The arc of life has bent it like Beckham for Keith Cregan, former offensive tackle for the University of Delaware football team whose current goal is to promote the beautiful game of futbol.

Cregan, BE '99, who majored in accounting, is working as a finance manager at Major League Soccer headquarters in New York City.

"I still have problems telling my football buddies from high school and college that I now work to promote soccer," Cregan, a third team All-Atlantic 10 Football Conference selection in 1998, says, laughing.

Cregan had just returned from the West Coast where the San Jose Earthquakes defeated the Chicago Fire 4-2 on Nov. 23, 2003, to win the MLS Cup before 27,000 fans at The Home Depot Center, a sparkling new pro soccer stadium in Carson, Calif.

He was joined at the championship game by another former Fightin' Blue Hen, defensive lineman Joe Minucci, an intern with the MLS special events department that plans and executes programs for league sponsors.

Minucci, a senior in the College of Health and Nursing Sciences, was a first-team All-Atlantic 10 defensive tackle at UD and was in the New York Jets' 2003 preseason training camp before joining MLS.

Cregan treasures his days at UD, both on the field at Delaware Stadium and in the classroom. "Delaware was great," he says. "I got a chance to play football and didn't have to pay for school, which I appreciate even more now that I am watching friends try to deal with their student loans."

In addition to accounting, a major he selected because he felt it was the college's most demanding, Cregan says the most important skill he learned at UD was time management. "With practice five days a week, and the offseason just as busy, you have to learn to use your time wisely," he says.

"As an accounting major, you had to put the time in each day because every class builds on the next," Cregan adds. "At the end of practice or a game, when your were tired and sore, the last thing you wanted to do was study, but you had to make that commitment."

After graduating from UD, Cregan worked for PriceWaterhouseCoopers and then moved into sports marketing before deciding that he wanted to get back into finance. He received a job offer from MLS but did not jump right on it. "I hesitated because I didn't know much about soccer," he says.

That has changed over the course of the last few months. Working in a relatively small office, Cregan has had exposure "to everything from A to Z, including suggesting and evaluating new business opportunities."

He has found the work fast-paced and rewarding and says it has been a tremendous learning experience. "There is a lot going on, and there is always something new," he says. "It keeps me sharp."

MLS is unusual among American professional sports leagues, in part because it is trying to avoid the mistakes that led to the demise of the North American Soccer League that operated from the late 1960s into the middle 1980s. That league had one or two powerful and financially sound teams, and a whole lot of others that constantly came and went.

"MLS has tried to build in stability," Cregan says. "I liken it to McDonald's because there is a strong corporate structure, and we then sell franchises to investors. They then own and operate their teams, but there is still a tie-in to the corporate structure and philosophy."

All player contracts, including that recently signed by teenage phenom Freddy Adu of DC United, are negotiated and held by the league, not by individual teams.

In addition to the league, MLS has a spin-off business entity known as Soccer United Marketing that handles a wide variety of commercial projects, including World Cup broadcasts, the rights to promote an American tour by the Mexican national team and the commercial rights to MLS.

Soccer United Marketing also in involved in promoting the commercial rights to the U.S. Soccer Federation national men's and women's teams, rights that include corporate sponsorship, consumer products and broadcast production.

"We are constantly trying to develop the sport of soccer in the United States," Cregan says.

He says he sees a healthy future for the sport and for MLS, which counts among its investors Philip Anschutz of the Anschutz Entertainment Group, who owns five teams and is currently backing the movie "The Game of Their Lives" that chronicles the U.S. national soccer team's 1-0 upset victory over England in the 1950 World Cup.

 

"We are signing wonderful players, including Freddy Adu, who have a great relationship with the fans, attendance is up, feedback is positive and the atmosphere at our games is very fun," he says. "I think the future of MLS looks great."

While his primary focus is MLS, Cregan says he maintains close ties to UD, particularly keeping in touch with Matt Robinson, assistant professor of health and exercise sciences, who has an interest in promoting careers in sports and sports marketing.

He has passed the word about MLS internship opportunities through Robinson and is anxious to let other Blue Hens know that the league is worth a look.