Nigel Travis is not the first economic migrant to exit London’s East End for a life in the United States.
However, not all are investing in the neighbourhood that nurtured them.
From his home in Boston, the ex-Dunkin Donuts CEO spends his days locked in conference calls helping run the six separate organisations he chairs, including Leyton Orient, the club that claimed his heart when Terry McDonald fired one in from 25 yards to beat Manchester United at home in September 1962.
“Last minute, top left hand corner,” Travis said, his face betraying a sense of accomplishment that never gets old.
That victory in front of a crowd of 24,901, and a home win over neighbouring West Ham, were the highlights of the one season Orient spent in the top flight.
The FA Cup has thrust this hardy perennial of the lower leagues back into the nation’s gaze with a fourth-round tie at home to Manchester City, a match that according to Travis ranks among the biggest in the club’s history, given the growing power of the City brand.
Orient form a triangle to London’s east and north with West Ham and Tottenham Hotspur.
The modest training ground in the leafy suburb of Chigwell, where London leaks into Essex, is a melting pot of footballing grandees, including former Spurs owner Sir Alan Sugar and West Ham majority owner David Sullivan.
The Hammers claim the hearts of most in this manor, followed by Spurs but there is a residual attachment to the O’s that offers a unique platform for growth.
In the age of the hipster club, a landscape where the likes of Bournemouth and Brentford, Brighton and Fulham prosper among the elite, the scale for that in London E10 is obvious.
Travis is all over this idea, but in a measured way.
The visit of City means eyeballs, particularly in the United States, a country increasingly wedded to the English national game via ownership of its top clubs, including United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal, and the success of those TV staples Ted Lasso and Welcome to Wrexham.
The latter sit three places and 11 points above Orient in the League One play-off zone.
Whilst the exposure brought to Wrexham by its Hollywood ownership of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney has given them an important foothold in the growing American market, it is the millions they have pumped into the club that has enabled their rise through the divisions.
It is the same kind of economic clout that Travis is chasing to fund the next steps at Orient.
“Wrexham have done a fantastic job for the game,” Travis tells The i Paper.
“Over here when I play golf, the first thing they say when I tell them about Leyton Orient is ‘how do you compare with Wrexham?’ I tell them we are in the same league and used to be above them. The Netflix programme has helped Americans understand promotion and relegation.
“My favourite quote when we got promoted a couple of years ago came from someone who said ‘can I congratulate you on your relegation?’ English football produces excitement. Wrexham is a fantastic story, Bournemouth, Brighton and Brentford are all aspirational.
“Do we want to be the Brentford of the East End? That would be very nice, but you have to keep making progress. I’m not jealous of these clubs, just proud of what we have done, proud of our players, our coaches, our board and most of all our fans.”
Orient has always been touched by romance, largely by virtue of not being an Arsenal or a Spurs or a West Ham, a London club rooted in community that thrives on second-club energy, their results of interest to those whose primary attachments lie elsewhere.
There is also a fringe celebrity aspect to Brisbane Road, where the Lloyd-Webbers, musical brothers Andrew and Julien, typify the theatrical connection.
Travis remembers when Sixties theatrical impresario Bernard Delfont was involved in running the club and Warren Mitchell, who played arch West Ham diehard Alf Garnett in Sixties sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, was a regular in the Brisbane Road posh seats now occupied by the Lloyd-Webbers.
“Andrew is a fan like anyone else. He gets asked about what we are going to do about the goalie and stuff like that as much as I do,” Travis said.
The City match has piqued huge interest in the United States, with The New York Times no less one of many American outlets preparing pieces ahead of the game, which will be shown live on ESPN Plus.
Travis, an associate of Boston native John Henry, whose Fenway Sports Group has transformed Liverpool, is a regular on American radio station Sirius XM with ex-Fulham and City striker Rodney Marsh, noisily promoting the Orient brand.
Whilst he is augmenting the club’s profile in the media space, Travis has also commissioned an investment bank to chase the money required to fund Orient’s push for a new stadium and training complex that will underpin the push towards the Championship and, perhaps, into the promised land itself, the Premier League.
Since Travis took over a broken club in 2017, Orient have won two promotions from the National League to League One.
The club is outperforming a midtable budget of £8m a year, with annual losses estimated at £3m, a chunk, yet approximately half the League One average.
“We’ve always tried to improve year by year and we have, apart from one year in League Two,” Travis said.
“This year we set two goals; to advance in some cup competitions because we haven’t had a very good record. We’ve achieved that and to progress over our league position last year, which was 11th. We look on track to do that.
“As for future investment we have had interest from the Middle East, America and Europe. We’ve had people from the business world, the entertainment world. We are running a very disciplined process and I feel confident it will come to a good conclusion soon, hopefully by the summer.”
Travis is part of the growing community of streamers who pay a tenner a game to watch Orient from anywhere in the world, a seismic contrast to the days when his father would have to fax results to America if he were to keep track of the team when he left for the States in 1989.
On Saturday he will experience the premium content from the director’s box, one of a dozen or so live games he manages to attend during the season, and one he hopes will fire interest in the Orient story.
“The Premier League is brilliantly covered over here [America] and has got everyone fixated to the degree they are now getting into the rest of the leagues,” he said.
“So you have people looking for a club [to follow]. A guy parking my car last year came up to me and asked what my Premier League team was. ‘I don’t have one,’ I said.
“‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Well, I own a football club,’ I said. ‘Which one?’ ‘Leyton Orient’.
“This guy now sends me texts every week. He watches every game on the streaming package. This will grow and grow. Welcome to Wrexham and Ted Lasso has educated people.
“I have people asking me if they can go see Orient when they are coming to London. Once they go, that’s it. They are hooked. A friend of my 19-year-old went a couple of years ago. She has been to lots of sports events and said that it was her best experience ever.”
The training ground has been awash all week with big match excitement, media interest peaking with a formal press day on Wednesday. Twenty-four hours earlier The i Paper intercepted Charlie Kelman, one of the heroes of the third-round victory over Derby County, opening the scoring and converting a penalty in the shoot-out.
When he walked toward the spot, Kelman had no idea that the match rested on his boot. Had he missed Orient’s fifth kick, Derby would have been banking the extra £300,000 broadcast bounty guaranteed when City came out of the hat.
“I was so focused on taking the kick, watching the keeper, how he was moving, quickly or slowly, I didn’t realise,” Kelman said.
“I knew they had scored all their pens but I was so in the zone I stepped up, knew where it was going to go, the rest is history.”
Kelman, 23, is in his second loan spell at Brisbane Road from parent club Queens Park Rangers. This time it feels different.
“You step into this environment you feel part of the journey,” he said.
“Last season the gaffer [Richie Wellens] felt he did not have the size of the squad. This season we are ready to take the next step and challenge for the top six. We lost the first four games of the season but things can change quickly.
“The club is building a solid infrastructure and the chairman knows what the next steps are. It feels like this is a story just waiting to happen.”
Though Basildon born, Kelman was raised, in part, in the United States attending high school in Texas. He rejected a scholarship in New York at 16 to pursue his dreams at Southend United. It is a tough call trying to find your feet in the lower leagues, especially in a part of the pitch where young players are fodder for flint tough defenders whose dreams of stardom were long since booted out of them.
“I have been playing first-team football since I was 17, learning on the job,” he said.
“The physicality is just part of the game now and all I have ever known. At this level people are playing for mortgages, their kids. It’s not like the luxury of the Premier League.
“People are really fighting for their livelihoods. You know you are in for a fight when you get smashed in the first five minutes. No-one lets you off.
“I just embrace it. It livens you up and gets you into the game.”
The arrival of City offers Kelman a chance to operate in a more refined setting and to measure himself against the best, not least the peerless Erling Haaland.
“He’s a freak. The guy is so athletic and always in the right place, just a beast,” he said.
“City are the best of the best. People say they aren’t doing that well but they are still the elite of the elite for me. But we are not coming for tea and biscuits.
“We are going to have a right go. To get a result would be amazing but you can’t get ahead of yourself. They will want to take out their frustrations but we will have a plan.”
Part of that was watching City’s fall at Arsenal, or it was supposed to be until Kelman’s partner intervened.
“She wanted me to do the cooking,” he said.
“It was getting late. She had spent the previous day in the cold watching me play. She loves watching me, but she was just hungry.
“I was like, ‘we are playing these guys next week, I’ve got to do my homework’. I just set my phone up on the worktop and got on with it. I think it keeps me grounded.
“You play in front of thousands every weekend and come home and you are just a normal person. It’s so different to what people think.”
City’s visit to Brisbane Road follows matches against Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea, Club Bruges and Arsenal and precedes fixtures against Real Madrid, Newcastle, Real Madrid and Liverpool. This, of course, is the essence of the Cup, an unequal struggle between opposites that invites the unimaginable result.
“I’m sure it will sink in when we are in the tunnel,” Kelman said.
“It’s more for the fans. The club went down to the National League, almost went bust, and they have been on this journey. When we play City that will be the time they go ‘wow, this is real.’
“We are back in League One and challenging for things. It’s been a privilege to be part of it and to give something back.”
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