After Rutgers' Mike Rice abuse scandal, former AD Tim Pernetti lands with NYCFC

Pernetti — having risen from a firestorm scandal at Rutgers that forced his resignation as AD less than two years ago — hopes to have successfully marketed and branded New York City’s first major professional soccer team.

Tim Pernetti started this endeavor with a clock ticking in his brain, a potential time bomb he vowed not to underestimate.

From ideas and the financial backing of Abu Dhabi’s royal family, Pernetti was given 18 months to build the business of a professional sports franchise. Complicating marketing matters, he is operating with a temporary home stadium — and a probable move to another borough in the coming years — without the knowledge of when the star player will show up from his loan overseas.

“And everybody thought, that’s a lot time,” Pernetti, 42, says in a sitdown with the Daily News. “And I thought every day, it’s just not enough.”

Soon his staff had a tangible reason to feel this urgency, every second of it. Pernetti hung up a countdown clock in the midtown office, a digital reminder within view of the work desks. The time is set to expire on March 8, the day of the season opener for NYCFC.

By then, Pernetti — having risen from a firestorm scandal at Rutgers that forced his resignation as AD less than two years ago — hopes to have successfully marketed and branded New York City’s first major professional soccer team.

But the clock resets after the inaugural game. A new deadline is ingrained for the home opener a week later. It’s a gimmick Pernetti picked up from friend and former Rutgers football coach Greg Schiano.

“He had the belief that it was always about thinking about only the next game and not anything beyond that,” Pernetti says. “We had a big countdown clock in the locker room that only counted down to the next game and it was sort of, ‘Let’s not think of anything beyond that.’

“So when I came here I sort of walked around and thought to myself, what can we do to instill in people that this was coming, that there’s a number of days, a number of minutes, hours, seconds, that this is actually going to take place at some point? It sort of became a culture around here. It’s not a race to the clock, but there is a clock. You have to be ready when that clock hits zero, no matter what. And what we’ll do after the first game is, we’ll rewind it to the next game, and then the next game, and then the next game.”

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A long-standing relationship ended when video surfaced of Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice physically and verbally abusing players. Pernetti had seen the video months before it went public and suspended Rice for only three games, although later — in a letter of resignation — he contended that his initial recommendation to superiors was to fire the coach.

Pernetti attended Rutgers, played tight end for the football team, worked as a broadcaster covering the university’s games. As AD, he set up Rutgers for a projected $200 million windfall over 12 years by organizing the move to the Big Ten.

Then he fell dramatically as a scandal engulfed the university.

“I was sad about the whole situation,” says Schiano, who had left Rutgers in 2012 for the NFL. “And that extends to the way it ended up for Tim and his family because I knew how much he cares about Rutgers. Sports as a profession and sports administration is a very fickle thing. So you know that when you get into it.”

Rarely does an official embroiled in such circumstances receive as much support as Pernetti. There were calls for his reinstatement, including full page ads in newspapers bought by boosters thanking him and denouncing the actions of university president Robert Barchi.

The support for Pernetti was intensified following the hiring of his replacement, Julie Hermann, whose first year on the job was a ride through controversy and missteps.

“I put my heart and soul into Rutgers every day I was there. I’m incredibly proud of everything we accomplished when I was there, especially this year watching their entrée into the Big Ten, which was something that I worked every day and night on for four years,” Pernetti says last week. “I think it’s terrific and I’m very proud of what we accomplished there and I always will be rooting for them. But I’m too busy to think of anything other than my job with NYCFC.

“Do I love the way it ended? Absolutely not. But it ended and I moved on to something great. . . . So I think everything happens for a reason.”

Those were Pernetti’s first public spoken words on his departure from Rutgers, chosen carefully. There’s no reason for him to dwell in the past, not after he was awarded a $1.2 million settlement with Rutgers and subsequently landed on his feet.

Pernetti says he was flooded with job offers following his departure from Rutgers, both for AD positions and “things I thought I’d never consider in my lifetime.”

When the Yankees announced their partnership with Manchester City in bringing an MLS team to NYC, Pernetti gained an inroads with the expansion club.

“I knew Tim, worked with him, and I recommended him and sent him over there,” says Yankees president Randy Levine. “He had the qualities, as far as I was concerned, to deal with this.”

The Nets recently moved to Brooklyn and the Islanders will do the same next year, but that’s a re-branding. Pernetti is making an introduction, building a startup.

To put it in perspective, the last expansion team within the five boroughs was the 1962 Mets.

“The one thing that kept sticking with me was, ‘How many new pro sports franchises are going to come to New York in the next 25 years or 50 years or whatever it is?” Pernetti says. “And every discussion I had, that continued to just kind of poke at me — ‘What a unique opportunity that is.’”

* * *

Pernetti’s first lessons into professional soccer were from his two sons, ages 15 and 13, who schooled their father on the Premier League, the international game, and whatever else he picked up from FIFA’s video game.

From there, it’s been a crash course for a lifetime football player — “American football,” Pernetti says with a smile, “you have to differentiate around here” -- as he works closely with NYCFC coach Jason Kreis and GM Claudio Reyna.

“I’ve probably asked a ton of dumb questions,” he says.

Not that an expert knowledge of the sport is an important requirement for the Chief Business Officer. His job is to fill seats (more than 11,000 season tickets have been sold), pick up endorsements and push a brand to a distracted market.

It’s also a market that appreciates stars, and there’s an opportunity to capitalize on the current garbage state of New York sports teams.

A big part of the rollout was the signing of Frank Lampard, the 36-year-old British midfielder who represented the team’s leap into sexy and serious. But Lampard’s future is up in the air because NYCFC’s sister club, Manchester City, has him on loan and is exploring the possibility of extending his stay into the MLS season.

It’s a situation that will dictate many early perceptions of NYCFC, about whether it is a legitimate priority for the uber-wealthy owner in the United Arab Emirates or merely a satellite for Manchester City.

If Lampard is overseas while NYCFC is playing games at Yankee Stadium, it would also seem disingenuous to fans who bought tickets — or No. 8 jerseys — under the premise of watching the Chelsea legend.

“From our business side, we’re trying to make sure we’re prepared for everything and anything,” Pernetti says.

The timing of Lampard’s arrival is out of Pernetti’s control, and it seems to be a question for the preferences of Manchester City and Lampard. Pernetti is more involved with the building of a new home stadium, a process that is moving slowly. The first site in Flushing was picked out by the league, and ultimately abandoned because of heavy opposition from the community.

A different proposal for a 28,000-seat arena in the Bronx — located just south of Yankee Stadium — was close to being completed, but then Mayor Bloomberg left office, and the DiBlasio administration wasn’t keen on all the negotiated taxpayer subsidies.

So that deal was nixed.

New York property attorney Martin Edelman, a member of Manchester City’s board of directors, told The News that the search has now moved to Queens and Brooklyn.

“We had focused on the Bronx, but that didn’t work out, and we weren’t able to find anything else in the Bronx that made sense,” Edelman says. “So we’re looking in Queens and Brooklyn, and each potential (site) has to be analyzed for construction, for access to public transportation, for parking, it’s a very complicated process.

“There’s no rush, but there’s a rush. In other words we’re not going to just settle for something, we’re going to find a place where everybody is comfortable doing it, and it makes economic sense to do it. But we’re not just sitting and waiting for the place to come to us.”

The original timetable for NYCFC to play at Yankee Stadium was no more than three years, but it clearly may take longer. And when the team moves, Pernetti will be in charge of marketing another introduction, assuming he sticks around that long.

For now, though, Pernetti doesn’t have time to look forward to another borough or back at Rutgers. There are only 77 days left.

“It seemed like yesterday that clock said 300-something,” he says.