Michael-John Tate Building Youth Soccer Legacy in Pacific Northwest
From South Africa to the United Kingdom to the Netherlands, Michael-John Tate has left a sizable football legacy in several different corners of the world. And today, he’s carving out a new footprint in youth football development in the Pacific Northwest.
The oldest of five siblings, Tate spent the first seven years of his life in rugby-crazed South Africa. Tate was blessed with athletic prowess from the very start, and by the time he was 16, he was able to run 100 meters in 10.98 seconds. However, it wasn’t until he made the move to Eastleigh, a town 40 minutes south west of London, that he was finally infected with an unrelenting zeal for football.
“Rugby is the #1 sport in South Africa, whereas coming to the UK, you’re just enveloped in football, that’s all you know. I did a number of different sports up until I was 10/11 years old, and then just football took over,” stated Tate in an exclusive R.Org interview. “I think it was more organic than a true passion, although that passion was ignited very quickly when I saw that I had a little bit of ability, and that someone would acknowledge that ability. It’s probably not the normal journey from a kid coming out of England, because really, when you’re born there, you’re born with a ball, and I don’t think that was really my story until I moved there.”
Launching his Playing Career in England
In order to launch his official footballing path, Tate joined Tottenham Hotspur’s south center of excellence – the club that the past two generations of his family supported – before being scouted shortly after by Southampton FC in the US equivalent of a State Select game. Tate headed down to Southampton’s academy, where he played alongside future stars like Matt Le Tissier, Rod Wallace, and all-time Premier League leading scorer Alan Shearer. Tate played at The Dell (now St. Mary’s Stadium) for two years, during which he achieved a childhood dream by starting against Tottenham at White Hart Lane, before dropping from the First Division to the Third Division and joining Cardiff City in 1989. He spent one year in Wales before heading back to England and graduating with a Bachelor of Business Administration – BBA, Recreation and Leisure Management – from Southampton City College.
“It was still really early in my journey, but I had an incredible reputation for the work that I’d done at Southampton, so Cardiff gambled on a young kid like me in a roster that was full of guys who had been playing for an immense amount of time. Cardiff took a chance on a young kid who they thought could come in and do a job for their team and play with established men. It was a journey more than anything. A lot of people would have been insulted to go down a division, but it doesn’t really work that way in Europe: sometimes, you go one step backwards to go two steps forward in so many ways. There have been a lot of young players who go out on loan to lower-division teams like Harry Kane, who spent years with lower division teams until he matured as a player, both on and off the field.”
“That’s just not common here stateside, but it’s incredibly common in Europe, but it’s not: ‘You dropped down a division, and therefore you must be really bad.’ The gap in quality between Division III and Division I is not as big as some people think it is. It’s an opportunity here, it’s a piece of magic here, it’s a moment that changes your trajectory. Cardiff were really good to me; they took care of me. I broke my ankle playing against Swansea, and they could have terminated my contract quite quickly, but they took care of me in my first year and still paid me as a young player, so I was super grateful to them, because that was a really difficult moment for me. That’s really where my journey took so many different twists and turns, but ultimately it was good to be part of such a good group of young men. I learned how to lead people because I was a small minnow in this pond of really established guys. There were some guys there that played for national teams, who were there in the final years of their careers, and some really good players that I learned a lot from, so I’ve got to give them a lot of props.”
Despite being told by his doctors that he’d likely never kick a ball again. Tate worked his way back from a brutal injury and started playing again for semi-pro outfit Fareham Town. He stole the show on his debut after he collected a free kick, escaped a Folkestone defender, and fired in a 25-yard drive to snatch a point for the Creeksiders. Tate then made the move to Eredivisie outfit Willem II, where he spent the first half of the 1992/93 campaign on loan, before spending the second half with Eerste Divisie side VVV-Venlo on loan and helping the Venlose Trots win the championship and return to the Dutch top-flight. He then plied his trade in the English lower leagues for Runcorn Town and Hungerford Town before deciding to head to Pretoria in 1997 and make the move to SuperSport United, owned by former Southampton legend Terry Payne. 20 years after leaving his homeland, Tate was going to be returning to a radically different South Africa.
“It was amazing, it was different…I couldn’t really appreciate the change from what was then the apartheid era, but I did experience the power of Nelson Mandela and what he brought, and that euphoric change was huge. I think there was a lot more cultural diversity, there was a lot of community, it just felt like there was a big power to work together, so there was that togetherness, and there was an effort to see how South Africa could become the next strong power of Africa outside of football economically and, naturally, we see that moment with Mandela’s inauguration as a big change in world politics and just in the world in general. I think that influenced so many people’s lives, me included.”
Transitioning to Youth Coaching
After bouncing around from SuperSport United and Randburg FC, Tate departed his motherland and made the move to the United States, where he has remained ever since. He joined new USL team Utah Blitzz, as a franchise player, spending a year at Rice-Eccles Stadium until deciding to hang up his boots in 2001. Tate quickly transitioned from playing to youth coaching, founding the European Pro Soccer Academy (EPSA) and turning it into the preeminent soccer training program in the Utah/Arizona/Idaho era, and delivering training sessions for boys and girls 6-18 years of age. He then merged EPSA with two soccer clubs, Cosmos and Sparta Soccer Club, and formed Inter FC, which became the most successful youth club in the state of Utah over the course of a decade.
Having served as Inter FC’s Technical Director from 2002 to 2006, Tate then worked as the Head Coach, Owner, and Director of Coaching at WPSL sides Rush Salt Lake City, where he expanded the player pathway options by partnering with Utah Rush and making them into the largest soccer club in the state with approximately 5,000 members. He then left Salt Lake City for Victorville, California, where he launched the first WPSL team in the High Desert with the So Cal Rush as the club’s Co-Owner and Technical Director. So Cal enjoyed success both on and off the pitch, attaining historic record-attendance records and negotiating a $30K per season “Little Caesars” Shirt Sponsorship, with Tate guiding them to a 200% revenue increase in two years and forging a strong partnership with Victor Valley College in Victorville for player recruitment and field development projects.
“I intentionally moved into leadership, coaching education, and organizational development, and I’m self-taught on all levels. Outside of my USSF licenses that I had to do, everything I’ve done is self-taught. I’ve done it through study and hard work, I’ve built and led football organizations, developed coaches and players, and worked inside the federation and academy structures to see what’s done well and what needs work. That combination of lived experience as an executive has defined where I am now, and I think that’s been a big part of how I have gone into these roles, because I still tap into the coaching side, I still work with teams and players, I still watch to observe what staff are doing, what they’re doing well and what they can improve on, and that’s a massive thing. I don’t always believe there’s that much of a hands-on approach. I would much rather be on the pitch watching and observing and helping and being hands-on than staying behind a laptop 24-7 and trying to joystick coach and lead entities. To me, that is not what a developer does: that’s far less people-centric than I’d like to be.”
After two years in the Golden State, Tate headed north for Portland in 2010, where he has remained ever since, serving as the Director of Coaching and Director of Player Development for Tualatin Hills Utd, overseeing recruitment, retention, and scouting, whilst also serving as the CEO and Founder of Futworks International from 2008 to 2015. Tate helped to develop the FutPro product, a training device to increase speed and agility for athletes, guiding the company from bootstrapping to managing manufacturing in South Korea at Moldpia manufacturing and securing over $1 million in capital investment.
By the time that he completed a three-year production and marketing agreement with original Shark Tank shark Kevin Harrington of TV Goods, the Futworks brand and the FutPro training device were valued at $5 million. Tate worked as the Technical Director for BSC Oregon, where he merged Newberg Soccer Club Operations into BSC Oregon, increased club revenue by $250K, and implemented new club partnerships in the south and west regions of the Oregon Workplace Organization. He also served part-time as an Assistant Coach and Head of Recruitment for Warner Pacific, where he added an international recruiting platform, coached all main-team training sessions, and developed the periodization programming and tactical strategies.
Consolidating a Legacy in Portland
Tate continued to lay down foundations in the Beaver State, serving as the Director of Business Development for PDX Sportscenter and helping them double their revenue in one year thanks to a name rebrand and a $100K deal with the Portland Steel (AFL) to have PDX Sportscenter as the official training facility for the 2016 season, in addition to adding two more tenants in dormant office space. Tate was able to showcase his business acumen as well as his coaching talent with GPS FC Bayern Munich, leading them to eight State and Regional titles and increasing revenue by 700% in four years through player registrations, donors, corporate sponsors, and creative programming. And in January 2019, Tate started a new journey as the CEO of Oregon United Football Club, balancing this expansive role with consultancy work.
“Oregon United was probably the biggest rollercoaster of my life…the ups and downs, the positives, the learning curves, the playing fields, not always having the infrastructure…the journey was super cool. We trained at a church field because we did not have access to fields, both locally and a little bit beyond that, so that was challenging.
We wanted to build it as a community club: the vision I had was that parents could all come to that field, wherever we trained, and not feel like they had to drop their children off and go. We wanted them to have a place where they could feel like they could all talk, whether you were an under-9 or an under-16, all the parents knew each other, and all the kids knew each other, and we intentionally made it that way so that the players knew that they had so much respect for the staff. We had a mandate that every kid had to come in and shake the coach’s hands, which is a very Dutch culture thing, respecting the coach, and that the families all got to know other kids in other age groups, as opposed to being very age-specific-centric.”
“Our goal was to be able to have a pub where, after the games and after training, parents could go and socialize and have a drink and talk football, which is very common in Europe, where the football club becomes almost the epicenter for community growth and togetherness. That was our vision; we got close to realizing it, and it was an incredible journey. In the pandemic, we had to pivot to training on private venues and barns, and we just kept the kids occupied. We wanted to make sure that they were safe as well: my backyard was a training center for a while, we did a lot of online Zoom calls for fitness, we all had to adapt, which was tough because we had just started our program.
It was difficult for a lot of people, but we hung in there. I did a lot of pivoting, a lot of training online, and helping not just my club, but a lot of other clubs to stay around, so I pat myself on the back for being community-centric and trying to get players back playing. I worked with the state government on the Let Them Play campaign, where we met with our governor to say, ‘Let’s get kids playing sports again,’ and which went from zero to upwards of 30,000 on Facebook in a very short space of time, and became a national campaign. We saw that kids needed to get out during that time and play sports – those are things that are important to me, it really comes down to kids first.”
Despite these enormous challenges, Tate was able to triple the size of Oregon United and launch a new league in conjunction with US Club Soccer, hire new national-level staff, and establish new training centers in Southern Oregon and Eastern Oregon for underserved soccer communities. Tate oversaw a cash revenue growth of over 300% in 12 months, including the sale of the club’s first cash jersey sponsorship, and negotiated the club’s first multi-field partnership facility development projects, resulting in a 10-year lease with an option for an additional five years.
But all good things come to an end, and in the summer of 2025, he was forced to close Oregon United after they were suspended for the Winter and Spring seasons due to a “clerical” error. The situation extended beyond the field, with members of his family impacted by targeted online activity across local forums and community platforms, as well as bullying and harassment experienced by his children in school and sporting environments. And yet, he’s once again managed to bounce back from this adversity and land on his feet in Lake Oswego. Now 55, Tate is blazing a new trail as the owner of DARE Futbol Academy, the latest in a laundry list of youth football facilities that he has operated since coming to the States a quarter-century ago.
“I’m a happy-go-lucky person anyway, but I want to be able to help entities and my own business grow and really understand that if we focus on the transformation of the human as opposed to the transaction of the human, as opposed to seeing them as just another number, you will see immaculate changes, you will see players play in ways you’ve never seen before, because they know you care. My journey was so lonely at times and so fraught – I wanted to be acknowledged all the time and told ‘You’re good, you can play here, we want you.’ I think when you’re told that ‘You are a special player, you can go places,’ and when you see some of the players I’ve coached and trained, and that are now playing at a high level, that’s really important. I’m looking to see 2026 be a real positive at every level, whether it be helping on the pro level, or helping at the youth academy level, whether it’s in the boardroom, in small, large businesses, or on a consulting side, I think there’s so much I can offer and excite people to live their lives differently.”