Well for NYCFC FO is was Hartford or bust. If not they would have put their pride aside and played it in RBA. They Fvcked up.....
Those are the CFL teams, right? Teams from a league that's only 20 years old, which didn't have a single Canadian team until a decade ago, playing a sport that was virtually unknown in the country until 40 years ago, are all outdrawing local rivals which were founded in the late 19th century and whose league is 110 years old. That's MLS-related in my book. Anybody's book, really. Very well spotted.
Whatever the reason the game ended up i Hartford, NYCFC FO dropped the the ball on a good opportunity. Hartford and Conneticut can just as easily support a New York team as a "New England" branded Boston one. Why they didn't market the game more towards locals is beyond me.
I don't think anyone has any proof. The rumors on BS were that MLS wanted them to use RBA and NYCFC said no way. Again not sure that we will ever be presented with proof of that either way. I dont know of any reason RBA would not have been available.
I like the CFL, but it is quite amusing to browse the CFL.ca forums and see a lot of people trash MLS. My favorite is the gent who says MLS is a ponzy (that's the way he spells) scheme and that MLS will be dead in five years. For the record he has been saying that at least since 2010. I guess its no different from the NFL and NCAAF fans here in the US who still hold on to the belief that soccer is a foreign sport played by a bunch of wimps. I don't argue with them, to each their own.
So this reduces my prediction by 1498 total attendance and thus drops the average by 88. I think that is the correct way to calculate that. 1498 / 17 = 88.118 So the new predicted average would be 48,020.
What are you assuming for the 3 remaining home games? I think 42,500 will be the max we could expect for mid-week games vs. Philly and Minny. There are less than 200 regular tickets left for Wed night and less than 500 remaining for the following Tues, but they are not selling standing room only for either game and there are quite a few re-sale tickets available. That said, it looks like they could match or exceed the 70,425 they drew vs. Orlando for the final home game vs. Toronto. In terms of regular seats (not re-sale) there are only two sections in the entire stadium where you can get 2 seats together, both in the $250 club seat section and still only 56 total seats. All of the other regular seats that remain (maybe 100 total), are single seats. I think next year will actually be even better attendance-wise as they won't have to sell season-ticket packages without even having a product yet, there will be fewer weeknight games, they could open the place up for 70K 3-4 times instead of only twice, and the home dates won't be so compressed.
The bolded part is not something you can assume when projecting attendance. Atlanta looks like the real deal and Seattle certainly is. I am curious, however, to see how attendance would fair if the team sucked for four or five seasons in a row. Still good by league average standards, I'd expect, but it can be hard to get the buzz back if attendance falls to 25 k for a couple of seasons.
Atlanta is mind boggling to me. Let's not take Seattle foregranted either. These are croweded sports markets that have succeeded beyond my wildest imagination. Would anyone have guessed in 1996 that a team in Atlanta could do this? Heck, I wasn't even sure MLS would make it to 1998 back then. I'm crying tears of joy. I lived in Seattle in the early 90s and the media used to relish in the fact that soccer continued to fail. In fact, I remember when a prominent media person claimed "no one came to the '94 WC; no one cares." Of course we know that was a fabrication. However, it was the prevailing attitude in the media back then. I'm glad those days are behind.
There was a sports talk show in the early 90s; four guys sitting around a table talking sports. The only name I remember is Rick Telander - he was the youngest. Just before the '94 WC one of the other three said something like, "This is stupid! Who's going to buy a ticket to watch soccer? Are they going to put guns to people's heads to make them go?" Telander just looked at him.
I do worry about that because we're committed to a soccer configuration of 42,500. So, if attendance slips to something near the league average, that would be a lot of empty seats and kill the great atmosphere. So, I don't know for sure what will happen long-term. I only know that Seattle could have have seen their attendance taper-off, but it hasn't. I believe two things make is possible, perhaps even probable, that ATL will become the Eastern Conference version of Seattle: 1. Staying Competitive: It's a league built for parity, but certain clubs still out-spend others on DNPs and ATL should be one of the league leaders in that regard. They have deep pockets and a very committed owner and the massive ticket sales help ensure they remain much closer to the top of the league than the bottom in payroll. Also, it should be a VERY attractive destination for young South American players due to the coach, style of play, local community, etc. Granted, nothing lasts forever. Every team has a down cycles eventually and Atlanta will eventually experience a change in owner and coach. But the foreseeable future looks bright. 2. Near-term Attendance: In the sort-term, ticket demand will actually go up. They sold 30,000 season tickets last year before anyone had even seen the product. With all the buzz in town, those numbers will rise for next season. Plus they won't have such a compressed schedule with all the mid-week games and they can open the full stadium 3-4 times rather than just twice. In fact, if you want to buy season tickets for 2018, you have to join a waiting list and give a non-refundable deposit. Even then, they can't guarantee that season tickets will be available, at least not at all price levels.
The '94 World Cup thing always drove me nuts. It drew over 3.5 million fans and remains, to this day, the best-attended World Cup in history. Right here in the USA, it out-drew every soccer-crazed nation on earth. By the way, MLS still has a long way to go in terms of TV ratings, but by the time MLS expands to 28 teams, it will rank 4th in the world in aggregate attendance behind only Bundesliga, Premier League, and La Liga.
Which is why, even with winning 4 (and counting) trophies in the 6+ seasons at Sporting Park with 100+ consecutive league game sellouts, there are no active moves to increase capacity at Sporting Park. There are rough plans, but the waiting list continues to shrink - but still exist. And that's with the team being successful ever since the rebrand. A couple years out of the playoffs is the big unknown, and once you burst that sellout streak bubble, it can be harder to get it back. Especially if you add 3 or 5 thousand seats to the inventory.
The Sportswriters on TV. Three Chicago curmudgeons (Bill Jauss, Bill Gleason, Ben Bentley) in a literal smoke-filled room with Telander, talking sports! I can see that conversation as you described it. The storied history of NASL 1.0's Chicago Sting made no impression on them.
To be fair, I can understand the older guys' reactions. They'd been hearing soccer was the next big thing for the previous 20 years. And it wasn't that Telander was such a big 'soccer guy'; I just think the over-the-top reaction caught him off guard.
I realize how important NYCFC is to the league, but they never should have agreed to let this team begin play until they had a stadium deal and timeline in place. This is dragging on forever, and Yankee Stadium is NOT a suitable long-term solution for soccer. The dimensions and shape of the pitch aren't even remotely close to FIFA regs, they have to put temporary sod over the baseball diamond which affects the way the ball rolls, they have to cut the field short to avoid having the pitcher's mound in-play, many sideline seats arc-out drastically from the playing surface, and it simply doesn't have it's own soccer identity. There's no mistaking that you're playing in a venue clearly built for another team and sport. The ongoing use of Yankee Stadium for soccer is a huge embarrassment for MLS. BY FAR the worst venue in the league. I realize it's MUCH harder to acquire land, permits, etc. for a downtown stadium than Red Bull Arena in NJ. But it simply has to be done....NOW!
you sure about this? A google search tells me the Yankee stadium pitch is 110 yards by 70 yards.....if that is correct, it seems to be well within the regs as described in the laws of the game for regular matches and at the bare minimum standards for international matches.
One thing.....I'm almost positive that field is 68 yards wide. When you look at the difference between the 10 yard mark from the corner flags and the penalty area (which 44 yds. wide) only looks at most 2 yards apart.....This is just from where I was sitting when I went in August. Anyone else geeked out on this? Also the official rules for international matches says 64 m, which is more like 70.5 yrds. If we're getting technical.