Thirty-five years building the businesses that define a sport.

My instinct for business showed up long before I discovered soccer. Growing up in Grangemouth, I started running a fleet of ice cream vans at 17 — working seven days a week to fund myself through university. When I graduated from the University of Strathclyde with a degree in Environmental Engineering in 1985, I sold the business and made enough profit to buy my first house. It was a good grounding. You learned quickly that success came from showing up, working hard and giving customers what they wanted.

Looking back, I have no idea why I chose Environmental Engineering. I enjoyed maths and physics and it brought both together. But business was always the real interest — university was almost a sideline.

In 1987 I was appointed to manage a struggling single-site health and fitness club in Paisley, Scotland. The fitness business was underperforming, but attached to it were four tennis courts that were being used for something far more interesting — informal five-a-side soccer. The pitches were generating more energy and more revenue than anything else on the site.

Before the late 1980s, if you wanted to play recreational soccer you booked a multipurpose sports hall, squeezed in between the basketball players, and chased a ball around on a wooden floor with lines painted for every sport imaginable. There were no dedicated facilities, no organised leagues worth speaking of, and no serious investment in the recreational game. I saw the opportunity immediately. I converted the four tennis courts into proper five-a-side soccer arenas, invested in quality facilities, and focused entirely on delivering a great customer experience.

The breakthrough moment came when I invited the main board directors of Scottish & Newcastle Breweries to Paisley one weeknight to see the business for themselves. It was one of those nights where the rain was blowing sideways in a gale. Every single pitch was full. There were people waiting to get on, people coming off. You could see the penny drop with the Scottish & Newcastle contingent — it was obvious they were in. They took us for lunch in Edinburgh and I told them: "This restaurant won't be here in five years, but I can guarantee you that the five-a-side football center will still be there in 20 years." I was proven right. The facility in Paisley has been standing for over 30 years and is still hosting five-a-side soccer every night of the week.

Scottish & Newcastle came on board as a shareholder and made the introduction to Bank of Scotland. From that point things began to move quickly. We opened a center in Glasgow, then one in Edinburgh on the site of the old Portobello swimming pool. We moved into Hamilton, then identified that we had the main central belt population of Scotland covered and expanded into England — Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle. The English centers taught us something important: Scottish players were happy with casual pick-up games, but English players wanted leagues, competitive football. It was a learning curve but we got to grips with it and kept building.

We called the business Pitz Soccer. By the time we sold, we had 13 centers nationally with a strong pipeline of additional sites ready to develop. In 1999 we were approached to sell and 3i, the venture capital firm, was the winning bidder at £28m. I was asked to stay on as Chief Executive but I took the view that I could do better if I went away and started again. The day the deal was done I handed in my resignation and walked out the door.

I had no restrictive covenants and within a year I was back in the sector. In 2000 I completed a management buy-in of Goals Soccer Centers — a small, Glasgow-based five-a-side business owned by a local family. The name, as the family explained to me, stood for Glasgow Open Air Leisure Services. I remember asking the owner whether the name came first or whether they realised it spelled Goals afterwards. You couldn't get a more perfect name, so we kept it.

Goals had three centers at the time of the MBI — two in Glasgow and one in Aberdeen — backed by Dunedin Ventures. The Glasgow South center was so run down when we bought it that there was a traffic cone on one of the pitches because there was a hole in the turf worn down to the concrete. People had to play soccer around the traffic cone. The week we took over, Environmental Health came in and threatened closure because the facility was a safety hazard.

From the very beginning we put in systems and processes, invested in IT to build a backbone that could handle a much bigger business, and started thinking ahead to what we were planning to do. The first thing I did was travel to Holland and visit FC Twente, because I had heard about a new rubber crumb 3G turf surface they had installed. I remember walking across what I thought were grass pitches and realising I was standing on rubber crumb. I had only ever experienced sand-filled pitches and immediately thought: "There is no going back. We have to have this."

The response was extraordinary. On a sand-filled pitch you were always aware of the surface and how it constantly affected the way you played. The 3G pitch changed everything: you played the game, not the surface. We rolled it out across all our sites.

The philosophy at Goals was always the same one that had driven Anchor: invest in quality, attract a wider demographic, and give people a reason to keep coming back. I was interested in the people who had played at school and stopped when they left — the guys in their 30s and 40s who had a negative association with football because of muddy pitches, bent goalposts and cold showers. To attract them back you had to build something genuinely good. The boardroom and the works van both needed to feel welcome pulling into our car park.

By 2004, knowing that our PE backer Dunedin Ventures would want to exit, we began exploring our options. The option that excited us was a stock market listing — but people were sceptical. Scottish companies weren't listing at that time. Five-a-side soccer didn't sound like a stock market business. We tested the market by inviting fund managers to an open day and they loved it. We proceeded with the IPO, which was five-times oversubscribed on the London Stock Exchange (AIM) and generated a 25% IRR for Dunedin Ventures.

Goals continued to grow strongly. By 2012 the business had 43 centers in the UK and one in the USA, revenues of £30.4m, and more than 100,000 customers visiting our facilities every week. That year, the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan — one of the world's largest institutional investors, with $117 billion in assets — made a formal cash offer to acquire the entire share capital of Goals, valuing the business at £73.1m. The offer was unanimously recommended by the board. Shareholders rejected it, believing the business was worth more.

In 2017 we established a joint venture with City Football Group — the owners of Manchester City FC, New York City FC and clubs on five continents — to develop Goals-branded facilities across the US and Canada. It was a powerful validation of the concept and a natural bridge to the next chapter.

During my tenure I also successfully challenged a significant HMRC VAT assessment at court — a ruling that had important implications for the wider leisure industry, with the court finding that we had in fact been under-claiming the exemption we were entitled to.

I left Goals in 2017 following a disagreement with the new chairman over strategic direction. I had built it from three centers to 46, taken it public, attracted a £73m institutional takeover offer and partnered with City Football Group. It was the right time to move on.

I had been thinking about the US market for years. As far back as 2014 I was on record saying: "I believe America is on a path to adopting soccer as one of their national sports. The growth is massive and it is arguably the most popular participation team sport in the US." In California alone, soccer had been one of the most popular participation sports in schools for close to a decade — but when those kids left high school, there was almost nothing for them to move on to. Unlike the UK, where we were well provided for in terms of all-weather pitches and dedicated facilities, the US had a massive infrastructure gap.

In a city like Los Angeles, with 18 million people, finding a local park to play on would be a miracle — the city is built up to an incredible degree. There is demand everywhere and almost no supply. That is the opportunity.

In 2019 I relocated to the United States to develop KIX Soccer Centers — bringing next-generation small-sided soccer facilities to the American market, targeting California, Florida, Georgia and Texas. I have negotiated site leases with public bodies across multiple states and confirmed a high-profile US soccer icon as brand ambassador, with a formal announcement to follow.

The model is the same one that worked in the UK — premium facilities, serious investment in quality, and a focus on attracting the widest possible demographic. The difference is the scale of the opportunity. The US small-sided soccer market today is where the UK market was in 1987. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, hosted across the US, Canada and Mexico, represents an inflection point that will accelerate everything.

I am also a Director of Klipp-It Ltd, a UK-based construction products business developing innovative products for the construction industry.

Keith Rogers is featured in The Five-a-Side Bible, which charts the history of five-a-side soccer in the UK. Available on Amazon.