Return of the Mackem: David Bruce

“A Seaburn lad,” says David Bruce looking back on his life.

Educated at Monkwearmouth School, the same as former England women’s international Jill Scott, he attended Sunderland College, winning a national A-levels award in business studies, before heading to Northumbria University.

By his own admission, however, David didn’t apply himself to his course, emerging with a business studies degree but also a fair bit of uncertainty.

Out of that indecision, though, grew a burning desire to give it a go in the US, and so began a love affair across the Atlantic.

He got an internship with Citibank, in New York, through the Lord Mountbatten Internship Program – but the role wasn’t quite to his taste.

He says: “It was mostly IT projects – I hated it.

“I lived in New Jersey, commuted through New York and worked in Queens, but quickly realised I wasn’t cut out to be a banker.

“There was something creative in my mind, trying to push and do things a little differently.

“You can’t really do that in banking – unless you want to bring down world markets, right…?”

Thanks to football, the one-time Sunderland under-16s goalkeeper met parents of the young players he was coaching in Westchester who had some very good connections, and he soon landed a job with global branding consultant Wolff Olins.

He says: “Two months into the job, the managing partner of the firm gave me a book on the Olympics and said, ‘you’re my sports guy – you were hired because you’re a normal person.

“‘Everyone else in the strategy teams is an Oxford or Cambridge grad. But working-class people buy brands and you’re that person, so that’s the reason you’re on the team’.

“I guess it was a compliment?!

“I became an Olympic expert, learning everything about the Games.

“I was part of the pitch team which won the London 2012 Olympics, and I spent 18 months on it.”

After the success of London 2012, David went to work for the firm in Dubai, using his time and salary to fund an MBA at the University of Oregon, which stands adjacent to Nike’s US base.

He says: “If you can learn the American sports business way of doing it, you can work anywhere in the world.

“Nike was basically founded out of the university, so I thought, ‘this is a brilliant place for me to be.’

“I went from living in Dubai, with a 40-metre pool in the apartment my company put me in, to living underneath my landlord’s basement in some crusty part of Oregon.

“But it was good for me; I just needed to focus on the study.”

While doing so, he sent a “random email” to Jim Allaker, the head of sportswear brand Umbro, which had been recently bought by Nike to relaunch the New York Cosmos.

Within weeks, he was working for the company.

David says: “Teams, leagues and events didn’t really do this idea of brand and commercial very well at the time, especially in England.

“I started to write about that and speak to people, and my name got on the radar of someone in Major League Soccer (MLS) who reached out and said, ‘we’re looking to appoint someone for a pretty senior marketing position at the league – would you be interested?’

“It was exactly what I wanted to do.”

After the interviews, MLS commissioner Don Garber personally intervened to appoint David, and he set about transforming the game in the States.

He says: “I wanted the game to be successful; I coached kids who were lost to the game of football, because they were going to high school and weren’t going to play anymore because they could play basketball, baseball or American football.

“I was very fortunate. I met the league during its maturation; it was 17 teams then – when I left it was 30.

“When I started, teams were getting sold for $10 to $15 million; when I left, San Diego sold for $500 million.

“The league was ripe to do some of the things I thought a sports entity should do, in terms of how we thought differently, how we tried to build something that was about obsessing over the fan and creating personalities at clubs, the clubs that fans will become attracted to.

“You don’t want someone to become emotionally excited by a league, you want someone to become emotionally excited by a club, because that’s where the passion points are and that’s where you fall in love.

“And it had to start by making brilliant clubs.

“My view was, ‘flip it, create a league that’s like a label, almost like a record label, like Motown, and then build your Stevie Wonder, build your Diana Ross, build your Michael Jackson.’

“That was the kind of language we talked in.

“We had to build these personalities at the local level, otherwise nobody would ever care about the league.”

There is a huge difference between working to create something under the MLS banner and working for a club that has been at the heart of a city like Sunderland for more than a century.

But for all that divide, when the opportunity presented itself for David to do just that, he jumped at the prospect.

Like many families, the Bruces have been Sunderland fanatics for several generations.

But supporters – and they’re not alone in this – have been, says David, “unloved for too long”.

He aims to change that.

“I wanted to feel the burn of being at a club every day, sitting in a stadium at the weekend and thinking, ‘I had something to do with this’”, says David.

He adds: “Sunderland fans should have the best service.”

He’s sitting at a table two floors above Sunderland’s new club shop in Black Cat House.

He’s been here since 7am, helping to unpack the latest delivery of Hummel kits.

This is the third drop and a fourth has already been ordered. A fifth is probably not too far away.

The shirts barely settle on their hangers in the store, created by new retail partner Fanatics, before being whisked away.

Demand for the home and away retro looks, with chevron sleeves and nods to the 1990s, has been unprecedented, with overnight sleepers and fans queueing around the Stadium of Light to get their hands on a shirt providing old school flashbacks.

The new shirts were David’s first task as chief brand and commercial officer, after he was persuaded by Sunderland chair and majority stakeholder Kyril Louis-Dreyfus to quit his MLS role and help transform his hometown club. it didn’t take long for the man who played a key part in creating 13 new MLS teams, a unique broadcast deal with Apple TV and the signing of Lionel Messi to head back to Wearside.

He says: “You can’t dictate when a particular club comes calling, but Sunderland is my team and, apart from my family, probably the thing I love most.

“All I wanted to do my whole life was play for the club; it was all I thought about until I was 16.

“It’s a magical club with the most potential of any out there because of the incredible fanbase, and what the football club means to the region.”

His beloved Sunderland, however, suffered prior to his arrival, with Premier League relegation followed by time in League One.

Now, though, with the club back in the Championship and looking upwards again, the appeal of helping transform its fortunes was too good to refuse, the lure made even more attractive by the investment across the city to rejuvenate its commercial and cultural scenes.

David says: “I came back for three things: the fans, the owner and the city.

“I’ve never known a council be so focus-driven and have such phenomenal vision about making Sunderland a modern and progressive city.

“We can take that, inject it into what we’re doing and create a better football club.

“Conversely, we can shine a light on the amazing things going on in the city, so our fanbase can understand the work of council chief executive Patrick Melia and his team.

“For us to take our club to the next level, it’s about working hand-in-hand with the city and its stakeholders.

“You’ve got young kids who dream about being a footballer.

“Now the same thing can happen around other opportunities in the city; we’re creating a place that is going to be full of potential.

“It will be a city that can drive agendas around digital, sustainability, creativity and culture with the £450 million Crown Works Studios, which will be this generation’s Nissan moment.

“We’ll have makers and creators in our city working on things that will travel the world with ‘Made in Sunderland’ on it. That’s phenomenal.

“The football club is going to be right at the heart of telling that story.”

Opportunity, though, is rarely too far from challenge, the latter something David was faced with before he even officially became part of the club’s hierarchy.

He says: “When Kyril offered me the job, he said, ‘we’ve decided to cancel our contract with Nike and Just Sports, so I need you to bring a technical partner in’.

“I was still five weeks away from joining but he said, ‘you better start now, otherwise we won’t have a technical partner for 2024/2025’”.

Hunting for a shirt deal before he’d even booked one-way flights for Sunderland, David used a familiar North East mantra to land his number one target Hummel.

He says: “My wife kept asking why I was getting up at five in the morning, but I needed to work European hours, to figure out this new technical partner deal and hit the ground running the minute I walked in the door.

“I had pretty good contacts; I’d worked with Adidas for a long time at the MLS, I had the background with Nike and Umbro, and I knew people in the technical and sports brand space.

“The only one I didn’t know was anyone at Hummel.

“So I sent a blind LinkedIn message to Hummel and said, ‘you don’t know me, but I know you – and I definitely know your brand. I’d love to talk about a potential partnership with Sunderland’.

“My mam always said, ‘shy bairns get nowt’, and I thought I’d probably get nothing.

“But, overnight, I was put in touch with the chief operating officer in Denmark and the chief executive in the UK.

“Two weeks later, I was here for a wedding and met Hummel’s UK chief executive outside this very office.

“I said, ‘I’m going to work in that building soon, but I can’t let you in because I haven’t got a swipe’.

“Someone had to come and let us in, and I took them around the stadium as if I was working at the club – I hadn’t even had the tour myself.

“Hummel took a total punt, trusted me so we could build up a head of steam so, when I came into position, we could start the contracts, stand the deal up and ensure it was right financially too.”

The bigger the brand, the blander the kit, and Sunderland’s have often been a different version of other teams’ unimaginative designs.

The partnership with Hummel, though, complete with slick online marketing campaign, gave Sunderland and David ownership of the home, away and third shirt designs.

The result are striking creations, which come complete with clever details such as the River Wear and shipbuilding images, ships down the red stripes and the Stadium of Light’s coordinates.

David says: “Because the storytelling was so detailed, the brief was so good and the first designs were really good – as we pressure tested and refined them – we knew we’d put something out the fans would really love.

“My only worry was it would land hard for a certain era and certain age.

“If you look back on Hummel, it was a time of brilliant kits, nice memories, beating Newcastle in the rain, getting to the play-off final and getting to the FA Cup Final.

“But it still wasn’t an era you could describe as absolute success.

“Yet the volume of fans waiting 12 hours before the store opened took us by surprise.

“The hardest thing in football is time; we don’t have time.

“People don’t give you time but what we’ve done with Hummel in 11 months, to have a fully custom product in store, is unheard of; it’s miraculous, in fact.

“Our new retail partner Fanatics are best in class, and were really excited about Hummel and what they could bring.

“Our retail business is going to be three times the size of what it was probably 18 months ago.

“It’s an incredible change, but we have a passionate fan base desperate to be serviced the right way and desperate to have a proper product.”

David’s last MLS task was to launch Lionel Messi’s arrival at David Beckham’s Inter Miami franchise.

He left a week after the Argentine legend made his debut.

David says: “I was working on two deals before I left; the first was bringing in Apple TV as global broadcast partner – the only league to sell to one partner – and the second was trying to bring the greatest football person brand into MLS.

“We were asking ourselves, ‘how do we go to the next level?’

“Well, if a star like Messi’s available, and you can add gasoline to the fire, as the Americans would like to say, that’s how.

“Messi is Messi; he’s a once-in-a-generation star, who transcends the sport in a way nobody else does.

“And he would look great with chevrons down his sleeves, wouldn’t he…?”