We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Gabriel. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Gabriel below.

Gabriel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

CLUBELEVEN started as a passion project, out of the idea of highlighting the untold stories of American Soccer. Back in 2018, my twin brother Pablo and I were just starting University in Maryland, and we found ourselves with a lot of free time the summer before freshman year. Pablo loved writing, and I loved photography, so that year we decided to start a social media page called Peru 18, focusing on Peruvian players who had attended the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia. Based in the U.S., we soon decided to only focus on those Peruvian players who were currently playing in the American domestic league, Major League Soccer. After attending our first MLS match as media, both as photographers and writers, we found that there was an opportunity for us to tell stories from all across American Soccer, and not just those that pertained to Peruvians playing in the U.S. That’s how CLUBELEVEN came to be, a media outlet dedicated to telling the untold stories of soccer in the United States.

There wasn’t really a problem we were trying to solve, rather it was more so a different approach that we wanted to take at storytelling. Our approach at photography focused on the details of the game, trying to paint a picture of the matchday that included the atmosphere, the fans, as well as what was going on on the field. In our writing, we focused on storytelling surrounding the athletes playing in these matchdays, focusing more on their life outside of the field rather than their statistics while on it. This helped us paint a picture of American Soccer that felt more true to what we were seeing on a weekly basis as we ventured into these matchdays and profile interviews, and a lot of that is what laid the foundation to the storytelling that we do today, involving video as well.

Gabriel, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m one of the Co-Founders of CLUBELEVEN, a media publication and agency focusing on American Soccer storytelling. As a first-generation immigrant from Peru, I was raised in a household where it was impossible not to fall in love with Soccer, and after moving to the United States back in 2010, it was something that I carried with me into my teenage years. After graduating high school in 2018, I attended the University of Maryland, where I graduated with a marketing degree four years later. Throughout college, my brother and I as well as a super talented group of photographers and writers across the U.S. built CLUBELEVEN into one of the most trusted American Soccer outlets in the States. After graduating college, our team decided to create an agency alongside CLUBELEVEN, in order to handle client requests for storytelling similar to what we were doing on a day to day basis at CLUBELEVEN, focusing primarily on photography and video.

What I’m most proud of in this journey has been our ability to stay true to our original mission, and for lack of a better description I’m just proud that we have been able to make it this far. People always tell you the sports industry is a thankless job, and one where independent ventures often times are left behind simply because of how difficult it is to monetize an idea. For us it’s been a struggle that we’ve been lucky to navigate up to this point in a manner that hasn’t compromised our core values, and our approach at creative, passionate, and inspiring storytelling hasn’t taken a hit at the expense of growth. On a personal level, it’s the people that I’ve been able to work with that have made this all worthwhile and the reason why we continue to work in this field. I’m very lucky to have met people early on that believed in our vision and showed us support, offered a helping hand, and opened doors when they didn’t need to. It’s made everything really special for everyone involved and we don’t take that for granted.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Back in 2020, we were mainly focusing on match day coverage of soccer games in the U.S., and a lot of our content strategy relied on this coverage to stay afloat. Once the pandemic rolled through, all the major leagues in America shut down for a few months, and we were left with a gap in our calendar, a pretty big one to say the least. Fortunately, we had done a good job up to that point in archiving our photos, and we had a good amount of stories to share during the downtime

Still, we didn’t want to rely only on matchday content, and we decided to pivot a bit into more longform storytelling. So by the end of 2020, we decided that in 2021 we would commit to publishing one long form interview per week, focusing on the stories of athletes, fans, and creatives in the industry whose stories we felt oftentimes had fallen through the cracks.

The pivot helped us experiment with new forms of expressing ourselves, and it ended up being one of the main reasons why we ended up trying our hand at video, which now happens to be our biggest offering when it comes to agency/client work.

clubelevenagency.com

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Luckily, I met my co founder pretty early on in life. Having my twin brother as my business partner has been a blessing, and I personally think it’s been our biggest advantage when it comes to day to day operations and early on scaling. Pablo and I grew up having pretty similar interests, and being able to share a vision for how we wanted to portray soccer in the States was super important at the beginning of our journey with CLUBELEVEN. Since Pablo loves writing and I enjoy photography, we had all the ingredients we needed to start out as a blog, and it’s something we might have taken for granted early on but can recognize as something that helped us stay on track at the beginning, those two hobbies at the time complemented each other to become one whole idea which has slowly grown into what it is today.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://clubelevenagency.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clubeleven/?hl=en
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/clubeleven
• Twitter: https://x.com/clubelevenmag
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@clubeleventv

Image Credits

Gabriel Bayona Sapag

Andrea Vílchez for CLUBELEVEN Group Photo