Glick is executive with Manchester City

Jul. 27, 2013

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The leap between the Midwest League and the Premier League, the Lansing Lugnuts and Manchester City, is probably greater than the distance between Michigan and England.

Tom Glick didn’t make the trek in one jump. But, while helping to run one of the world’s most prominent and wealthiest professional sports franchises, he fondly considers his stint as the Lugnuts’ first general manager — his words — “transformational.”

“To this day, it continues to be one of the, if not the most exciting times professionally for me in the two decades I’ve been working,” Glick said earlier this month from Manchester, England.

Thirteen years after he left Lansing, Glick was hired in 2012 as Manchester City’s chief commercial and operating officer, brought in, in some ways, to do what he did in Lansing — grow the soccer organization’s brand, create a top-notch fan experience and do it within a self-sustaining budget (albeit several hundred million dollars larger).

“The basic functions are the same,” Glick, 44, said. “As the organizations get bigger, the scale of it gets bigger and requires more people, more specialized roles. But the core functions are very similar.”

Glick’s trip from Lansing to overseas included another stop in minor league baseball — the startup Sacramento River Cats — and two in the NBA — first in the league office as the vice president of team marketing and business operations, and then as the New Jersey Nets’ chief marketing officer.

That led to soccer — a gig as the president and CEO of Derby County Football Club in England, which, five years later, put him in position to operate Manchester City and the club, with its massive annual budget, reportedly close to 300 million pounds when he took over.

“It’s a ton of fun, I feel fortunate just to be able to work in (sports),” Glick said. “This hasn’t changed since I did my first unpaid (minor league baseball) internship in Colorado Springs in 1989 and did nothing glamorous. I ran errands and did all sorts of odd jobs and didn’t get paid for it and probably worked 80 hours a week. And fell in love with it.

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“And I just try to keep learning and keep being challenged by the work that I’m doing and just try to do a good job, get along well and build good relationships with people. That’s continued to lead me to good choices and opportunities.”

This execution of this philosophy led to him to Lansing more than 17 years ago. Or, rather, led Lansing to him.

Early success

Lugnuts owner Tom Dickson said he called 10 minor league baseball owners and asked for a list of the five best people they knew in sports.

“His name showed up on five of those lists,” Dickson said of Glick, working in minor league hockey in Peoria, Ill., at the time, in 1995. “I think (my wife) Sherrie (Myers) and I knew within two weeks of him walking in the door that we had a superstar in the making.”

Dickson said beyond being bright, well-educated and ambitious, Glick had “great instincts, great integrity and great people skills.”

“His rise is nothing short of meteoric,” Dickson said. “We knew it was coming.”

Glick didn’t. And he’s not sure it happens without his four seasons in Lansing, from 1996 to 1999.

“What Tom and Sherrie created in Lansing and gave birth to in 1996 changed the game again, brought it to a new level, in terms of the way they approached it,” Glick said. “For me, I was fortunate to be in the eye of the storm and to have the two of them as mentors. It was a time of tremendous learning.

“So many different things, just in terms of the way we built corporate sponsorships, the way we packaged tickets, the way we sold group tickets, the way we entertained fans at matches. But one of the things, just having the strength of your convictions in terms of following through and taking risks. To name the team the Lugnuts was a massive risk that they took, that wasn’t popular at first, but very quickly changed and turned into the top-selling brand in minor league baseball by the end of the first year.”

The Manchester City brand didn’t need a goofy-looking bolt logo to catch the world’s attention. It has it, having regained its stature among the world’s great soccer clubs in the last half-decade.

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First soccer position

Glick grabbed Manchester City’s attention with his work at Derby (pronounced Darby), taking over with new North American ownership in 2008, just as the club was being relegated down from the Premier League. He made his name keeping Derby afloat financially and relevant during this tumultuous period.

He had never thought of working in soccer or England. He hadn’t been around the sport since being told he should give it up as a teenager in Colorado.

“I hadn’t followed (soccer) particularly closely,” Glick said. “I tend to immerse myself in the sport in which I’m working, so that was true with baseball and basketball at those times. One of the owners at Darby County and the gentleman who put the deal together to buy the club, called me and asked if I would consider moving over with my family and running the club. It took me off guard. But as I looked more closely at it, I was intrigued. And it turned out to be an amazing move.

“Football is the world’s sport. In England, it’s the first, second and third most popular sport every week in terms of what’s on the news. So it’s just been an incredible amount of fun.

“One of the things that we did in Lansing, which was really impactful, was just saying goodbye and thank you to Lugnuts fans as they were leaving, coming through the gates on their way out the game. I’ve always enjoyed that aspect of sports and sports is built around a live-event experience. It’s something at a very young age, when I was 20, when I had my first job, that really captured me. And that lasted.”