Man, I picked a bad day to skip catching up on this thread. If you think Commerce City is the problem with the Rapids attendance you haven't been paying attention to, well, anything. But given your posts in this thread that seems par for the course. Actually the press bix & suites are the other side of the field. That's just the concessions and bathrooms back there. Not the social media's intern's best work. Though we did get this out of it.
My only addition the the zombie discussion of the Columbus stadium situation is to note that there was zero reason why Precourt couldn't have built a downtown stadium in Columbus on the same site the Haslam/Edwards families are. MLS didn't force potential new ownership to build on a downtown site... or else! The league and PSV put absolutely no effort into trying to build a new Crew stadium in Columbus; their entire effort was geared toward engineering a relocation of the club, partially obscured by a veil-thin "demand" for a downtown stadium. Those of us an the Crew boards who followed this closely from day one, knew there were a few sites being considered for the stadium site, once we'd heard that potential new ownership was engaged (we didn't know who these people were, but we knew there were three potential ownership groups). All those sites were "downtown," more or less: the one chosen, in the Arena District; one in East Franklinton; one in Lou Berliner Park. It's absurd to imply that difficulty in getting an adequate downtown site had anything whatsoever to do with the Crew saga. It was an unnecessary, near disaster entirely of the league's own making, lubricated by Precourt's dishonesty and brutal incompetence as an owner (he actively pissed off the Columbus business elite from day one).
KC doesn't have a downtown location and they are doing just fine at the gate. Rewind to 15 years ago when they couldn't draw flies and it was "conventional wisdom" that market couldn't support an MLS team and everybody was convinced they needed to be moved elsewhere. What changed? They were sold to owners that gave a shit and were motivated to be successful in that market. KSE, in contrast, is not (and has never been) motivated to have a successful team. If you could wave a magic wand that would lift DSGP from Commerce City and drop it into Downtown Denver it wouldn't make a huge amount of difference. You'd probably get a small attendance bump because of bar proximity, but the Rapids would still consistently be towards the bottom of MLS. Attendance will not go up by any noticeable measure until either KSE actually starts running the Rapids like a professional sports team, or unless MLS forces KSE out of the league. Unfortunately neither is likely.
Well, 20 years ago they didn't draw shit. 15 years ago they drew 15k/game which is a reasonable amount especially given that there was zero scarcity of tickets. The issues with the ownership and stewardship of HSG are complicated and well documented. Resources to market the team were pretty much absent. In the early years ticket sales were handled by staff coopted from the Chiefs, a team who - at the time in the mid-90s - had a waiting list, so actually having to get out and work to sell tickets wasn't a strong point. The nadir was around 1999/2000 when the average dropped below 10k, which would still be a really good USL number, and above the bottom feeders in most D1s around the world including Serie A and La Liga. 2003/2004 saw great growth as Clark Hunt had reached a rough agreement to sell the club to Frank DuRoss in Rochester, but Lamar convinced Clark to put that on hold if Lamar could raise attendance and season ticket numbers. What followed was the natural consequence of actually investing in the marketing and promotion of the product. Attendance grew markedly as Lamar personally got involved. The second, smaller collapse around 2005/2006 came as HSG, who put the team on the market in December, 2004, absolutely cut all spending. In fact MLS put in minimum standards for the 2006 season to address just how little investment the Wizards were getting as HSG was keeping the team on life support until it sold the team. But once OnGoal bought the team, attendance has varied from 98-105% of capacity of CommunityAmerica Ballpark and Sporting Park as the current ownership has invested heavily in marketing and improving the on-field product. But HSG actually did give a shit, so to speak, but Lamar Hunt was always interested in the "greater good" than just the good of his own team. The anti-Steinbrenner or anti-Cosmos type of thing. He saw the NASL up front. He was part of that experience as well as the AFL launching. I also think it's hard to figure out just how much cash HSG actually had. Lamar or Lamar and Family never appeared on the Forbes list of billionaires despite the fact that HSG owned the Chiefs, part of the Chicago Bulls, up to three MLS teams, some stadiums and so on. And when I was following the Forbes list 15 years ago, those were times where the Chiefs were variously listed as being worth 750-900 million. Makes one wonder if most of the liquid resources were going to MLS cash calls or the HSG portion of the stadiums in Columbus and Frisco. Not to mention the attempt to pay an NHL expansion fee in Columbus. HSG cared, but not in the same way that were used to with most ego driven sports team owners. There's a surety and comfort about having your team owned by HSG. Without Lamar, the Wiz would not have been born and certainly would not have been allowed to survive. But then there's also the freedom that comes with having someone else, with an irrational desire to win, take over the team.
There was a great potential stadium site in downtown Austin. It's the former Statesman newpaper campus on Ladybird lake. It was sold 2 years ago for 70 million dollars. Precourt could have bought it but then his stadium would be reduced to something like Houston or Orlando have.
Fair points. Though KC's situation pre-sale had a lot in common with the Rapids pre-sale. Phil Anschutz did care about the Rapids, and to this day he's still been to more of our games than either of the Kroenkes combined. MLS was different animal in those days. KC ended up being sold to a great ownership group that genuinely cares about their product, and it shows. Colorado sold to a real estate hustler that squats on assets and just plays the appreciation game by doing the bare minimum possible...basically the sports equivalent of a slumlord. You mentioned the minimum standards put in to place by the league for the 2006 season. Did you know KSE actually wanted to shut down the Rapids and not even have them play the 2006 season? The idea was the club would be "restarted" in 2007 with the re-brand and the new stadium...the league said "No." The stadium site was pretty much just a real estate play anyway. KSE didn't even really expect Rapids were going to survive, and that's why our stadium seats are grey instead of burgundy. I recall at one point that Anschutz even said to a reporter a few years later to the effect that selling to Kroenke was a mistake.
Grass is being laid at Lockhart Stadium Inter Miami to play first home game in March 2020 against LA Galaxy
https://chicago.suntimes.com/soccer...calls-for-sliding-payment-based-on-attendance Hooray for FOIA I just took a look at the Fire website. I am confused. You can buy a season ticket for $25/game right now, but in December the price will drop to $15/game. I don't get it. Someone please explain this to me.
Fair and good points. But as a former HSG club, I'd amend it to: Lamar cared. HSG/Clark Hunt? Not so much. They sold us to Precourt and were ready to sell KC to Rochester.
Agreed. Lamar was a sports fan. Clark is a businessman. EDIT: Just to be clear, the Wizards were put on the market when they were by Lamar in order to save the team. Lamar knew his time was running out, and if the team still belonged to HSG and was playing at Arrowhead Stadium when he died, Clark would've sold it to the highest bidder even if relocation was part of the deal. Sporting KC exists because Lamar did what needed to do to save MLS in Kansas City.
Not really. The "Access" thing a setup that allows you to purchase tickets for a cheaper price. No set seats like with season tickets and you purchase game to game. Not sure if there's a flat fee for it. Also looks like they're in the lower tier prices of seats, which ALMOST haven't been selling during the STH selection.
I was going to say that the SF lease was giving me MLS 1.0 flashbacks, since the Galaxy had a similar agreement back when they played in the Rose Bowl. But the article noted that the Fire get a decent cut of ancillary revenue, and that wasn't normally a thing back in the pre SSS days. Scheduling seems pretty iffy.
Maybe you should be hanging with the Beastie Boys. I heard they are in Washington, lobbying Congress to make an amendment to the Bill of Rights--our Right to Party.
What part of that answer to the question raised did you not understand? You've been around since at least 2005, you should know exactly how long many of your fellow fans continued to rail at AEG over the relocation of the original MLS Clash/Earthquakes to Houston. Long after the 2008 expansion Earthquakes took their place, history, and stars. That's a straight up answer to the question I was answering. It's a similar situation, and the San Jose fans reaction to what happened and how long they continued to vilify AEG afterwards (with a select few still not letting go completely) is a fair data point to offer up. Hope that clarifies things for you.
No matter what they may do in the future, AEG will always be front-and-center on my personal shit list for what they did to SJE fans in the early 2000s. They were PSV before PSV was PSV, and they deserve every bit of scorn and opprobrium they would ever receive.