Marc de Grandpré has long been obsessed with sports, but soccer was not always one of them.
Growing up in Quebec, his main athletic passions were hockey and baseball. He has fond memories of going to Montreal Expos games before the team moved to Washington, D.C., and remains extremely disappointed that a strike ended the Major League Baseball season in 1994, when the Expos were putting together a strong playoff run.
“I was certain it was a conspiracy theory against Montreal,” he said. “The league didn’t want a small-market team winning it all.”
These days, however, soccer plays a huge role in his life, given his job as the president and general manager of the New York Red Bulls. The franchise, one of the region’s two Major League Soccer teams, has had a strong run of success since it was founded in 1996, finishing first in the league three times and enjoying an ongoing streak of 15 consecutive playoff appearances. De Grandpré hopes that the World Cup’s arrival in the U.S. next year will help the franchise and the sport grow in popularity.
De Grandpré first joined beverage company Red Bull in 1999, just two years after the firm launched in the U.S. His job was to help market the energy drink in the Northeast, and although its brand is well known today, there was limited interest in it back then.
“We couldn’t get in anywhere,” de Grandpré said. “We’re like, ‘What are we doing here? Is this going to work?’ And ultimately, we got one distributor. We got a few accounts around Boston College picking up, and then it snowballed.”
His shift from marketing the energy drink to running its namesake soccer team was abrupt and partly based on being in the right place at the right time. He was working in the company’s Hoboken office one day in 2006 when Red Bull co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz happened to walk in.
“He said, ‘All right, come with me. We’re going to go to New York City. We’re buying a soccer team,'” de Grandpré said. “And that’s how my story in soccer started.”
De Grandpré started running the team with virtually no understanding of the sport, which he freely admitted to Mateschitz. But the billionaire businessman, who passed away in 2022, was mainly interested in having someone he trusted run the team.
“When he offered me the job, he gave me a FIFA rulebook on soccer,” de Grandpré said. “So I read it, and now I know most of the rules.”
De Grandpré took to the job quickly as a longtime sports fanatic, although he did leave the franchise and the company in 2008 to explore other opportunities, which included stints at Qualcomm and IMAX. He returned to the Red Bulls in 2014 and now says he probably never should have left in the first place.
Soccer has yet to become as popular in the U.S. as it is in many other parts of the world, but de Grandpré remains optimistic that its profile ultimately will rise. There is an immense amount of talent in the MLS, and he stressed that it is still very young compared to the country’s other pro sports organizations.
“We’re only in our 20s as a league,” he said, “so we’ve got a lot of runaway growth to do.”
