While Crystal Palace Baltimore began as a dream, it ended up being a nightmare when reality sunk in over how to run the club.
When former midfielder Jim Cherneski from the USA had a chance meeting with a representative from Crystal Palace back on a college tour in 2006, there was no doubt plenty of excitement and jubilation over how the Eagles could soar in the States. With club executives making regular trips across the pond over the following year, it ultimately led to the creation of Crystal Palace Baltimore.
Cherneski became their head coach, also playing when needed - but they dissolved just four years into their inception in 2010. However, he was determined not to make that his lasting legacy in football and has since rewritten his pathway in the sport.
With the dust barely settling following the decline of Crystal Palace Baltimore, Cherneski was already making his next move. After being told by Palace that he would not be getting paid and having already used up his savings and credit cards, all he had left was a bright scheme that would flourish into a multi-million-pound company.
A sock designed to eradicate slipping sounds like a fairly innocuous idea but it was one that had not been thought of before Cherneski dreamt it up while experiencing trouble with his own footwear. After getting a patent for his design in 2010, the company took off exponentially and soon they had their first Premier League player donning the socks - Victor Moses.
Cherneski told The Set Pieces : "For the next year I worked on the product every day and regularly met the players from Crystal Palace who were trying to get a new club and stay fit. We’d go out and hold training sessions and test whatever I made in my house.
"We even tried hospital socks until, in October 2011, we had a formula that worked and is close to the product we have now. We’d wear it every day in training and it worked. It was like a miracle breakthrough. So we created a company in Maryland.
"This was around the same time we’d given a pair to Victor Moses. Victor text back saying ‘I love these. Get me more’. I knew I had to get them to more players so then I’d get them in the stores.
"In America if you want something on a soccer kid you get it on a Premier League player. It validates it. So Victor was wearing the socks and I’d go into stores and say ‘Look, you need to stock 12 of these’ but the rectangles were only visible just above the boot and they didn’t believe me. So I made sure they now went up the sock."
After countless trips speaking to various kit men in the Premier League, the product started to flourish but it was not until the World Cup in 2014 when it really took off. With the company losing hundreds of thousands of dollars, they needed a miracle - and got exactly that when they broke nearly $2million in sales.
Cherneski added: "We needed another investor and Bill Plank came to the table. Bill is the brother of Kevin Plank, who founded Under Armour, and he came in and said ‘I want in. How much?’ I pulled the figure of $1.5m out of the air. The original investors got all their money back and retained 15% of the business.
"That summer in 2014 we had roughly a hundred players at the World Cup wearing the products and did $1.8m in sales. We believed in the product so much all we thought was ‘Why isn’t everyone wearing them?’"
Gareth Bale ended up sporting TruSox, as well as Luis Suarez, Arjen Robben, Emmanuel Adebayor and countless other A-list football stars, further bolstering the profile of Cherneski's company. It did not take long before the big sportswear companies were not only aware of the progress being made - but started feeling threatened.
Cherneski continued: "Another sportswear giant has brought out their own sock that boasts technology similar to our own. It is supposed to grip on the inside and out so I got in touch with my patent attorney and he said ‘On the face of it they owe you millions right now’.
"We have got a patent infringement document drawn up and from that we can serve a cease and desist letter. Then we file a case in federal court and depose the CEO to determine that he approved this.
"The media has to expose this. Because they basically say to you ‘Go ahead and sue us because we’ll outlast you in court all day’."
Whether Cherneski will ever hang up his socks remains to be seen having been inundated with offers for his business, but he has set a steep asking price. "[One sportswear company] offered $40m this summer for the company but they just wanted to acquire the intellectual property. I said I was thinking of a number closer to $500m."
