I think the more immediate risk is the stadium being financially underwater instead. That thing looks ridiculous and I would be quite surprised if the finished product ends up looking anything like it. That's a lot of money to be spending with the expectation that people show up, but there will be no point in having bells and whistles if no one is around to ring or blow them. While MLS has made huge strides in attendance, that's only been realized in certain markets. I'm very skeptical of Miami entering the league. Florida's history of supporting pro teams and the legacy of some truly awful pro team owners in the state makes this one a big gamble.
A rising tide lifts all boats. Hopefully it works out this time around in South Florida (Think LAFC for Miami, not Chivas USA )..
Give me a finished/reinforced roof (that doesn't shake when LAFC supporters come to town), skin/facade and in-stadium/year around restaurant/soccer pub and I'll be good. No pink DG!!
Abso-friggin'-lutely! Closing in the corners on the stadium's open end would be pretty cool too, but what you listed needs to be done both first and ASAP! GO SAN JOSE EARTHQUAKES!!! -G
I think Forward Madison FC did it first and better (They're already playing, and have won three USOC games):
The market is definitely a concern to me. I was watching the A's game last night and I know baseball attendance and soccer attendance may be two separate creatures, but they mentioned on the telecast both the Marlins only drawing 6500 and the Rays 5800 to a game as a concern. I get that the Marlins are a bad team, but the Rays are a game behind the Yankees right now for first in the East and have a pretty good young team that they should be excited about, but no one shows up. Not that the A's draw great either, but those numbers are pretty bad.
Yeah, the lack of fans for the Marlins is pretty easy to understand. They have the worst ownership in MLB, they screwed over the community building a park that they didn't need, and they are beyond awful. I'm shocked they still exist. It's one thing to have owners that don't spend as much as you'd like or whatever, but the Marlins seem to actively hate their fans. Derek Jeter is now part owner and CEO, for eff's sake. Tampa Bay is a somewhat different situation. A relatively competitive team most years (although still very often in the shadow of New York and Boston). I don't know enough about their stadium situation off-hand to say how that factors in, but that team plays well enough often enough that you'd think there'd be more fans. On the surface, it's easy to say that Florida just isn't a good pro sports state. However, a quick look up of attendance (won't vouch for accuracy) lists Orlando City FC at an average over 23k for the last 2 years. And that team hasn't really been very good. I assume that's fairly close to capacity for their stadium. San Jose obviously can't get more than the 18k capacity, but in terms of percentage of seats sold, they haven't done very well. So who knows? Why teams are successful or not is multifaceted and you definitely need to be careful of making too many generalizations. Still, not confident in the Miami project as a whole, certainly. What do we think the odds are of the team actually getting a stadium built at all?
Orlando City suffers from reported-attendance-inflation, like most the rest of MLS. They had the new-team / new-stadium bump, which appears to have largely worn off.
I think hockey is a better comparison for soccer attendance (similar kinds of fan mindsets I think). Its concerning that the Panther's attendance isn't great either: http://www.hockeydb.com/nhl-attendance/att_graph.php?tmi=5763
Actually, they would need a levee to keep it dry, however, they made need to levy a tax to pay for it.
Yeah, I certainly would not be surprised. I haven't watched Orlando games so I was just going off the reported attendance. I guess the question I'd pose to you is do Orlando games still look well-attended? Quakes games don't, for the most part. And obviously a 5000 person crowd in a baseball stadium looks, and is, quite sad. You may be right about the fan mindset thing for hockey and soccer. That should give the Quakes hope in that if they can put together entertaining teams consecutively, fans will show up regularly. I know nearly nothing about the Panthers, so can't comment on what might be the root cause of attendance issues there. Of course, you have to be careful about those comparisons, too. Atlanta has been overflowing with soccer fans in MLS so far whereas they lost their NHL team not all that long ago. We certainly don't know if Miami will be a success or not unless and until they actually start playing some games, I just have a feeling the league has been emboldened by LA 2 and Atlanta, and is not making the best decision on this one. I'd love to be wrong, though, as strong teams in as many regions as possible is a good thing. To try to tie it back to the thread, I still think the renders for Miami's stadium are maybe the worst thing I've ever seen, aside from the liberal use of the color pink. I'd take Avaya every single day of the week over something like that. Embrace the minimalism, everybody .
That’s what I’m saying. It looks like Orlando has about 4-5,000 people in the stands, same as how Avaya looks despite our claims of 15-18,000 tickets sold. In fact, almost all the MLS teams look like they have pretty sparse attendance except SEA, LAFC, ATL, MINN, CIN, SKC
Yeah, a difference of 15k is obviously not good. It is hard to know the true numbers since they're so tight-lipped about it, but it doesn't exactly make a good case for more MLS in Florida.
seems there is another push to reconnect with past season ticket holders. Yesterday got email from FO which included the following sales pitch, along with the 5 reasons I should sign up again.... ".....No one enjoys FOMO. You can still join the 2019 Quakes Season Ticket crew if you purchase before this Saturday, June 1.".... I'm sure if you wanted tickets after the first of June they would accommodate you
Thanks for sharing the pictures. I have never been to DC. I thought it was Avaya when I first saw the pictures.
Nope. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/the-siege-of-miami But South Florida’s problems also run deeper. The whole region—indeed, most of the state—consists of limestone that was laid down over the millions of years Florida sat at the bottom of a shallow sea. The limestone is filled with holes, and the holes are, for the most part, filled with water. (Near the surface, this is generally freshwater, which has a lower density than saltwater.) ... I asked everyone I met in South Florida who seemed at all concerned about sea-level rise the same question: What could be done? More than a quarter of the Netherlands is below sea level and those areas are home to millions of people, so low-elevation living is certainly possible. But the geology of South Florida is peculiarly intractable. Building a dike on porous limestone is like putting a fence on top of a tunnel: it alters the route of travel, but not necessarily the amount. “You can’t build levees on the coast and stop the water” is the way Jayantha Obeysekera put it. “The water would just come underground.” Some people told me that they thought the only realistic response for South Florida was retreat. “I live opposite a park,” Philip Stoddard, the mayor of South Miami—also a city in its own right—told me. “And there’s a low area in it that fills up when it rains. I was out there this morning walking my dog, and I saw fish in it. Where the heck did the fish come from? They came from underground. We have fish that travel underground! “What that means is, there’s no keeping the water out,” he went on. “So ultimately this area has to depopulate. What I want to work toward is a slow and graceful depopulation, rather than a sudden and catastrophic one.” ... I asked about the limestone problem. “That is the one that scares us more than anything,” Mowry said. “New Orleans, the Netherlands—everybody understands putting in barriers, perimeter levees, pumps. Very few people understand: What do you do when the water’s coming up through the ground? “What I’d really like to do is pick the whole city up, spray on a membrane, and drop it back down,” he went on. I thought of Calvino’s “Invisible Cities,” where such fantastical engineering schemes are the norm. Mowry said he was intrigued by the possibility of finding some kind of resin that could be injected into the limestone. The resin would fill the holes, then set to form a seal. Or, he suggested, perhaps one day the city would require that builders, before constructing a house, lay a waterproof shield underneath it, the way a camper spreads a tarp under a tent. Or maybe some sort of clay could be pumped into the ground that would ooze out and fill the interstices. “Will it hold?” Mowry said of the clay. “I doubt it. But these are things we’re exploring.”
As Quakes fans know, a stadium can make the difference, although that clearly is not a given. The Tampa issue does raise the issue of the quality of the ballpark. The Rays play in what is arguably the worst stadium in MLB, not to mention it is not all that easy to access from the city of Tampa itself. I have driven by it dozens of times over the years (on my trips to Florida to visit family...flying into Tampa International, then taking the Skyway Bridge route to the Venice area). The stadium is in St. Petersburg, which is not necessarily bad in itself, but it is a poorly designed indoor park that really doesn't add anything to the experience of a ball game (it is from the Kingdome era). As hot and humid as it is in Florida during the summer, an outdoor park overlooking the bay might do wonders for a competitive team's attendance. If it were located in Tampa, it might make a difference too. That is an expansive area in terms of distance. They draw fans from Ft. Myers to the south, all the way up to the Crystal River area to the north, arguably even Ocala), so stadium location is important. Driving all that distance to a lousy ballpark, regardless of the team's quality, then to spend a decent amount of $$ to get in to the lousy park, is a lot to ask.