Brener selling and re-brand?

so you have one of the original 10 teams, moved here when there were 12 teams after expansion, and it's worth 22nd?

 

Yea, that’s what lack of investment does. Especially when the old owners buy at a lower price and operating cost and new owners driving up the standards. This isn’t just Dynamo, this can be applied to Chicago, San Jose (even the rebooted version), Colorado, New England up until 2018/19 and Dallas aside from the academy.

 

One thing that is noticeable is that the new MLS owners invested far more in their stadiums than the mostly barebones PNC Stadium that we have, thus providing a better experience to the fans and more incentive to invest in other areas to leverage those facilities. I used to compare the Dynamo to an older rundown Denny's that had a very good location so they always drew in breakfast customers without having to invest or provide a good service.

 

Yea kind of a tough thing being in the first generation of SSS in the US*. If you look at a lot of the early ones such as Bridgeview, Commerce City, Frisco, maybe Carson but it’s done pretty well imo, you have pretty barebones stadiums that mostly just showed the team was committed to existing. It became a developing science which is how you get to a lot of expansion teams having elite stadiums in the league. An example would be how no new stadiums had a supporters “wall” of seats until all of them had one.


*this excuse only goes so far as SKC stadium opened a year before and is much better

 

Sounds like the one on I-10 and Washington.

We always talk about how good 59 Diner was when it first opened. Then it coasted on its reputation and goodwill until the loyal customers gave up on it.

 

Man I forgot about 59 Diner. Good analogy. There are a lot of inner loop marginal places coasting on location

 

i think HD was in the 1st generation of SSS teams, who went cookie cutter, and got less value. in our case, i think we expected more of a government contribution. we ended up agreeing to a very low number to get it done. personally i thought it was insane they also got TSU football forced after that. "you're not pitching in, f*ck off." why are we paying rent for something we mostly paid for. maybe at that point we should have raised the rest and told them exactly that. there is the lake to go jump in if you're going to make this a corrupt back scratching exercise. (conroe? houston?). you go to the media with a fully funded stadium and say planning approval is being arbitrarily held up for political reasons. which it was.

though i am not sure if Houston or Harris had added more would that have increased the scope or just lightened our debt load on the same exact thing. my inclination is we are cheap and short sighted. they didn't seem to have even considered the heat thing, we were just xeroxing dallas with a roof, and let's be real, rob's airflow benefits probably reflected it was an expanded HS stadium at its genesis. that was something we rented, not something we came up with.

i think at that initial phase of 1 DP and a bunch of teams renting football stadia "owning" was an advantage. i also think we were the disciplined team in a sloppy league, and the team with a flat salary structure -- a bunch of $200k players -- when LAG at first after beckham was like 3 good players and 8 cheap guys barely above USL quality. once LA figured out how to do a supporting cast we had a problem.

i think we're now competing with teams affiliated with NFL/CFL teams who don't pay rent, or at least much; we're competing with teams that were more spendy or thoughtful on their SSS; we're competing with teams who are the only show in town. my personal impression is the cheap SSS phase is no longer advantageous. 4 of the nonplayoff teams in the west are the colorado/KC/SJ/Houston set of SSS teams.

i also think that the teams with rich sugar daddies compete better on payroll and have reduced expenses. they may even play on turf or a baseball park but over a season talent and payroll will usually win out. and we have made no effort to get an elite coach and smart GM to overcome our deficits. we do bullsh*t optimism instead. a league schedule exposes that.

but, yeah, like i pointed out a few weeks back in response to someone, this is a "moved original." we are technically one of the original 10. got a team here when there were 12. this is not top 20 on value, and until recently wasn't that on payroll. it's almost like an expansion team.

and, you know, yet again, charlotte comes in, beats us at home, finishes 6 points ahead. year before that it was austin. this is like the team that never grows up.

 

let's be real, they could pull decent crowds over on the edge of UH in what was a bad neighborhood, they at first used to pretty well sell out BBVA/PNC, this is about product, and they could pull fans to watch the product before they even had the nice location. the fans are gone because their product went to sh*t and the baseball team the other side of the freeway is championship caliber. so any casual or corporate fan that can help it is over with the astros now. you have the soccer diehards, and really not even fully that but the ones willing to put up with being the weaker team in the league in a city this wealthy. my childhood friend, who used to watch a couple games a year with me, and bought the beckham package -- he's like me, he's not paying to watch this. you are almost starting to create a snob problem where we didn't have a ton of one outside a few MX fans and UCL snobs. this isn't dallas.

i see the stadium critiques as more second or third order explanations. added straws on the camel's back when you're trying to get people to watch a struggling team. hot stadium, cheap business, hasn't connected with the fans independent of the soccer. but i want to be fair to the fans and say they got a few years of decent high teens attendances from latent interest while the product dropped off.

the primary problem is the product. put a competitive team out there and fans would start showing back up regardless what we think of the place, whether we have the same infrastructure investments, etc.

that being said, while my first instinct was that you stand no chance with the mexican yeti sucking this bad, the attendance yesterday suggests people will show up to see chicharito vs HH. they won't convert, but they might come for a one-off. but the idea we are converting MX fans with a team this bad is just silly. i can root for monterrey like family does or i can root for bottom of the table houston because they signed a mexican. hmmm. the calculus on that is not even competitive until we offer a competitive team. there are no short cuts. you might sell tickets 2-3 nights a season because of specific players but we would kind of do that before.

 

I have to agree with you on this. Same games every year draw - home opener, Galaxy, Dallas, now LAFC. Common thread: special occasion or Mexican Fan Yeti comes out. Maybe 713 games move the needle because they are dirt cheap. That’s it.

I’d love to get the sales figures on the PNC suites since for many games several don’t seem to be in use and they are demoing the ones center east side for the new club. Astros have sucked up a lot of the oxygen, this isn’t 2013 anymore - but even saying that the Dynamo had better comparative attendance 2006-2008 when Astros were competitive and coming off of World Series.

Outside of about half of 2017’s games, Dynamo have been neither winning or exciting for most of the last decade. Can’t keep half “running it back again” and get anyone excited

 

one of my concerns with all this "identity" talk or "look like the city" etc. is that someone has led them astray and they actually believe we are soccer snobs, concerned with roster breakdowns, etc. you're talking about the club box stuff, same deal with the constant nibbling around the stadium edges. what we want fixed is obvious. they keep acting like we want subtlety and aesthetics. we would like a winner. someone mentioned the "6s are wild" in our home record, and it's been that way a couple years now, and the implication is when you buy a home game ticket the statistics are about even that they win, draw, or lose. the odds are roughly 2/3 they tie or lose. this does not reward or encourage the fans. my last 2 trips out to the park were 1-1 ties with awful goals allowed.

i get as a competitive soccer team the focus on road form, but the killer in recent years, atop that, has been the erosion away of any home advantage. our road points this season, we had more than anyone up to portland. what we were was bottom 3 on home record, fewest home wins in the west.

and cincy just fixed it in less than a season from worse table spot than we were in. all sorts of teams peppered around us and SJ in the table did it.

i personally would like to see an internal inquest whether our tactics fit our climate. or whether team defense should be a tactical focus. because it's odd to now be a lousy home team. and to me it's gotta be some mix of personnel, GA, and the fact our tactics aren't just risky but they advocate high early effort in a game, which leaves you vulnerable late. it's road teams that are usually told run around like mad for 30 and hang on, see if you can out endure the other guy.

but, again, i feel like that "practical" concern has been hijacked by "identity," and perhaps by an idea of giving the fans what they want. thing is, the numbers say they want a winner. some people groused about kinnear's tactics but everyone showed up to watch. there was never the mass EPL/UCL snob thing they have to fight in dallas.

and, again, as with HH, this is something where the analytics, that they love, should be clear already. just like the numbers scream ditch HH, i am sure the fanbase as a whole, when put to questionaires, would list highest up that the soccer team sucks. all this facilities and concessions and aesthetics and snobbery stuff, secondary, and not the reason tickets move or not. "i really want...." vs "you know what would also be nice...."

 

i had hopes for segal, and we have spent more, but unwisely, and we have worked on the pipeline, but not really promoted them through to the first team much. but it doesn't feel like much has changed in terms of the big ideas around here, how we hire, quality of key staff, how we find players, how good they are, soccer tactics, how we balance working on the field product vs the park. i don't feel a "before" and "after" yet.

the way they handled the last 5 games was like a control test for manager quality. like try the same players 5 more games with a new man in the dugout. but despite benching their most expensive player he sounds very much in the plans, and doing it this way denies us any idea of whether the kids we have around are more thiagos or could have any value. feels a little like they are trying too hard to not fault pat and personnel. the coaching test says a different coach gets you 1.4 ppg which is last playoff slot. so it's not just they quit on the old coach, and you committed hard to that hypothesis, and we instead recommitted back to the game 3 folks. little too much, like westie says, that they want to keep the player spend down this year.

and to get particularly punchy, on the culture thing, i did a google search and it was segal talking "pillars" back when he took over. so that's new regime.

 

westie -- re the astros and dynamo, the first few years they usually averaged 15-17k with the exception of the first year 18k, which might have been juiced by novelty. those years interestingly match recent numbers -- 17k roughly 2017 and then falling off to 15k.

comparing that to astros' success, the big year was 05. they had latent appeal through 08 before it fell off from high 30ks. by 10 they are under 30k. by 12 they are under 20k. it comes back in 15 when they start making the playoffs.

12, 14-15 are the peak dynamo years in the new park. 12 is the last finalist team.

so there is some interesting push-pull i see but it doesn't match up perfect because fans believe for a few years after the team obviously lost a wheel in retrospect.

i do think we have frittered away the good years benefit and are basically back down to the sort of levels we could pull in The Rob. but then when we were in the Rob you'd have relatively huge 25-30k for openers, playoff games. and it's an interesting idea that some chunk of that is me and my childhood buddy while some of it seems to visibly walk across the street depending who is doing better.

in terms of expectations on that, it might take another half decade or so to run through the careers of valdez, altuve, bergman, alvarez, etc. verlander can't last forever. they already lost springer and correa. the one thing i see is the next set up hasn't been as consistently good as the bunch accumulated from the "tank" era. if they don't start churning out another generation that is going to wane at a point. but for now it's very good, though.

but i would say that when people showed up in droves for us in 12, it was probably not just the novelty but us being competitive in a way the other team wasn't. the novelty is gone which leaves product.

 

Astros drew decent thru 08 - but even on nights when both teams played the Dynamo drew well at the Rob.

I really struggle to believe the “announced” attendance figures in the last 4-5 years. Some seem insulting to the intelligence when vast sections of seats are empty but we claim 18k were there. I’m sure it happened back at the Rob (although maybe less so since we were a tenant only) but some numbers seem completely fabricated now.

given Houston’s growth in the last 15 years, saving par on attendance compared to Robertson is a poor outcome. And we are past Covid effects too. Astros tix have gotten very expensive IMO.

 

Im not going to try to test my memory by trying to determine if Robertson numbers were more or less inflated. However it’s very plausible in my head that they would be motivated to boost numbers as they were trying to get a stadium built.

 

I have a habit of sitting anywhere I damn well want despite what my tickets say.

There were games in ol Robertson when I had to sit in my actual ticketed location. There were also plenty of games where I could (and would) sit on all four sides at one time or another in the game. Open seats galore. In the new stadium, games where the open seats are plentiful despite near sell-outs announced happen much more often. It is my experience that obvious disconnects between butts in seats reality versus announced "attendance" happen much more often now.

Attendance of course is tickets sold. 4k unused sold tickets will always look like a bigger discrepancy in the new stadium than it looked like in Robertson. Playing into though is Robertson did not afford much in the way of sellable suites that comes with tickets. The new stadium does. Those corporates sales tickets are most likely to be no-shows. Makes sense no-shows have increased.

There is nothing deceptive about calculating "attendance" as tickets sold. What else are they supposed to do?

 

this is about half a decade old but interesting

https://www.latimes.com/sports/soccer/la-sp-soccer-baxter-20161029-story.html

"MLS, like the NBA, NHL and even the English Premier League, bases crowd figures on the number of tickets distributed, a practice that has become an industry standard...."

"...none of the top North American leagues use an old-school turnstile count, meaning none of the attendance figures they release reflect the number of people who actually attend the events."

MLS used to comp 30% of tickets but as of 2016 they said "It now accounts for about 9% of announced attendance..."

However, at roughly the same time, "In 2015, Orlando City’s first season in the league, the city’s [turnstile] attendance figures for the first 12 games were more than 17% lower than the team’s [ticket distributed] numbers."

"Diogo Kotscho, the team’s vice president of communications, said the club based its figures on a combination of tickets sold and tickets distributed to team officials and people in the community. Comps are also given regularly to team sponsors in recognition of their support."

and this would be the league policy and subject to how a team actually does it, including them trying to get cute.

 

i also think with us you could have a STH "gap" right now. you buy 17 tickets but you don't necessarily use them all. they might be harder to give away these days.

the one thing on that is if you have this entertainment and you start no-showing enough, it's technically a 2022 ticket sale but good luck getting me to renew.

that and ever since they legalized scalping aka secondary market, i just about assume there will be some degree of empty seats regardless how many sell because people are trying to make a buck off resale and unless it's the world series i don't know if that ever maximizes ie that every ticket that someone buys for arbitrage, goes.

in this era of electronic tickets i am sure they have fairly detailed reliable real information on tickets vs turnstiles, overall and segments and individuals, as well as comps vs paid for. this is no longer printing up 3 inch paper that pops up and gets torn up. you're being scanned through. so i am sure they know how often x showed up in 201Q as well as the absolute numbers and percent of the crowd actually coming.

 

INBOX: FuboTV announced it will close its Fubo Gaming subsidiary and cease operations of Fubo Sportsbook effective immediately.

Won't be the last sports betting casualty in the US.

— Bob Williams (@WilliamsBob75) October 17, 2022

 

so it's a $1m/year practice jersey sponsor then.

 

With the AppleTV deal kicking in it wouldn’t surprise me if fubo was just completely out after this year with the Dynamo. The Texas sports gambling license is dead to them and The Dynamo games are not gonna be on their service so I’m not sure why they stick around. Plus apparently last week I found out they don’t have TBS which ticked off a lot of people who couldn’t watch Astros games

 

hmmm. i could see it.

and the thing is that money's already spent IMO. when i rant about sunk costs fallacy, it's a broke team suddenly having a "fund," then not wanting to admit how well that $10m got spent, to undo their mistakes. i think sebas + HH + thiago + quinones + coco was that money. you can then spend even more in service of those expenses, or you can not throw bad money after well intentioned but erroneous money.

if they want to win they need to be able to say pat sucks and they wasted all that money ("and we're sorry.").

 

I don’t see the point in trying to figure out the math behind the team. If it’s so clear where roster money came from then where did the $8 million stadium upgrades come from? It just doesn’t seem right to do forensic accounting as a fan. I’m not saying that the Fubo money *didnt* help with some moves, but the idea that it’s the only money pot the team has to pull from

 

i actually on a level agree with you. i am primarily a soccer fan here. i want to be talking soccer. but to get that emphasis they need a competitive product where there is soccer to discuss. it hasn't been one. so we ask why. old answer was we didn't even spend the payroll. new answer, to me, since we did spend some, is that was from a specific source and when it got mis-spent, we aren't going to spend a second time to fix that mistake.

that to me is the difference between us and austin. they have canned 2 DPs in a year and a half to get where they are. if you think about that as the business side, they might have had to eat some sunk costs. they responded to that as a moral organization and sports team. we respond like a business. "but i have all this money already invested in coco, HH, etc." yes, but as a soccer team it isn't working. and other teams in the league would eat those costs, and spend a new transfer or loan fee, or big coaching salary.

and while up to a point i am annoyed doing the accounting for why did we spend last winter but not last summer, it feels too close to true. we got a new sponsor in the winter. we made a few splurges. once that money was gone, even as the team struggled, "there is no budget." at that point, sorry man, but with a wealthy owner talking resources and we're gonna compete, there is a "we are a competitive soccer team" response -- spare no expense, f*ck the sunk costs -- and there is a cheap business response -- "but we just invested x, but we still owe the bank some on the transaction loan." the way we respond, whether you want to talk soccer or not -- and believe me i'd prefer it -- sends you back to the finances.

to be fair, come at it slightly different angle, i am with you in the sense that whether i go on strike next season relates to "cut the crap" is the soccer team good enough. the reasoning behind it won't save them. but while i am here, it's like, this seems to be the reason. and why? because if we have other pots of gold on their way -- apple, shirt sponsor -- recent history suggests that's when the next iteration of field push will happen. unlike austin, the owner doesn't seem like he will just get rid of x on moral grounds or x and y on you're not good enough a DP, money as no object. because the cap rules do say what they say, and the contracts bind while they last, but if you are willing to do deals and spend added money, the same bad deals can go away tomorrow. but behind the scenes the owner has to eat the bad money and spend again.

just like, when we fire a coach, barring some sort of crazy "good cause," behind the scenes, they either get paid the remainder of the deal during gardening leave, or they settle for some amount. making those moves costs more money. those moves don't cost cap. but you pay for 2 coaches for a year. are we still cheap and waiting on the next package of money?

 

i mean, i am sorry but no one in their right mind is like let me chase ben olsen and hugo perez and option daniel steres. their decision making process radiates working within constraints. they do not act like a team that desperately wants to win or even recognizes how hard you have to work to dig out of their hole.

 

From the @HoustonDynamo: Announced the promotion of Jessica O’Neill to Chief Operating Officer. In her role O’Neill will oversee all business operations for the organization in conjunction with ownership and continue to serve as the Dash president.

— Mark Berman (@MarkBerman_) November 1, 2022