They have not, in any tweets or press releases, directly said they sold deposits for 30k season tickets. They say it in a cheeky way, but imply they oversold the stadium. I think they are counting every deposit as 17 seats sold and running with the publicity. It's just seems odd the way they phrase it.
I hadn't seen that one until I just looked it up after reading your post. I had only seen the one from Austin FC that said "secured deposits totaling over 30,000 seats" Record-breaking. 🙌 @AustinFC receive 30,000 season-ticket deposits in one day. https://t.co/jCT6Lud7gW pic.twitter.com/JT4mbMaFz1— Major League Soccer (@MLS) June 14, 2019
Yeah, I have no idea what to think. It doesn't seem as though there was much social media hype down there to secure so many deposits, so I find it hard to believe. That's why I can't get past the way the club has been wording it, just seems intentionally deceptive. What are they going to announce next, 50k seats? 300k? It will be pretty obvious at that point, and yet another excuse to ridicule the club.
I think people are just crappy at predicting how a market will respond to an expansion team. Until Atlanta started announcing their numbers, people were crapping on the market.
If they had said like 7k, which would be huge for day one, I could buy it. 30k on day one is just so crazy I am skeptical. I don't think the market is bad at all. It's a unique experience in good sized and growing City.
Austin FC reported that the demand was so high it crashed their website, which I guess is the kind of thing you'd say if you wanted to artificially create hype, but seems believable enough. I'm hopeful the market does well, so I'm going to go with believing the announced number of 30k deposits in one day until I'm looking at a half-empty stadium in the middle of their first season.
Crashing a website due to traffic is not a super difficult thing to do. Most web servers for average sites are not set up to handle a lot of traffic. Who knows what they had their hosting infrastructure set up to do. That claim by itself without any other info is very underwhelming. For it to be of any meaning they would need to release the number of people visiting in a certain amount of time. If 5000 visitors in an hour crashed it...big whoop. If there were 100,000 visitors in an hour then you have something to talk about.
The spin to make the Austin announcement look bad is just as bad as most of the spin on here to make any other MLS announcement look good.
I don’t know if the market had as much to do with the response as the ineptness of the owner and FO did. I hope Austin is successful because I love soccer. I hope their owner is a spectacular failure at everything he ever tries.
Meh. Season ticket deposits is more reflective of the market than the owner. Austin hasn't been burned by Precourt yet. Matter of fact, he's actually done pretty much everything he said he would do...
It's not spin but doubt because this is LITERALLY the first sign of notable support from Austin. Atlanta had a grass roots campaign and average support of their minor league team, whereas Austin was lackluster in their past team support and struggled to get on board with PSV's astroturf campaign. Truly, this is a zero-to-warp speed jump from a primitive tribe, as it were. Doubt is to be expected.
Seattle were in the bottom half of attendance in the lower divisions. I believe Toronto might have been dead last. These kinds of spikes happen all the time with MLS.
Is Austin still taking deposits? If so that's a bit suspicious. The team could easily clarify by saying something like "Yesterday 8K individual account holders to be made deposits on 30K full season seats for our inaugural season and we're thrilled". It's not entirely clear what they are selling at this point. It seems to be a place on a list to buy season tickets when the time comes.
If it was any other expansion team and MLS announced 30k deposits this forum would have gone crazy predicting the new Atlanta, but because it's Austin everybody is finding a way to suspect the numbers. Why not believe them? we blindly believe every "announced" attendance number they give us. I hated how the Austin thing played and I was all for the #SaveTheCrew efforts, but the Crew is already saved, they have new shiny owners and will have a new shiny stadium. At the same time we have a new team in MLS in an interesting market with no other major league to compete. I am happy for them, but clearly I'm on the minority on this one.
This wouldn’t have been an issue and the Austinites would have had their day if they just would have been truthful and not tried to spin it. 4000 depositors is a hell of a lot different than 30k STM’s.
It is clear that the message was not clear by Austin, but that's not my issue here, my issue is the desire by many of looking immediatly for reasons to believe it is not as good, that they are lying, not impressive, etc. Especially since (I think) almost everyone in this forum wants MLS was a league to grow. MLS did say it was "record breaking". Of what? we may not know clearly, but a new record has been set and that is great news, but it seems that it is bad news for many people here who have an inner desire of seeing Austin fail.
I’m jaded enough, being a fan from the beginning, to not take the leagues word as gospel. I also understand there is a bit of a need to project success in Austin because of the massive black eye the attempted hijacking of Columbus caused. I also know from conversations with people that would know, that Garber would like nothing more than to have Austin be wildly successful and Columbus flounder. I do not hope Austin fails, I hope Precourt does. But what I really want it honesty and transparency, which I also know will never happen.
Putting aside my desire to see Precourt fall on his face, there are still issues with what Austin FC put out yesterday. They claim to have set a record but what was the old record? What exactly is the new record? How many depositors were there? What exactly are depositors getting?
Yes it is. When MLS started, they said they'd put a team in cities which had 10K season ticket members. Columbus was the only city that qualified under that standard. And we charged deposits per seat, not per account. So we had 10K deposits to back up the 10K tickets. I'll concede some of those were bought by sponsors, notably Kroger. But there was a deposit for every seat, not up to 8 seats per deposit.
So.. what you’re saying is that Columbus artificially inflated their numbers but that’s okay? However, completely different purpose here. MLS isn’t trying to gauge interest in Austin. They already have a team. The only thing that matters is moving tickets and this kind of thing moves tickets. I’m not sure how the other teams handled their deposits with regards to requiring a deposit for each ticket, but even the teams that required people to pay for each deposit didn’t hold people to that. That’s how teams got a 100+% conversion rate on their deposits.