Jim Neil has been a “sports nut” since he was a kid.
The co-founder and CEO of Dallas-based real estate investment firm Churchill Capital Company played soccer in the ‘70s and hoped to get involved in sports at some point. He got his chance about three years ago.
“This came up actually in casual conversation, someone mentioned to me that the NWSL [National Women’s Soccer League] was expanding to franchises,” Neil said. “I just was like, ‘How does Dallas not have a professional women’s soccer team?’”
While the Neil family didn’t end up with an NWSL franchise, they got involved with the USL Super League, a new women’s professional soccer organization that started play in 2024.
From there, Dallas Trinity FC was born. The first women’s professional soccer team in the area became a family business, with Neil’s kids playing key roles in the front office.
In its first year, the franchise was one of the top teams in the league in attendance and merchandise sales while finishing third in the regular-season standings.
The team started a new season in August, notching home wins against teams from Spokane and Brooklyn.
Dallas Trinity FC also attracted key partners, including digital estate planning platform Trust & Will, which currently sponsors the NWSL team San Diego Wave FC.
“We sell to families, and I felt like that was a huge part of Trinity’s trying to build … a fanbase of families all over the D-FW area and beyond,” Trust & Will founder and CEO Cody Barbo said. “I’ve got a daughter, my business partner’s got a daughter in Dallas, and it just felt like we could do good for the professional sports franchises [by] being an early sponsor of the team, but also, you know, be good husbands and fathers to our wives and daughters.”
As Dallas Trinity FC starts its second season, it has big plans to raise capital and bring more fans to its games.
Jim Neil, CEO of Trinity Dallas FC, speaks at an event for the unveiling of the Dallas USL Super League women’s soccer team name, Thursday, May 9, 2024, in Dallas.
Elías Valverde II / Staff Photographer
Neil sat down with The Dallas Morning News to discuss the women’s sports business and building a financial structure around the franchise. Here are some of the highlights, edited for length and clarity.
How did you get involved in women’s sports?
Every time I looked at sports, it just didn’t seem to make sense and truly, I was often invited as a minority player, where it made even less sense because you don’t have control and it’s sort of like you’re paying a lot of money to be a spectator.
We had an opportunity to take a look at potentially becoming bidders on an NWSL franchise. The previous expansion … franchise had gone for two and a half, $3 million, and that was in a financial realm that our family could handle as well.
It turns out that they ended up doing two franchises instead of one, and they were purchased by groups in San Francisco and Boston and they went for $53 million as opposed to $3 million. So that … just knocked me on my butt.
We were way below a $53 million offer, and we dropped out. And then my son got contacted by someone who had obtained the rights to a USL Super League franchise, which is the women’s division in the USL ecosystem. And what was intriguing was that was … all sorts of financial challenges involved with that, but at a much more palatable entry price, lower cost to get involved. And we decided to take a run at that.
How did you build the financial structure around the team?
The USL structure is a little bit different than other major league sports. It’s a true franchise setup like McDonald’s. So the teams don’t own the league.
What you have to do is you put together the money to acquire the franchise, and then what they did is it’s sort of like they put together the franchise directions.
So you have an outline, but then you have to figure out how much of that outline you’re going to subscribe to and how you want to tinker with it. So there’s the sporting side, there’s the soccer side and then the business side, and then you’ve got to figure out the venue, which is probably the biggest and most important piece to capture and figure out.
I would say we went through seven, eight, nine, 10 iterations of, “Here’s what we think it’ll look like. Here’s what we think the budget will look like. Do we have enough money to do it? Do we need to raise money?” … We will keep a controlling interest of the team but actually, we’re going to go out and raise some outside capital, probably this summer, to supplement our family capital, which has been predominantly what’s been funding the team so far.
How do you go about making sure that the team is economically viable?
One of the things that was important to me was to believe that under some defined amount of time we could get to an annual operating budget of zero. We knew that any sports enterprise loses money. Most of the major league sports make money, but they make very small amounts of money relative to the worth or the value of the franchise.
We put together a budget and a timeline and a hope to get to break even by the end of our fifth year. I explained to my family, as we all sort of sat down and thought about doing this, that we were going to need to convince ourselves that we could accomplish that or we would pass.
There are a lot of wild cards that affect that. … There are huge capital investments and it’s difficult through just tickets and sponsorships to get a proper return on those investments.
Where do you get those returns on investments so that you can eventually break even?
When I say break even, I’m talking about getting the operating cash flow to break even, and that’s going to come basically from ticket sales and from sponsorships, and there are other things you can run — summer camps, you can run coaches’ clinics. You can run a variety of other things that are associated with the club. Some of the clubs have built … a youth academy. The youth academy can make you money.
We haven’t sorted through what we’re going to do yet or not, and some of the other teams throughout the league are doing that in a variety of ways, but that’s another source of revenue. But then ultimately you’ve also got your terminal value. So my view is, if you can get to the point where you’re at least breaking even, you’re engaged in the community, and it’s kind of like in a house. Your house doesn’t make you money year after year, but it appreciates in value, and as long as you can keep the cost of the house reasonably low, then you can continue to live there knowing that someday I could sell it for a bunch more money down the road.
