The schedule is up now... August 10th we play Cincinnati at home in Mapfre, then August 25th we play Cincinnati on the road for Rivalry week at Nippert. https://www.columbuscrewsc.com/schedule
Ok, who's the creep in the red shirt desperately trying to figure out how to work the zoom on his phone.
I just looked it up...this is a weird law. So there isn't anything specifically against scalping...but OSU has banned it on campus and there is a law against "peddling" if you are demonstrated to be "harassing, aggravating, or disruptive to the proceedings of the event". So my guess is that if you are nicely scalping on the street corner and not being to aggressive you are fine but they wanted a way to move you along if you turned into one of those guys who is screaming in every passer-by's face.
So we get Ibra and the Galaxy on a Wednesday. That should help ticket sales a bit for a midweek match?
And Rooney and DC in the other one. No Saturday game after that one either. Weirdly enough, Crew play at DC on the next saturday though.
Possibly, what I will be curious about is if our number of midweek matches lines up with the rest of the league. Someone did a statistical breakdown and discovered in 2017 and 2018 the Crew had more (about double) the number of midweek matches of the average MLS club. This was obviously problematic since midweek matches suffer in attendance in ratings. When reporters brought it up MLS said that the schedule was set with the involvement of all teams...basically Precourt offered to take more midweek games. I am not sure how involved the Haslam/Edwards were able to be with scheduling this season given how quickly everything came together. So I am curious if MLS (and the league) treated us a little better to appeal to the new owners or if they let PSV toss one more match before they left.
This claims we have one of the toughest schedules in the league: https://www.mlssoccer.com/post/2019/01/07/2019-strength-schedule-rankings-who-has-toughest-schedule
I may be thin-skinned about this kind of thing (also, some of the questionable scheduling we've dealt with), but I've always assumed that this kind of bullshit is due in part to being Columbus (i.e., not being a league priority market), but also because our ownership simply hasn't had the willingness or weight to demand much of anything from the league. And I very much hope that the situation under the Haslams/Edwards brings an end to that crap. You need ownership that's willing to stand up for itself.
If we came out with a better schedule in that sense then I would suspect that at the very minimum there was some pushback from Haslam/Edwards.
It looks like we only have two, which is good. Unfortunately, they are both before school lets out for the summer. Hopefully our increased season ticket base, and our big name opponents are enough to offset the time of the game.
We have 4 (not counting the 4th of July Thursday game) 2 away, 2 home. All on Wednesday. Looks like FCC have 4 too, 2 away and 2 home. 2 of theirs are on Thursday though.
That's probably it. It's no secret you can ask for $500 in exchange for certain OSU football tickets right outside the stadium. Of course, OSU tries to discourage it by "reminding" people about their TM Ticket Exchange (in which they probably get a cut), but they're certainly not actively stopping scalpers. They did recently end the "print at home" option, so it's mobile or traditional-style only, however. I'm surprised they still have physical tickets, especially after ending "print at home" to curb scalping. I was at their home finale last year and someone was trying to scalp a .PDF and my thought was basically "good luck."
Here's something interesting. We have 8 home games in the first 3 months of the season. In the remaining 5 months of the season we have 9 home games.
My advice? Join the Nordecke-related Facebook groups and go to Nordecke.com Someone will plan something and make the job easier for hundreds of others.
The home ones are the only ones that count to our attendance/ratings though so that would be an improvement.
So i filled my pledge and got a 4 game pack 2 tickets. My rep said they have almost sold out the lower bowl.