He Built the Clothing Brand to Fund the Soccer Pitch.

Colm Dillane will tell you himself. The fashion was never the point.

"People say, what a brilliant marketing idea, building a soccer field during the World Cup," he says. "I built the clothing brand so I could have the soccer field during the World Cup. It's a completely different intention."

The world knows Colm as the founder of KidSuper, the Brooklyn label behind the Louis Vuitton Men's guest collection, the man who put Ronaldinho and Balotelli on a Paris runway. What the world may not fully appreciate is that all of it, from the first store to the fashion week moments to the rooftop pitch now crowning KidSuper World in Williamsburg, has been in service of one thing.

"At the core of who I truly am," he says, "is a soccer player."

The first thing he always did

Colm moved around a lot as a kid. Seven times, ten times, somewhere in that range. An only child, no fixed geography, no guaranteed friendships. Every new city meant starting again.

"Every time I'd go somewhere new, the first thing would be soccer," he says. "It would remove all hesitation, all nervousness, all newness. You'd go into a group of people playing, and everything would go by the wayside. You'd become brothers instantly."

Soccer was how he found family in a life with very little consistency. That has not changed. The team he runs now, KidSuper FC, grew out of the same impulse. A Brazilian coach used to wander the parks of New York, looking for players, checking their birthdays, and pulling kids from different boroughs onto the same roster. When Colm was 15, his squad represented 18 different countries. Vice made a documentary about them.

"This is the New York that people talk about," he remembers thinking. "And this is New York at its best."

Build it and they will come

He wrote it on the wall of his first store. He has been living by it ever since.

Before KidSuper even had a location, Colm was pitching the rooftop pitch to anyone who would listen. They told him he did not have a store. He told them that was the plan. A decade later, the pitch exists. It has been open for a few months now, and is getting used 6-7 days a week. It is already getting used every weekend, ten-year-olds training on Mondays, friends coming back who played together as teenagers, neighbours who fought the planning permission now asking when their kids can come up.

"Every time I walk out there, it feels like a dream," he says. "But more importantly, it has inspired everyone around us to take this seriously as a real project."

The building below the pitch holds a recording studio, a gallery, and a podcast room. His mother used to describe New York in the 1970s, when artists could afford to experiment because rent was $75 a month and collaboration happened by accident on every corner. The rooftop is Colm's version of that: a physical place where different people collide and something unexpected emerges. A graphic designer who turned up to play five-a-side. A photographer who started documenting the games. Jobs that did not exist before the pitch existed.

What the security cameras couldn't catch

For a while, the only footage from the rooftop came from two security cameras pointing left and right across the pitch. Colm would sit watching both simultaneously, trying to mentally stitch the picture together. Goals were missed. What was captured was grainy and cropped. Players started bringing their own cameras because the footage was too bad to bother with.

"Even some kids that play there bring their own cameras because they're like, your footage is terrible," he says.

That changed when Veo came to KidSuper World. Now the pitch has proper coverage, every goal captured, and every session available to review. For a player who has been describing his own highlights for years without the video to prove them, that matters.

"All my bicycle kick goals will now be highlighted," Colm says. He is joking. He is also not joking at all.

KidSuper's rooftop was built on that belief. The game is worth documenting. That the people playing it deserve to see themselves.

Colm Dillane has been saying that since before he had a store. Now he has a pitch on a roof in Brooklyn to prove it.