Scott LeTellier
Scott LeTellier is known for his passion for sports and for bringing soccer’s World Cup to the United States in 1994 for the first time. In his own estimation, he’s known for two things regarding soccer: “He’s the guy who wrote the bid document in 1988 that got FIFA to the U.S., and then mortgaged his house in Irvine, California, to pay the initial costs and salaries to get the World Cup going.” Eventually, the World Cup got bank financing from Manufacturers Hanover in New York with an $8 million line of credit.[1]
Soccer was not his sport growing up. His father was a doctor for the Milwaukee Braves baseball team and consequently LeTellier loved baseball. After the Braves moved from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Atlanta, Georgia, LeTellier’s father took him to the local tennis club, and Scott grew to love tennis. He was the captain of his university tennis team. In 1971, won both the Wisconsin and Tennessee men’s open doubles titles.
- He enjoyed sports so much that when LeTellier was in sixth grade, he and his father made a list of 15 major international sporting events he dreamed of attending: one event per sport, including the NCAA final, a Rose Bowl game for college football, a world heavyweight championship. “The World Cup was on the list, but mostly because he felt it was too big of an event to leave out.”[2]
LeTellier came up to speed on soccer while serving a full-time mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Germany. At church, he met “a 12-year-old blond soccer player in a blue blazer, who seemed to know the answer to every one of LeTellier’s questions about soccer.” He also gave issues of Kicker magazine to LeTellier; “it was a kind of European Sports Illustrated, only mostly focused on soccer.”[3]
Still serving his mission in 1974, LeTellier got to watch the World Cup at the German fraternity in Erlangen. "Similarly, at one point, he even talked his way into a celebration party with the German national team after its World Cup victory. There, he handed the Book of Mormon to Franz Beckenbauer — German’s legendary soccer player."
LeTellier earned a law degree at Brigham Young University and scrimmaged with the soccer team at the university. He became an expert in corporate and securities law. He also became involved in the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, becoming the assistant vice president of sports for the Los Angeles Olympics. He also did legal work for the Los Angeles-based California Soccer Association.
LeTellier was named president and chief operating officer of the World Cup ’94 Organizing Committee, Inc.
LeTellier believes that soccer’s “ethnic and cultural diversity make it a perfect fit for America. ‘You got people from every continent playing,’ he said. ‘It’s such a melting pot that it’s really the true American sport in a lot of ways.’”
