For someone who has made it relatively good in the commercial pond, Claudatos knows what he's talking about when he watches a sporting venture fighting to sprout from its fledgling state.
"If we get a 16,000-plus crowd it'll be good, I think," he says, nodding in self-approval soon after alighting from a tractor mower on his Meeanee property.
Claudatos has served as a player/administrator/coach for Port Hill for 36 years, from as early as the club's humble beginnings at Whitmore Park under Napier Technical Old Boys' Club's floodlights before it was relocated to South Pond, a park at Ahuriri.
"It was not an ideal ground. It had bumps and holes and it was leaching so the council wanted us off it," he says, revealing the establishment was transplanted to Marewa Park where the club invested in a hockey field to let its roots bed in with a bit more conviction.
Fellow Phoenix game organiser Kevin Murphy reveals close to 800 Yellow Fever fans from Wellington are among those who have snapped up about 4500 of the tickets.
The ball, as it were, is in the locals' court to make the televised match a regular fixture here as the Wellington franchise look to broaden their horizon from its base in the capital city.
With the Napier City Rovers' annual under-19 youth tournament at Park Island, Napier, during the Labour Day weekend the organisers are hoping some visitors will make the most of a footy fiesta.
Needless to say, Claudatos hasn't been sitting around twiddling his thumbs.
He has mustered the sponsorship of numerous Ahuriri businesses to spawn free tickets/posters for 250 Port Hill juniors.
"If they have tickets then we're hoping they'll take their parents along so they too will buy tickets."
In fact, people may have mistaken Claudatos for a local government politician a few weeks ago.
He ventured up the Napier/Taupo motorway and as far as Gisborne as well as down south towards Manawatu to put up posters and billboards to promote the A-League encounter.
"The next time I'll put 20 of them up the Gisborne/Taupo way," he says with a steely resolve.
Those sold on the beautiful game are not on the Claudatos' sales-pitch wavelength.
"Those people are a given. It's the other sports-minded people we need to bring in," he says, emphasising the public have shown they are willing to get behind the All Blacks, America's Cup and Ranfurly Shield campaigns provided they are winners.
Claudatos started coaxing people to travel to Wellington and back in a day in 2011 for $90.
"You got a ticket to the stadium, a couple of beers and something to eat and a trip back without the worry of having to drive back.
"A couple of beers after the game you're back on the motorway, which is near the Cake Tin, by 6.45pm and you're home by midnight."
It started with two car trips and then mushroomed to busloads with the proceeds of the trip going towards the club's fund-raising drive.
"It wasn't much but each year it got better.
"Last year we made about $1800 for the club from four trips," he says, contemplating enticing fans from Manawatu on the 22-seater vehicle.
It was all Greek growing up as a young lad in the Bay in the halcyon days.
"They called us Greasy Greeks in school," a grinning Claudatos says before explaining it was quite common for Greeks to fit that mould because they owned a string of fish-and-chip shops.
One of seven children of Greek Romanian immigrant, the late Vasilios Claudatos and Kiwi mother, the late Denyse, of Ashburton, Tim was switched on culturally but mingling with others of similar ethnicity wasn't a given.
"We knew Greeks but we only met them when we went to things like weddings."
His father often impressed on him the need to marry "a nice Greek girl".
Claudatos did, not surprisingly, at a wedding in Wellington as a 28-year-old.
Excited, he had phoned his father in Sydney to share a sense of fulfilment but, to his dismay, the elder Claudatos knew the family of Chrysoula Grivas, 19, who he married although he copped a fair bit of ribbing from his football mates because of the gulf in their age.
Vasilious Claudatos and Spyros Grivas, as it transpired, were good teammates of the Aris Soccer Club in their heyday.
"My dad told me he had a photo to prove that showed him with Spyros at the football field in 1955.
"I still have it. My mum had pulled it out from a shoe box in the hot water cylinder cupboard," he says with a laugh, revealing the silverfish-scarred photograph shows his father-in-law as the only one playing in dress shoes.
"I used to give him a lot of s**t about it."
Claudatos' father, 22 years old then, arrived in Wellington on an immigrant labour ship, Goya, in 1952 before fellow Greeks, Poles, Italians and Jews were transported to a Pahiatua camp to work in pine-tree plantations.
"They had a three-year government bond to pay back their boat fares," says Claudatos who in 2002 attended a 50-year anniversary in the capital city to mark their arrival.
His father worked at the wharf in Wellington where he met his mother who worked at Kirkcaldy's departmental store.
He moved to the Bay where he worked at the Napier port but "didn't want to be an employee".
"He opened a fish-and-chip shop in Taradale [Star Fish Supplies]," he says, adding it still operates under a new ownership as Moby Dick.
Not content, he operated several other fish-and-chip shops before putting his feelers out to retail in crayfish supplies.
Tim Claudatos started helping run the family business when he was a teenager at St John's College in Hastings.
In 1975, his parents took him and six other siblings on a nostalgic trip of Greece and Romania.
"My brother worked in the Greek Naval Merchant."
Tim Claudatos and wife "Chia" have three sons who all attended Lindisfarne College.
Michali, 25, and Andreas, 22, were goalkeepers while Gerasimos, 27, was a striker.
"Michali won a gold medal with Napier City Rovers when they won the under-19 tournament at Park Island."
