Marco Carrizales has loved soccer all of his life. The Dallas native played two seasons at Furman University while pursuing a degree in communications.
“I grew up a soccer player,” he says. “I lived it. I breathed it. I trained every day.”
By the time he graduated from Furman, Carrizales got an offer to play professionally for FC Dallas in the MLS (Major League Soccer) division. But a stacked roster and nagging knee injury meant that his stay in Dallas was short.
He came back to Greenville, a place he’d come to love while at Furman.
“When I had an opportunity to explore the area, I was taken aback by all the city had to offer,” he says. “I was 20 minutes from the mountains. I was 30 minutes from a lake. I was two hours from Atlanta and Charlotte, I was three hours from a beach, there was a burgeoning downtown scene.”
An opportunity cloaked in a challenge
His soccer-playing days behind him, Carrizales realized he needed a new plan.
“I was kind of in a position in my life I’d never really been in, which was ‘What’s plan B?’” Carrizales says. “In striving to be a professional athlete, you kind of only have a plan A, so when I was looking for that plan B I didn’t feel good about staying in Dallas.”
It was then — around 2018 — that Carrizales heard the story of Dennis Crowley, a New York soccer fan and entrepreneur who started his own National Premier Soccer League (NPSL) team.
“After reading up on what this guy had done, I immediately became interested in the idea of bringing a higher level of soccer into Greenville, I knew there was an appetite here, and they just didn’t have anything to rally around. That little itch in my head turned into six months of building a business plan and crafting what type of branding that it could be.”
Together with his brother, Richard, Carrizales got in touch with the league which, coincidentally, was hoping to expand into Greenville. Soon after, the Greenville FC soccer team was born.
“They just needed somebody to approach them,” Carrizales says. “I was 22 years old at the time so maybe they were a little skeptical, but I had good connections here, and I got the approval to start our first season.”
Building connections, growing brands
Along the way, Carrizales also tapped into another career, working as a partner and General Manager at Ringofire, an Upstate marketing agency.
“We were doing a lot of grassroots events in the city,” he says. “Coincidentally through that process, my brother and I met the two guys who were starting RingoFire Marketing. We went a couple of months with them as our agency, and then they moved into a larger office space downtown and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got extra space, we’d love for y’all to move in and sublease from us.’”
Once the two companies started sharing office space together, they inevitably started sharing a lot more.
“We started talking about each other’s businesses,” Carrizales says, “opening up about struggles and successes and different things we can try, and it became very collaborative between our two businesses. About a year after we met them, we started doing contract work for them and eventually they said, ‘We don’t want you guys to work for us, we want you to work with us.’ So we ended up doing an equity swap with each other’s companies, where we became partners in the agency and they became partners in the soccer club.”
Now, Carrizales has the chance to work with the twin passions in his life — soccer and marketing.
“I studied communications at Furman and I specialized in marketing classes,” he says. “I had always been interested in building brands; I found joy in looking at my favorite brands and seeing what they were doing to communicate with their audience. The most fun part about building the soccer club was what branding was going to resonate with the city. My passion is building a brand, and that has helped me personally get to where I’m at right now.”
Did you know?
- Carrizales played at SMU for two years before transferring to Furman University
- Dennis Crowley, who inspired Carrizales to start Greenville FC, is the co-founder of the Foursquare mobile app.
- Ringofire Marketing has worked with Crescent Tools, Serta, Flybar Pogosticks and Monument Grills, among others.
