One Sunday morning last month, several dozen American soccer fans gathered inside a Brooklyn bar to cheer on a middling, minor league club from Denmark.
Many arrived wearing the team’s Kelly-green gear and used the royal “we” to discuss the composition of the squad. As kickoff loomed, a statuette resembling the club’s avian mascot made its way around the room.
“Everyone’s rubbing the owl for good luck,” said Joe Gordon, a sales consultant from the Lower East Side, as he slipped through the crowd.
For the next two hours, the group whooped and cursed at the television screens. Shots and beers and traditional Danish pastries were consumed.
The scene felt inexplicable — a pack of Americans zealously rooting for a third-tier Scandinavian team — save for one key fact: They own it.
Some people splurge on beach vacations or handbags or bottle service. A year and a half ago, a group of roughly 140 people, many of them New Yorkers, pooled some cash to buy a struggling Danish soccer team called Akademisk Boldklub, also known as A.B. The club plays in an unassuming suburb of Copenhagen called Gladsaxe and only draws a couple hundred fans to its games.
“Buying a soccer club is probably one of the worst investments you can make,” said Andrew Lewner, a group member from East Rockaway. “But no one’s going into this from that perspective.”
They are a far cry from the hedge funders and nation states that own some of the world’s biggest soccer clubs. The group bought the team in 2022 for a sum that barely exceeded seven figures, and its membership includes a literary agent, an accountant, a real estate broker, a photographer, a chocolatier, a tutor, a doctor, journalists, a plumbing supply company owner and a stay-at-home father.
By investing — most put in between $10,000 to $30,000 — these non-billionaires could experience a bargain basement version of the sports ownership dream. They could author a storybook return to prominence for the once proud, now floundering club. And yes, they said, if all goes well, they could make some money.
At the same time, the investors knew little about the team, or Denmark, as they embarked on this project, and from the outset they have faced a series of culture clashes and learning curves. Last year, for instance, as members gathered at an apartment downtown to watch their inaugural game as owners, there was confusion about what to drink.
“I had to Google, ‘What’s a Danish beer?’ ” said Sean Naughton, who lives in the East Village. “Luckily they had Carlsberg at the deli.”
The group’s monthly(ish) watch parties have relocated to Mugs Ale House in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Naughton is responsible for logging into the website that streams the games (monthly subscriptions are 79 Danish kroner, or around $11.50) and getting them on the bar’s big screens.
Last month’s gathering featured breakfast beers and an early-morning headache, as A.B., defending inattentively, conceded a goal within minutes of the opening whistle.
“We’re terrible at corners!” Garrett Usina, a stay-at-home father, yelped from the back of the bar.
European soccer in recent years has undergone a rapid period of Americanization. Half the clubs in the England’s top league and nine out of 20 teams in the top division of Italy have owners from the United States.
Then there’s “Welcome to Wrexham,” the popular documentary series from the actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny, who bought an unprosperous club from Wales in a gambit that has some echoes of the A.B. purchase.
“Sure,” said Matt Michaels, an A.B. investor from Maplewood, N.J. “Besides the fame, looks or money — just like Wrexham.”
The project started in 2022, when some friends formed an investment group, Five Castles Football Group, and searched for an undervalued club to buy. After narrowing the hunt to Denmark, they fanned out in search of more cash.
Gordon, introduced to Five Castles by a mutual acquaintance, jumped at the opportunity, eventually assembling a New York-centric consortium of 59 individual investors — friends, parents from his kids’ schools and others — and earning a place on A.B.’s board of directors when the sale finalized that November.
Gordon described his role as a “cruise director,” making sure everyone’s having fun. Last year, he organized an investors’ trip to Copenhagen for two dozen people. It felt like a sports ownership fantasy camp. They enjoyed finger food and unlimited beers in the (modest) V.I.P. lounge during a match, toured the training facilities and met fans. They sang karaoke until 1 a.m.
Back home, every investor, no matter their level of expertise, has access to scouting reports and match analyses from the team’s sporting director. During games, a WhatsApp group for the owners hums with commentary and jokes. The children of some owners have even trained with A.B.’s youth academy.
“You get to get a little of the V.I.P. treatment,” Gordon said. “You get to have a talking point at parties.”
A.B. was once, by Danish standards, a big club, having won the league title nine times. Its list of high-profile former players includes Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who played goalkeeper for the team before turning his focus more fully to quantum mechanics.
“He read the angles better than anyone else,” said Harrison Oellrich, of Garden City, N.Y., an investor.
A.B. won the Danish Cup in 1999, but that was its final triumph. Financial mismanagement sank the team to the country’s third tier — the equivalent of Class AA in American baseball — where it has toiled for years.
Allan Bennich Grønkjær, who co-wrote a book on Danish soccer history, said A.B. was seen now as “something of the past.” (He was also so perplexed upon hearing of the Americans’ investment that he wondered initially if it were a pyramid scheme.)
Results since the takeover have been uneven. The team reached the quarterfinals of the national cup tournament last season for the first time in decades but has looked inconsistent in league play. The owners have already fired one coach and overturned the entire roster.
“It’s too many changes, too quickly,” said Søren Philip Sørensen, 69, of Copenhagen, who has been following the club since the 1960s.
The immediate goal for the American owners is to win promotion to the second tier, where an influx of money from media rights and sponsorships could turn the project into a sustainable business.
For now, the experience remains charmingly unpolished.
The morning of the meet-up last month, Nina Grieco, a trained chef from Syosset, N.Y., arrived with two trays of kanelstang, or Danish cinnamon twists, that she had baked the night before. Her family’s investment prompted her to learn some Danish recipes, with frikadeller — traditional meatballs — being her kids’ favorite so far.
Tina Carr, Gordon’s neighbor on the Lower East Side and the group’s one Danish member, added traditional cardamom buns from Smør, a Danish cafe in Manhattan, between the coffee and bagels at the bar.
The treats could only sustain the good vibes for so long. The team was stumbling again, and would go on to lose, 2-1.
As the minutes ticked away, Gabe Lewner, 16, watched with his father and shrugged his shoulders. There was work to do, on and off the field. Wearing Nike sneakers in the team’s colors, the teenager explained how he’d taken it upon himself to start an English-language Instagram account for the team. His next challenge: learning to speak Danish.
“Well, I’m trying,” he said, eyes fixed on the screen. “I’m using Duolingo.”
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