I would add that another sign of fading interest is that - you would assume - many if not most of those seats were offered for resale online, probably at knock down prices, and nobody else was interested in going either. As you rightly point out, aside from the vendors and such whose income takes a hit, the club itself has to care since when people stop going this year and eating the cost they are susceptible to wondering whether it makes and sense to renew an STM. As we used to talk about around here, most locals knew that you didn't need to sign up for an st since you could pick and choose your time and date and wait to see the weather before plunking down for a ticket. Empty seats weaken st demand.
This just looks like the initial, new team, euphoria that's been happening for years. But when the teams don't produce, apathy takes over very quickly.
Unpopular opinion, but I don’t think Precourt planned on tanking the Crew on purpose, I just think he’s incompetent.
I think he tried to move the Crew to Austin very much "on purpose". I'm not even sure how that's arguable..
He and Don brought in Dave Greeley on day one. Dave was a hatchet man. He had one job and that was to tank attendance and sponsorship. It was all part of the plan.
He's not arguing that point. He's arguing whether the tanking of the Crew was intentional or just sheer incompetence. A point can be made for the latter.
He would’ve moved the team regardless if they were successful. Nobody is going to actively run a business for 5 years in the red on purpose. He tried to schmooze with Columbus business leaders and failed miserably at it. “poor business metrics” were because of his incompetence. It just became an excuse and had they’d done fairly well, they’d have just came up with a different reason to move the team.
I strongly disagree. You know as well as I do all of the shit they pulled trying to make attending a game a miserable experience. As someone who was stuck in a 500 foot long line trying to get in to HCS through one gate where one guy was assigned to pat everyone down, and finally got in 20 minutes after kick, I can testify. (And of.course that was the night they had their photographer ready at kickoff to show the empty stands so that Don could show them around to the world. Shameless.) And that was just one of the many many stunts they pulled. Like I said, just ask.p Now you can try if you want to explain why an outfit that is doing everything it can to depress attendance would do anything BUT make an effort to field a crappy side. I could use a good laugh this morning. Tanking attendance, tanking sponsorships, tanking team performance, it's all part and parcel of the same deal, engineered by, as my learned colleague @crew2112 notes above, by professional team destroyer Dave Greeley. The only thing I can say about Fatty McDaddysMoney is that he doesn't have any skills whatsoever and had zero interest in having his hands directly on the levers in Columbus, a town he detests. Precourt didn't even bother to attend MLS Board of Governors meetings like all the other owners; he actually sent Greeley because he could t be bothered. He hired someone and gave them.the job, then waited around for Don to tell him it was time to change the teams mailing address. And when Greeley completed his assignment, Fatso canned him. He isn't someone a team actually trying to succeed wants around.
A couple late and random thoughts on the game. Certainly happy for Matan. I've been a fan of his for a while. I don't think it proves anything one way or the other, but maybe that helps him take more opportunities. Still has trouble with that final ball, for some reason, if it's anything other than a short dish-off AZ bings a similar quickness and attacking mindset as Matan. I'm not sure you want them both on the field together against better competition, but I guess we'll see. If it's an either-or, i'm not sure who I would pick moving forward right now. I think Matan is more polished, but AZ probably has higher upside. Amundsen is (WAY) under-rated.
When did Prec***t fire Greeley? Was it during the time the "Modell Law" came into the picture, or around the time the Haslams and Dr Edwards were presented as owners, or once aust*n was announced officially as a franchise and the organization really started to take shape?
He's definitely incompetent, but he also planned on tanking the Crew. All we can credit his FO with was fixing the TV deal and an appearance in MLS Cup 2015, but when you're tanking anything, there's something to be said about not wanting to give that appearance. If he was more competent, Austin would be a decent team...and they're not even that. That Halloween game shitshow? If it wasn't on trick-or-treat night, it could have been anyone's guess. Everyone knew that a lot of the staffers would have said "sorry, but I can't work that night" if they were even called to work. The pat downs definitely sucked, but it also came at the end of a season where a lot of people were waiting until 7:10-7:15 to go in the stadium anyway. I remember moving to let people past my spot...during player intros, at times when the Nordecke should have been full...and that was basically all season long. I definitely remember emails "This game is expected to be sold out. Pat downs will be enforced. Please allow lots of extra time to enter the stadium." I think gates even opened two hours early that night.
The biggest problem with the pat downs, aside from being stupid and unnecessary, is that there was ONE guy at ONE open gate who had to pat down 18,000 people one at a time. That was a well planned bottleneck. As for Austin, the fans - and pretty much everybody else - blames Claudio Reyna. He assembled that team with absolutely no overall concept or plan.
There was no TP in the bathroom and the stalls didn't have doors. There were missing tiles in the ceiling of the Upper 90 and the tiles that were there were water stained. Are we really going through this again?
Check out this from the archives: https://www.foxsports.com/stories/o...airman-and-investor-operator-anthony-precourt “We want to do things right. We are a major-league franchise. I think there were certain things that needed to be done to get up to the level I think we should be at as a professional soccer club. We want to treat everyone well. "Those mothereffers. They don't know anything."
When the investor/operator has to say things to the media like, "We are a major-league franchise." You know something is wrong.
He intended to sabotage and move the team all along, but his incompetency in business and basic people skills is a foundational reason for why the Columbus Crew still exists. He had a four-year head start on getting the relocation arranged before anyone in Columbus knew what he was doing, and he did absolutely nothing with it. A competent person would have ironed out a relocation deal in private for the Austin city council to rubber stamp before anyone in Columbus could even try to organize against it. The week when he dropped his Barton Springs stadium plan and saw it immediately go up in flames was when I first felt hopeful, because I realized he was staggeringly stupid and incompetent.
Was Barton Springs before or after the UT stadium idea? Did he REALLY think the University of Texas would take a check for use of Darrell K Royal - Texas Memorial Stadium?
Different concepts. The Texas Memorial idea was that if they were going to move in time to start playing there for the 2019 season that they would play in DKR while the new stadium was being built. Barton Springs was his initial proposal for a new stadium, except: 1) No one, not even Adler, knew he was targeting that spot 2) No one on the council had seen or was expecting to see any renderings 3) The councilwoman for that area had never even met Precourt (this tidbit specifically was what stunned me) 4) Most of the rest of the council also had never talked to him 5) He hadn't engaged anyone else in that area of town about building there 6) The only alternative floated was "I guess we can play at the expo center way out east" Yet he expected that they'd just sign off on giving him prime public park land and banging out the rest of the deal later. I'm not sure if they even got to the next council meeting before giving him a hard no. Just a spectacular dumpster fire.