Alan Rothenberg led the growth of soccer in the United States. A member of the National Soccer Hall of Fame, Alan was the president of U.S. Soccer, the governing body of American soccer, where he oversaw the 1994 FIFA World Cup and the 1999 Women’s World Cup and founded Major League Soccer. Alan joins Adam to share his journey and his best lessons and advice. Alan and Adam discuss a wide range of topics: leadership, career success, authenticity, reputation, risk, and much more.
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Read the full transcript of Adam’s conversation with Alan Rothenberg.
Episode Summary
Alan Rothenberg joins Adam on Thirty Minute Mentors to trace an improbable career that took him from a Los Angeles law practice to the presidency of U.S. Soccer, where he built the modern era of American soccer almost by accident. Rothenberg had seen only three soccer matches in his life when Jack Kent Cooke put him in charge of a professional soccer team at age 28, and he did not become deeply involved in the sport again until he was asked to run the 1984 Olympic soccer tournament in Los Angeles. That tournament’s unexpected success, with a Rose Bowl final drawing more than 100,000 fans, convinced FIFA to risk awarding the United States the 1994 World Cup.
Much of the conversation centers on risk. Rothenberg’s first mentor, Lakers and Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke, taught him to use leverage in business rather than rely on legal reasoning alone, and to accept that not every risk pays off. Rothenberg describes his first real business failure, an NBA expansion bid in Houston that collapsed on the eve of closing, and how Cooke’s response, telling him to come sit with him at a Lakers game rather than hide, shaped how he thinks about setbacks ever since. He later applied that same risk calculus to declining the commissioner role at the Major League Soccer he had just founded, correctly judging that the job carried a far higher chance of regret than reward.
Rothenberg is direct about what made the 1994 World Cup succeed commercially in a country with little soccer tradition: treating it as a spectacle rather than a technical sporting event. He booked Diana Ross, Oprah Winfrey, and Robin Williams for the tournament’s ceremonies, took over the Hollywood Bowl for a week of concerts, and staged a Three Tenors show the night before the final draw. That same instinct for knowing the audience shaped Major League Soccer’s early design, including his insistence, over investor objections, that teams build soccer-specific stadiums rather than play in oversized football venues.
On reputation, Rothenberg describes building trust as assembling a mosaic one tile at a time, where a few tiles can fall from the edges without harm but a single tile lost from the center brings the whole picture down. That reputation let him raise the capital for two banks entirely through friends and family, with one investor telling him he was simply buying preferred stock in Alan Rothenberg and didn’t need to hear the pitch. He ties that same authenticity to leadership more broadly, describing his own realization, after working for the notoriously hard-nosed Cooke and later for Clippers owner Donald Sterling, that he could be just as effective by being genuinely polite rather than adversarial.
Rothenberg closes by pointing to the 1999 Women’s World Cup, which FIFA initially wanted staged in small Northeast stadiums, as the achievement he is proudest of. After U.S. Soccer pushed to host it in major stadiums instead, the tournament became what he calls a seminal moment for women’s team sports in America, one he connects directly to the growth of the WNBA and other women’s leagues in the decades since.
What You’ll Learn
- What Jack Kent Cooke taught him about risk and leverage. Rothenberg breaks down the lesson that if you have leverage in a negotiation, reasoned argument matters less than being willing to use it.
- How to recover from a failed risk without letting it define you. Rothenberg describes the collapse of an early business deal and the mentor response that shaped how he has handled setbacks ever since.
- Why the 1994 World Cup was built as a spectacle, not just a sporting event. Rothenberg explains why entertainment programming, not soccer purism, was the key to reaching an American audience that didn’t yet care about the sport.
- Why Major League Soccer required soccer-specific stadiums from day one. Rothenberg walks through the investor pushback he overcame to make stadium construction a condition of the league’s founding.
- Reputation as a mosaic, built one tile at a time. Rothenberg’s framework for why trust built over decades let him raise bank capital from friends and family with no formal pitch.
- Why he turned down the job of MLS commissioner. Rothenberg’s honest breakdown of the risk-reward math behind passing on leading the league he had just founded.
- Why the 1999 Women’s World Cup is the achievement he’s proudest of. Rothenberg connects that tournament’s success directly to the growth of women’s professional sports leagues in America since.
About Alan Rothenberg
Alan Rothenberg is the former president of U.S. Soccer, where he served from 1990 to 1998, overseeing the 1994 FIFA World Cup and the 1999 Women’s World Cup and founding Major League Soccer in 1996. He was previously the soccer commissioner of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and an owner of the NASL’s Los Angeles Aztecs. Rothenberg is a member of the U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame, a recipient of the FIFA Order of Merit, and the author of The Big Bounce: The Surge That Shaped the Future of U.S. Soccer. Earlier in his career, he was general counsel for the Los Angeles Lakers under owner Jack Kent Cooke and later an executive for the Los Angeles Clippers. He is the founder and chairman of Premier Partnerships, a sports and entertainment marketing firm, and previously founded two banks, First Century Bank and First Los Angeles Bank. Learn more via his official Hall of Fame bio and his Premier Partnerships bio.
Related Episodes
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Like Rothenberg, Leonsis built and owns professional sports franchises from the ground up, and shares Rothenberg’s emphasis on risk-taking and long-term reputation over quick wins. - Episode 316: Peloton Co-Founder John Foley
Foley’s conversation covers risk-taking and growth and scale directly, echoing Rothenberg’s own account of the calculated risks behind building Major League Soccer. - Episode 333: Culinary Legend Wolfgang Puck
Puck’s episode covers risk-taking and adaptability in building a personal brand from scratch, a theme that runs through Rothenberg’s own account of reinventing himself across law, sports, and banking. - Episode 332: LPL Financial CEO Rich Steinmeier
Steinmeier’s conversation on trust and resilience closely mirrors Rothenberg’s own framework for building reputation one tile at a time. - Episode 330: Priceline Co-Founder Paul Breitenbach
Breitenbach’s episode on leadership and career success offers another founder’s perspective on the kind of career reinvention Rothenberg describes across law, sports, and banking.
