I may have teased you a bit before, but I appreciate your diligence in using/ finding every bit info re: ticket sales that you can to paint a picture here.
I played in the first game in the FHS stadium. We did have a lot of good players. One of my teammates was in the YNT pool. Because of the high level of quality we had I was very lucky and played against a lot of incredible players. A few of them are Crew legends. Oh and the reason we had that soccer stadium in Findlay - soccer was ruining the football field! The grounds crew for the football stadium determined the cause of the mud pit in the middle of the field was soccer, not the lineman from 2 football teams that used the field. We didn’t care though because we had one of the best fields in the state to play on.
If we did actually crack 10k season tickets in 2016, it's weird that FO wouldn't have announced that as some sort of achievement. Then again, it's PSV we're talking about. The next obvious follow up question would be season tickets for other clubs. Here I'm thinking specifically KC, Minnesota in their new stadium, DC, RSL, San Jose, LAFC, Portland. I'm no expert, but there certainly is a well established formulaic link between season ticket numbers and percentage of seats sold. The normal* teams that are on solid footing in MLS are those that are selling well over 90% of their available tickets for every match. If we knew how many season tickets those clubs sell (especially those in stadiums roughly of our size), and know how many season tickets we've sold, we'd have a good sense of the gap that needs to be bridged in Columbus. I'd also toss in Orlando, by the way, as an example of a club that's failing in this regard. Gotta assume their season ticket sales have fallen off a cliff since their inaugural season. * by this I mean clubs other than Seattle and Atlanta who play in NFL stadiums and draw some freakishly huge numbers for many games.
Have you driven down 315 recently and noticed the 100,000 seat behemoth of a stadium we have sitting there? Is that big enough to bring in these big events you are craving?
Apologize if this has been talked about in the last few pages, but we probably are getting a pretty generic new design right? I mean Precourt had every intention of being gone, so can’t believe MLS had Adidas cranking out a new design for Columbus. We’ve been told in past these designs take almost a year to come to life. I was almost certain we were about to wear the current yellow primary for another year, but agree the BOGO sale makes me think new kit. I get that it can be as simple as template X with badges on it and imagine that’s the route we’ll get.
I want to pass something along to anyone who may be having trouble getting aholdof a ticket agent. Just FWIW. I sent my guy - Michael Mallory - an email last evening around 6:45. I figured I'd get an email back in the morning. It wasn't urgent. Less than ten minutes later I got a phone call from the guy; he was in his car, probably going home but who knows. Like I've said, I've never met him, so I can't vouch for anything about him except that he's the most responsive salesperson I've dealt with for literally anything in many many years. He works his ass off.
Customer service, in any field and no matter the job if it even remotely deals with anything resembling customers, is quite necessary. Be on top of things, and you can go so far. Sometimes it is the little things that give the ultimate payoff.
And while is just speculation on our parts, it is possible to see an Arena District with Nationwide, Huntington Park, a new Crew Stadium and LC Pavilion (or whatever it's called now) being able to host multi-day music festivals and the like in way that no single venue in Columbus can possibly handle today.
I could definitely see this happening. At least the combo of Crew Stadium and Huntington Park. Maybe even use McFerson Commons as a third smaller stage.
Was just about to bring this up. The way the Rock on the Range owner was wording them potentially moving seemed to have a lot more to do with infrastructure and wanting to create more of a festival set up and more staging options. There's been that thought (maybe rumor?) that he worked with the city to re-up with Mapfre because of something bigger they have planned (perhaps new stadium and a SXSW type festival set up that Fashion Meets Music Festival wanted to have originally that it failed at?). Wasn't the Sonic Temple's renewal with the stadium only until 2020 or sometime around then?
Probably for me was the time we played (and beat) part of Westerville South's HS team indoors. They were so cocky they left our striker unmarked for much of the first half--but he'd played at Northwestern. After it got to be 5-0, they began to realize they had a problem. We also had a few former D1 players play for my CAS team in Corporate Challenge. This does not count kicking the ball around with some of the Xoggz at the season ending party or practicing with the Atoms (NASL) player who used to come to some of our club practices when I was in college.
Columbus will get a new home uniform for 2019. They alternate every two years home and away. The kerfuffle over the Crew was likely not an issue. adidas does not, would not, simply slap some piece of crap together,nor would the league ask them to and it's been some time since PSV would have had any say in the matter. adidas doesn't make value judgements. They design shirts until they're told not to, and there would have been no reason not to do a Crew 2019. The most you can probably say is that it's possible they held off on the production order for a bit, but beyond that I wouldn't worry.
I think it was this kind of speculation at the time that led @Bill Archer to quip (paraphrased): "PSV's shenanigans are going to let Columbus potentially out-Austin Austin."
Great work. Though as you & others have noted, I do not think we ever got to 10k in 2016. Project 10k was a stated goal of the FOs and if we would have hit it, I think there would have been an announcement. PSV was touting attendance successes pretty heavily (sellouts & largest % increase in the league) in those days.
2016 is one of the few times where we don't have a good idea for STM performance. After the 2014 season, the FO gave an interview where they said they were nearly at 8,000, the following year after the 2015 season they said they had increased new ST by nearly 1000 members and were on track to do it again. One estimate by the FO said they would go higher which would have put them closer to 10.5k. However, they never make any comments or give any real numbers that year at all. So all we have is the sales forecast they put out in the offseason before the 2016 seasons started. During the 2017 season though they make comments about STMs and say they are close to 9k. So we really don't know about 2016's performance. We could have been under 10k so they didn't make an announcement but dropped some in 2017 or we could have basically been flat for three years. It is hard to say. What I can say is right now we are over 9.5k and I think we will easily break 10k. With a little luck and drive we could crack the record of 12k. I am going to see about finding STM for comparable markets over the weekend since I should have some time.
I hope the final number sits around 20k but I stand by my thought that there should be an easily expandable plan to get to 24-25k in 1 or 2 stages that could be done in an offseason. Ticket scarcity, and the increased value that creates, hopefully is a "problem" created by going with 20k. For long term viability (25 years?) of the stadium I think being able to sell 25k tickets would make the place last.
This reminds me of why Cleveland State's basketball arena has a capacity of 13,610 (most of it now curtained off with the program in the toilet). The head coach at the time had been an assistant at Michigan and requested that capacity because Crisler Arena held 13,609 at the time.
So those more in the know with local government can correct me if I am wrong but... I think we just passed the 30-day window for a petition for a referendum to be filed. The Crew MOU was passed as emergency legislation which is considered enacted upon passage. There is then a 30-day window to file a petition for a referendum. That would have just passed.