbus Sports Commission, and sees ample statistical and anecdotal evidence of how the Crew’s revival has raised the city’s profile.

“The brand has reached some greater international status because of the players we have, the coaches we have, the winning records that we have had. It’s been really fun to see, because that’s something that probably in the early days of the franchise was not the case,” Logan told MLSsoccer.com.

“We do see it economically, we do see that when the Crew are in the city, hotel occupancy is up … What's been special to me is to see the grassroots efforts of the community – so now we have so many more young kids playing soccer. Our high school programs are really solid, they're winning state championships. We have a lot of our local homegrown talent that's not only playing in college, but at the professional level, maybe even representing our country.”

All involved describe this as a living, ongoing story. The Crew just swung a $4 million-plus transaction with the Philadelphia Union to augment their attack with Hungarian playmaker Dániel Gazdag, and there's the potential for another big move this summer. The Astor Park development is still in its early stages and could eventually redefine a previously-ignored sector of downtown Columbus. Tall also points to the progressively younger ages of Crew 2 players as part of the plan to ramp up the academy’s production of homegrown signings.

And in an ironic turnabout on the traditional Ohio sports hierarchy, the Crew will look to grow their presence in Cleveland this Saturday, with a bumper crowd expected to flock to the Browns’ Huntington Bank Field for a visit from Leo Messi and Inter Miami CF (4:30 pm ET | MLS Season Pass). It’s the sort of occasion ‘Dr. Pete’ and others who were there at the dawn of this story could scarcely have imagined back in the 1990s, when Lamar Hunt, the club’s first owner/investor, defied conventional wisdom to plant MLS’s flag in Columbus.

“In the beginning, we didn't have training fields, let alone training centers or academies or anything like that – and sometimes in Columbus, we trained on grass that hadn't been mowed in the spring for two weeks, and the grass was so tall you couldn't even kick the ball,” Edwards recalled wryly. “Lamar always said it would take a full generation of kids to live through MLS before it really took on. And he was hoping it'd be 10 years, but it turned out to be more like 15 to 20. But he was right. It just took a little longer.

“There's something we talk about in Columbus called ‘the Columbus way,’ and that's a collaborative spirit and a sense of community, and a sense of community pride, that allows us to to do things maybe that can't be done in other cities. And so Lamar was spot on in picking us.”