The Verde Report: James Ruth Is Bringing Austin FC’s Blueprint to the NFL
Club’s first head of marketing talks about building a brand
By Eric Goodman, Fri., March 15, 2024
Over the weekend, Austin FC saw a golden chance at its first win of the season slip away when St. Louis City equalized in stoppage time to escape Q2 Stadium with a 2-2 draw. It was the latest anticlimax in what has been – at best – a so-so start to MLS life for the nascent football club. On the pitch, that is.
Off the pitch, the club is one of American soccer’s brightest success stories. Austin FC boasts the league’s longest active sellout streak and routinely delivers one of the loudest, most engaged home crowds in the nation. The club’s oak tree crest is ubiquitous around Austin, in bars, on hats, on car bumpers. Where Austin FC as a soccer team has wavered, Austin FC as a brand has thrived.
“We could have created a brand that would have [just] resonated with the converted soccer fans in this city, but by trying to make sure that this club honored all of Austin and tried to be a flag bearer for Austin, that opened us up to a much larger range of people,” James Ruth, Austin FC’s first head of marketing and current chief marketing officer of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, told the Chronicle.
Ruth, who was back in Austin Monday to appear on the SXSW featured session From Goals to Touchdowns: Cultivating Brands Across Continents, is arguably the man most responsible for establishing Austin FC as one of the most popular and powerful brands – sports or otherwise – in Central Texas.
Originally hailing from the college football haven of Lincoln, Neb., Ruth found himself so moved by the drama and thrill of the 2010 FIFA World Cup that he left a career in investment banking in favor of a marketing gig at the MLS league office in New York City.
When MLS tabbed Austin for expansion in 2019, Ruth’s eyes lit up. An SMU alumnus who took “every excuse I could be down in Austin” during his undergrad days, he presented club president Andy Loughnane with a vision of how he would, if given the opportunity, launch the ATXFC brand in an authentic way that would resonate with the Austin community.
At the center of that pitch was another member of the club’s ownership group: self-proclaimed “Minister of Culture,” Matthew McConaughey.
“Matthew is the cultural laureate of Austin, right? He lives and breathes this,” Ruth said. “He was always down for that conversation, and he was always down to have it from a perspective of, what is the soul of the city?”
Those conversations centered around everything from jersey design to local partnerships to the club’s iconic “Verde Listos” refrain, which inspired one of the club’s earliest successful marketing initiatives.
“We found people that we thought were uniquely representative of all the different pieces of Austin and said that they were 'Verde.’ People that weren’t necessarily the token Austin celebs, but they were absolutely emblematic of what makes Austin cool,” Ruth said.
That campaign and others like it proved successful enough to propel Ruth to Tampa last summer, where he now holds one of just 32 coveted roles spearheading marketing for an NFL franchise.
“When I told my team at Austin FC that I was going to the NFL, it’s like it was going to the dark side. You spend a lot of time playing the challenger, and the 800-pound gorilla is the NFL,” he said. “But it was an opportunity for me to try something new ..., People look to the Bucs as a representation of Tampa, but I think we can go even farther in terms of how we represent Tampa off the field. And that’s very much akin to how we looked at things from an Austin FC perspective.”
Austin FC faces Philadelphia Union on Saturday, March 16, 7:30pm at Q2 Stadium, broadcast free on Apple TV.
