I suppose most people here would be happier if the Quakes played in a cavernous 50k stadium, with fake grass under a roof and $2 Cokes, and competed for a Supporters Shield by beating up on bottom feeders with massive help from the VAR folks. Just like most of us would probably like to be wealthy tech titans oblivious to the adverse externalities of our actions.
It was the best because you say it was the best? Thank you, Donald! The only thing I liked about the place was that after the first season there I was able to get a season parking pass in the lot across the entry way road from the stadium. In or out in a minute. Oh, and the beer was cheaper. That's about it!
I disagree. 18,000 seats, if all sold, with the max number of season tickets sold, is more than enough to keep the team incredibly competitive from a spending standpoint. Fisher could compete on that front right now, that just isn't how he operates his teams. No amount of fans is going to change that unless there are literally no fans. Also, I wouldn't bet my future on Atlanta maintaining that high an attendance over the course of their existence. For the sake of the league I hope they do, but excitement for the arrival of the team and an incredibly hot start out of the gate makes getting an accurate judgement of what the market will realistically maintain impossible to determine right now. The Quakes have been around too long and the possibilities of what one can do with their free time in the Bay Area makes me think that 18,000 is enough for a long, long time. It means that more and more people will probably be priced out of attending, similar to what happened in San Francisco with the Giants, assuming the Quakes actually become a watchable team, but I don't anticipate a whole lot of true financial struggles for the team because of the small size of the stadium.
it only makes sense that if team A can sell a max of 18,000 tickets and team B can sell 50,000, team B has a whole bunch more $$$ to spend on players. now assuming the Quakes could sell 18,000 tickets consistently (a giant 'if' really given the dramatic decline in STH's and attendance in general), they will always be working with a small(ish) budget for players and will need a wiz of a GM to be able to find great players and build a strong team. So yeah, if new teams coming into the league, and teams to the north and south of us, are pulling in 25k to 50k fans per game, that will always put a team with an 18k max capacity stadium at a disadvantage. take Seattle, those guys have been pulling +/- 35k/game...and haven't missed the playoffs since they joined the league in 2009. granted they play in a football stadium with artificial turf, but don't tell me that getting that kind of fan support isn't a huge part of the reason they've put the Quakes to shame.
I don't have the specific numbers, but the Quakes have generally punched in the upper part of the league in revenues while remaining in the lower part of the league in spending on players, not to mention other aspects of the organization. It's not simply the number of fans in the stadium, but what they're paying per ticket. The Quakes tend to sell proportionately fewer supporters tickets and proportionately many more premium seats -- while locking in the high-price seats on multi-year deals. On the other hand, the Quakes would benefit from a larger stadium, assuming they could fill it. And I believe they realize this, which is why they have a multitude of plans to improve it when they consider the time to be right.
first they've got the Himalayan challenge of filling our 18k capacity stadium. that's not going to be easy.
Himalayan challenges aren't what they used to be. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/mount-everest-overcrowded-tourist-trap-article-1.1356457
A couple of points: All things being equal, yes, a team that can sell more tickets would be better off financially than one that couldn't sell as many. However, you are assuming that the team that sells more tickets is also reinvesting the extra revenue in the team. That is not a guarantee. The budget for the Quakes is set in part based on how much it can sell, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. Given how much money Fisher has, he could decide to invest as much as he wants and compete at a very high level. He's a billionaire. As I said before, he doesn't operate his pro teams that way, and he isn't required to, but the 18,000k seats is not stopping him from spending more money on the roster, etc. He and Wolff chose to build that many seats, and if the team is successful, the limited availability could drive ticket prices up to close the gap somewhat against teams that can sell more tickets. That's what I was alluding to with fans being priced out. I don't think the number of fans showing up to Sounders games is really much of a factor in them being more competitive on the field than the Quakes. It makes them more relevant to the league than the Quakes, sure, but it's not the driving factor for why they've played well (if soul crushingly boring to watch) compared to San Jose. San Jose has played poorly because Fisher knows absolutely nothing about soccer, hired a GM who was more interested in running his youth soccer empire than doing his "main" job and who didn't know what a good coach looked like in modern MLS, then hired another GM who has had eerily similar problems with identifying and acquiring talent. MLS is not some absolute capitalist nightmare of a league. The success of Atlanta and Seattle helps every other team in the league, including San Jose. The Quakes don't fail because Atlanta and Seattle are good. They fail because they have made incredibly poor decisions, have failed to invest their money wisely, and haven't been bothered enough to make a concerted effort to fix it.
This.... The Earthquakes FO/ownership only have themselves to blame for the lack of success. As much as I want to beat Seattle/Atlanta on the pitch, you have to give them credit for what they have accomplished. They came into the league to compete and made necessary investments to be competitive...
no doubt the FO/ownership only have themselves to blame, Quakes should've built a much better roster for the opening of Avaya and continued adding exciting players ever since. in fact, that was their promise to the fans of San Jose, we were told specifically that as revenue from Avaya boosted the team's income, spending on players would also increase. it never happened. Fisher's not alone in this thinking, these guys are business people and the smart ones, the ones who are selling boatloads of tickets, they understand they have to constantly upgrade their rosters if they hope to stay competitive. so yes, the best teams are generating way more revenue, using that revenue (whatever portion) to add roster depth which in turn sells more tickets and so on. if you're really not seeing that correlation, we're probably just not going to agree. of course Fisher is super rich and could fund the team at whatever level he wanted, whenever he wanted, but his instinct seems to be to want to tie player payroll to revenue (again, as the FO has previously stated), which has obviously dwindled as he's now apparently losing "millions." at this point he probably has no option but to dig deeper into his own pocket if the ever hopes to get things turned around in San Jose, somehow I doubt that's going over well.
This is also not necessarily true. It depends on what you mean by "best" of course, but Dallas has been very successful on the field over the last decade, yet hasn't become a dominating force for the league in terms of ticket sales or general relevance. They also have historically had a hard time getting fans out to games for a number of reasons. Even continued success on the field doesn't automatically translate into "way more revenue". The circumstances for each team are unique enough that I don't think you can just compare one to the other in the way you think.
Dallas is a little different, they should be called Frisco FC. Toyota Stadium is a long way from Dallas which has always been a challenge.
That doesn't change the fact that they have been able to build a competitive team while being in a small stadium and not being big revenue generators.
Depends on the definition of "competitive." Dallas has zero wins, three losses and a draw against the Quakes the past couple seasons.
it can happen. happened in San Jose once too. 2012. I don't think I've suggested there aren't exceptions.
Yeah it does happen. During the "Golden Age" of Earthquakes team in early 2000's we used to have a lot of problem against Colorado Rapids (when they had Kyle Beckerman and John Spencer) for some reason. It may have been the curse of trading Paul Bravo away... Also, Manchester United under Alex Ferguson had some tough spell against Southhampton (esp. at St. Mary's).....
Yeah, this. As we know, some teams, especially MLS 1.0 teams get either very little or actually bad press in their communities. While some teams, mostly those established after 2005, get good press in the local media. That makes a huge difference. Some teams have downtown stadia because those stadia have been there forever, such as in Portland and Seattle. While some teams, like the RedCows, have stadia well outside city limits, that are difficult to get to, and their attendance suffers accordingly. (Dallass, Chitcago, and so on.) And then there's the question of how much does use of the stadium cost? In our case, we're amortizing the cost with every game. In Shittle, they get to use the stadium for one dollar, or some absurdly low price. I don't know the cost of stadium use for the various clubs, but we know that in some cases, the cost of running the stadium or the cost of building the stadium divided by how many times it gets used plus depreciation, and or the cost of renting the stadium are wildly different numbers from one stadium to another. And then, how easy is it to get to the stadium? In Portland and Shittle, it's a snap. Public transit takes you right there, or you can walk in a lot of cases. And there are different financial deals with parking, and concessions, and hotel taxes, and so on and so forth. It is next to impossible to compare one team to another. BUT, we can look at what each team is doing and try to gauge their "ambition level." GO Quakes!! - Mark
I hope one day we have a quantifiable ambition level. looking at the video from The Greatest Comeback is bittersweet. reminds me of a time when I had such great pride in my team, but also highlights what a tiny, insignificant team we've become.
Ironically, the ambition of Quakes' ownership during the Comeback was for the Galaxy to win the game.
If we can't fill our 18k stadium we don't deserve a bigger one. Regardless of announced attendance (tickets distributed) the actual butts in seats is probably under 10k at many games. That few people in Atlanta's or Seattle's stadia would be truly pathetic -- like the Revs in the early 2000s pathetic. But we can't fill our stadium when our team sucks as bad as it does. Get us a good team with a couple big-name Euro or South American stars that can compete against the leaders in MLS and we'll fill it, and get more enthusiasm in the fans, and after a couple years of that we can talk about whether our stadium is too small.