🔴 Why this agency launched a creator collective

Today’s guest is Kyle Sheldon, an agency founder, newsletter co-founder, and twenty-year sports marketing veteran. He’s spent his career leading marketing for three Major League Soccer teams, plus a three-year stint running social media for NASCAR. In 2022, he launched Name & Number, a marketing agency serving soccer teams and related clients in the United States and beyond. One year later, he co-founded a newsletter serving the same industry.

In this issue:

• 🌎️ How creators will grow the GDP of American soccer

• ⚽️ How brands should approach working with creators and vice versa

• 📧 How to make an excellent, engaging, niche-industry newsletter

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Watch my interview with Kyle, or listen to it wherever you get podcasts.

American soccer, creators, and the global stage

If Kyle Sheldon has anything to do with it, the GDP and cultural impact of American soccer will grow by leaps and bounds over the next decade and beyond.

In November 2022, after 18 years leading marketing for three MLS teams and social media for NASCAR (a three-year adventure), Kyle launched Name & Number, a self-funded soccer creative and marketing agency that’s grown to a team of six full-time employees.

Kyle is also the co-founder of Pathway, a well-executed newsletter built “to help ambitious people break into and build careers in soccer.” (More on that down in today’s “Steal this tactic” section.)

Last week, Name & Number launched their Creator Collective, the first such initiative serving the American soccer industry.

The most influential American soccer creator is not a part of that collective but illustrates the influence creators have on the industry. IShowSpeed set a record for English-speaking streamers last September with 1 million concurrent viewers. Speed, who just turned 20 in January, has hit new heights in his popularity since becoming obsessed with soccer — specifically with Cristiano Ronaldo, the most-followed person across all social media platforms — just a few years ago. But the soccer his content features is, most of the time, not American. Like his fanbase, it’s global. This is where Name & Number comes in.

An agency connecting creators and brands

The Name & Number Creative Collective is a group of 12 creators with a combined following of over 9 million across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Their content averages over 80 million monthly views across those channels.

The collective came about naturally over the agency’s lifetime as they worked with these creators across various client projects; Kyle’s team decided to package a creator-services product based on the consistent demand.

The model works well for brands who want to connect to new, highly engaged audiences but might not know which creators to work with and how to work with them, as well as creators who want healthy brand deals but don’t necessarily know how to connect with those brands or negotiate a deal. Name & Number is a facilitator for both, taking a fee from the brands.

There are two engagements on offer:

• A content studio model where creators produce white label content for the brand channels, fully managed by Name & Number. “It gives the brand the opportunity to have consistent content. They know what's coming. We're working with them on what type of content [they want]."

• Campaign integrations where creators plug into existing campaigns by providing on-brief content shared on their own channels to extend the brand’s reach and distribution.
  
  “It gives the brand the opportunity to have consistent content. They know what's coming. We're working with them on what type of content, what's the topic, what are the clubs we're featuring.”

In creator marketing, generally, the brand-creator relationship is almost always balanced in favor of the brand; creators often operate in a state of precarity without multiple, stable income streams. Kyle stresses the importance of helping creators they work with achieve steady, long-term engagements. And he has the right approach to briefing these creators:

The hour is early

In 2013, after eight years with MLS team D.C. United, Kyle decamped to NASCAR to oversee their social media presence. They weren’t even on Instagram yet, almost a year after Facebook acquired the app. I asked him what he’s kept with him from that time, from that early era of social media marketing:

You could say the same of creator marketing. The goal doesn’t change: connect with people. Kyle has a 14k-strong following on Twitter; he’s been active there for some time. I asked him how he built that audience, why he adopted the platform early on: “When you work for a pro soccer team in America, you look for any opportunity to connect to fans, right? Traditional media coverage was hard when I started my career.”

He went to Twitter because he didn’t have the resources, and MLS as a league did not have the clout to get more traditional media coverage 15–20 years ago. “Twitter was a natural way to try and tell our story.” It’s part of why he’s been able to start an agency entirely self-funded, too.

FIFA Men’s World Cup 2054

The next FIFA Men’s World Cup will take place across Mexico, Canada, and the United States in 2026. The last time the World Cup took place in the United States was in 1994 — there have been seven editions since, but no other edition has been so well-attended. Across all games, 3.4 million people attended.

Assuming the world functions much as it does seven editions after the next one, there will be another World Cup. IShowSpeed will be 51 years old.

I won’t attempt to predict whether any current social media platforms will exist or if every global citizen has an always-on livestream camera embedded in their retinae. “Marketing” might be a word long-buried in the dustbin of linguistic history after being fully, for-good folded into "education" and "entertainment." But I will predict this: millions more people will watch the games and participate in the culture around them. And, here and there, that growth will bear Kyle Sheldon’s fingerprints.

Connect with Kyle on X or LinkedIn.
Read and subscribe to Pathway.
Explore Name & Number.

🎙️ This was an excellent conversation. It was impossible to fit every topic we touched on in this newsletter — here’s some of what we touch on in the podcast:

• 00:00 Introducing Kyle Sheldon

• 01:05 The evolution of soccer and sports marketing

• 04:28 Becoming the driving force in growing soccer in the U.S.

• 09:25 Growing careers in the soccer industry

• 12:22 Pathway's natural growth has led to extremely high engagement

• 17:32 The potential future growth of the soccer industry is massive

• 21:20 Navigating the soccer-creator industry requires expertise

• 24:49 The fashion culture within soccer

• 28:19 Empowering creators to thrive in the soccer space

• 32:22 U.S. vs European football content culture

• 41:36 The shifting power dynamic between creators and traditional media

• 50:32 Partnership advice for creators and brands

If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, we’re on all of them.

How to make a vital industry newsletter

One year after starting his agency, Kyle launched another soccer company, this time alongside two others, his brother Nolan Sheldon and John Bello, who have also spent their careers in the industry on the technical coaching side.

Pathway’s mission is “to help ambitious people break into and build careers in soccer.” The bi-weekly newsletter has now been publishing for most of one-and-a-half years, including an extended hiatus after John withdrew from the project after accepting a role as First Assistant Coach at MLS team Nashville SC.

The goal for Kyle and his co-founders is to position themselves as core, vital operators in this burgeoning industry, to be the people you go to when you need to make a connection.

This is relatively straightforward for them to do with multiple decades of experience and connections in the industry; it would be similarly straightforward for anyone in any industry without this kind of service-product to set up a similar newsletter. That said, I don’t think you need the experience; it helps, but building a newsletter like this is equally an excellent way to enter an industry.

This is how they’ve structured the newsletter:

1. An intro letter from that week’s author, much like the note you see at the top of every issue of Creator Spotlight. Rarely more than 200 words.
   

2. The cleaned transcript of an interview with a soccer thought leader. Kyle and his brother usually switch off interview and writing duties for each issue. Kyle’s most recent issue featured Julie Haddon, CMO for the National Women’s Soccer League. Usually around 1,500 words.
   

3. Jobs in soccer. Usually half-a-dozen to a full dozen open positions across the broader American soccer industry.
   

4. Links around the web, or “ICYMI: Must-read articles,” as they frame them. Usually three-five links to recent, relevant industry reads.
   

5. Closing formalities": A signup link for anyone who received the issue on a forward, a CTA for organizations looking to place their job opening in the letter, Pathway’s social media links, and the brothers’ LinkedIn links.

It’s about as classic as it gets. I’ve built newsletters with exactly this format. And it’s classic for a reason! Their audience is highly engaged. Kyle shared these numbers:

• 4,000 subscribers

• 75-80% open rates

Growth has been entirely organic, driven especially by their own social media efforts.

The potential audience is “anyone who might want to work in soccer,” which Kyle believes is a massive potential audience. The existing audience, based on surveys they’ve run, is split into thirds:

• “A third of people who are early in their career and want to break into the industry”

• “A third who are middle-career and either industry or looking to, we kind of call it a career pivot, someone who wants to break into the soccer industry but is in a different space.“

• “A third are senior executives, 15-plus years, and that split surprised me a bit, because I thought it would trend a little bit younger.”

As for monetization, in the past, they’ve sold sponsorships and charged fees for the job listings; an early issue offers inclusion in the jobs list for $100, a featured job promotion for $350, and a featured sponsorship for $500. That’s no longer the case, as Kyle says they’ve agreed to “just build and grow” the newsletter this year. Another reason monetization isn’t urgent: it only takes around 90 minutes to put the newsletter together each week.