Then again, those new 8000 are several multiples of people, not one monolithic block. Heck, I wore my scarf on game day in Salem and got a car-wash cashier telling me he wants to go to a game. Not much into soccer but wanted to go. How long the desire lasts? Not sure.
I think the situation in Toronto is a pretty good template. Fans will naturally give a new team a honeymoon period, but they'll expect on-field results after a few years.
Agreed. But win a championship within 6 years and you'll have generations of loyal followers a la Blazers. [21 years straight of playoff appearances helps too]
What "new" team are you talking about? The Timbers might be new to you but the club sold over 1 million tickets between 2001 and 2010. That number does include repeat visitors of course but on the lowest possible end we know for a fact that there were at least 16,000 individuals who had some experience with the Timbers between 2001 and 2010. And following the logic previously mentioned abiut how that 8000 is not a monolithic block of the same people, in reality the number of unique pre-mls game-goers is certainly double, triple or quadruple that 16,000. Therefore team is not "new" to perhaps 50,000 or more people who have been to Timbers games in the past - certainly multiples more than can fit in the stadium. Not only is that situation completely different from Toronto, but different from any other MLS expansion club ever. It is extremely naive to seek similarities between Portland and Toronto. The situations are very different.
Now we've got Portland AND Seattle inventing stuff?! Just kidding/mostly. We get that all situations are different, but there are some similarities. Everyone said a lot of the same stuff about Toronto for the first 3 or 4 years until they realized Toronto may never make the playoffs (which isn't that hard to do in MLS mind you). Everyone said "Toronto is different". It seems that they are somewhat different, but are also losing fans as the team continues its futility. It seems out of the realm of possibility in the next 5 years or so in Portland to me too, but it could certainly happen that a horrible team would hurt attendance eventually.
Yes but thanks to parity in the league and the unique playoff structure it is always possible that this year's wooden spoon recipient is the following years Eastern Conference champion.
The Portland team that plays in MLS. You might have heard of it. I think they're named after a forestry product. That's nice. But whatever success Portland might have had in the minor leagues is meaningless at this point. Fans are only going to care about success in MLS. They're both expansion teams looking for success in the big leagues. If Portland does as badly as Toronto has done since it joined MLS, its fans will react the same as the fans up at BMO Field. There's nothing unique about Timbers fans. Like fans of any other team in any league, they'll drift away if the team doesn't have on-field success.
Oh, you mean the Timbers, which have been using the same name, playing in the same location, having the same ownership, many of the same fans, and even some of the same players as they did in USL? That is the brand new club you are talking about? Exactly. Yeah, absolutely no relationship between MLS and USL. None. Either you understand that these are the same people and their past behavior is a good indication of their future behavior, or you need to explain why moving up to MLS would cause a mass exodus of USL Timbers fans. Except that Timbers fans didn't do that. Get it? Timbers have been mediocre over the last 10 years and attendance grew, yes even before MLS was a possibility. These are the same people who have been around for 5-10 years already and many Sounder fans will be happy to tell you about the Timbers on-field success that these fans were treated to. So you're wrong. Timbers fans ARE different from other expansion club supporters simply because this is not the first season they have supported the Timbers. The vast majority of the 18k have been to Timbers matches over the many years before and they are still coming out, despite results. The Honeymoon period concept is garbage when you've applying it to fans who have been married to the team for up to a decade already. These fans have been there through the shittiest years of a shittier league. This is stuff that happened, these people came to games, attendance increased, Timbers sucked, they still came back. These are facts so it's funny you think you are in a position to ignore the last ten years of what actually happened in Portland and instead are trying to force fit a comparison of what we see in some different city in another country with a different club and none of the same fans. Can I suggest that if anybody wants to prognosticate about what Timbers fans will do if the team starts losing, don't look at how Toronto fans have responded over the last 5 years, look at how Timbers fans have responded over the last 5 years.
It's funny how the narrative changes depending on the intended audience. When trying to convince the world (or at least Sounder fans) of non-suckitude, we hear about the 2 USL Commissioners Cups, and extended winning streaks, and Cascadia Cups. When trying to emphasize years of faithful, thankless fan support, the story becomes "We've always sucked, yet still we came" and shall therefore always continue to come. As a Seattle fan, it is definitely interesting to see it from the other side of the fence.
So what? Sure, some of the hardcore fans may stick around if things go pearshaped, just as some hardcore fans have stuck it out with DC and some hardcore fans will stick it out if Toronto remains bad. But Timbers fans are like fans of any other sports team. If the on-field product becomes bad and stays bad, the party in the stands won't be enough to keep them coming. Sorry kids, you're not special fan snowflakes.
The Timbers could finish bottom of the table and I still wouldn't give up my season ticket. Did I mention that I've lived in MN the past four years and have been to only one home game in that time? I didn't give up my tickets then (when there were plenty of tickets available), why would I now? I know others in MN in the same situation. I'd say it's even more of a pride in Portland thing. The sooner that the renovations are paid off with the ticket taxes, the sooner the City of Portland can dip into the Spectator Facilities Fund to build in more kickass. It's sort of a game against the no-fun NIMBYs.
Nope. We're not talking about a couple dozen hardcore DC fans who have expectations of seeing a successful MLS side. We are talking about thousands of people who bought over 1 million tickets to see a USL club over a decade. Sorry but this is a different situation no matter how much you want to think you know differently. Where did you get the idea that you are in a position to preach on all things Portland anyway?
Your attendance has almost quadrupled in the last 4 seasons, and almost doubled in the last season. If the Timbers follow Toronto's trajectory, you're average attendance is going to falter. Portland does appear to have a larger core of die-hards than other MLS teams, but the new fans that you've added in recent seasons aren't going to be the same as the fans that went through the crap years. Another change that Paulson brought in was a bit of success for the Timbers. While 2008 was a very bad year, you had the second best regular season record in 2007, the best regular season record in 2009, and fourth best in 2010.
Not that anyone participating in this thread is interesting in actually gaining knowledge and understanding versus just engaging of another round of Crossfire style exchanges of talking points, but I suggest separating two sets of numbers from each other: those of general attendance and those of the Timbers Army. Seattle fans tend to accuse the Timbers Army of making their support more about themselves than the team, and maybe there's a kernel of truth to that, but the byproduct of building that kind of support that is not reliant on trophies and "decades of dominance" is that we believe we will retain our numbers even through bad seasons. Indeed, the membership of our non-profit is still climbing, despite a nearly 2 month winless streak, and we're beginning negotiations to *expand* the Timbers Army section for next season. The ignorant and stubborn may write off the history we carried over from the USL days, but there are hundreds and thousands of TA who remember the team going into PCL ownership, the 2006 "Agnello" year of PDL rejects and bottom of the table status, and the long years when Rochester seemed a more likely MLS expansion franchise than Portland. You think they're going to jump ship just because we're losing games now? Will there be an ebb after the novelty of MLS in Portland has worn off? Absolutely. But if we can still claim nearly 4,000 TA as core support, I'm not at all worried about falling into Columbus-sized numbers. The team's pro forma claimed profitability off a baseline of (IIRC) 11,000 in attendance. I'd be surprised if we ever dipped below 15k, which would still put us solidly in the median of MLS teams.
You keep throwing around the 1 million tickets over one decade like it is a particularly impressive number. And I guess it is for minor league soccer. But here are Timbers average attendance dumbers before they joined MLS: 2001 7,169 2002 6,260 2003 5,871 2004 5,628 2005 6,028 2006 5,575 2007 6,851 2008 8,567 2009 9,734 2010 10,727 Now, for comparison, let's look at the Montreal Impact during the same period: 2001 2,103 2002 5,178 2003 7,236 2004 9,279 2005 11,176 2006 11,554 2007 11,035 2008 12,696 2009 12,033 2010 12,397 So, it looks like throughout its history in the 21st century, the Timbers had a mostly stagnant fanbase that could be expected to generate about 6,000 or so tickets sold per game. When the team entered MLS, it picked up a number of new fans, many of whom are likely only really starting to support the team now. So, for the majority of the people at Jeld-Wen, this team is in the honeymoon period. And if things get bad on the field, they'll go back to not going to games, just like new fans in, say, Toronto. And if we're going to talk about impressive fan support in the minor leagues, I think the Impact's numbers are what we should be talking about, given that they outsold you guys in the minors 8 out of the last 10 years. And while you guys were stagnating during most of the pre-MLS announcement period, they were consistenly getting more and more fans.
It would be a particularly ignorant thing to say, but you are certainly welcome to say it. Anyone with any familiarity of either USL team would be able to tell you why, but you don't appear to be the sort who would be listening. If the Timbers gave thousands of tickets away, essentially for free, to OYSA they'd be able to claim 5-figure attendances as well. Aren't subsidized turnstiles great? But I'm sure you already knew that.
Numbers are numbers. If you've ever been on the attendance thread, you'd have seen this complaint a million times "But they give away tickets!" Every team gives away some tickets. But the attendance numbers are what they are- you can't handwave them away.
Yes, I'm sure that would be your POV since it's the only "knowledge" you bring to the conversation. So you know that 3 > 2. What else you got? If you spent any time talking to the teams or their FOs, you'd know that numbers are rarely ever just numbers.
And this is a far different response than Fenerbace is tossing out. I don't think there is anyone arguing that Portland's following will plummet to FCD levels, but if Portland doesn't start putting out a quality product, then the casual fans that jumped on the bandwagon in the last few years are going to start falling off and at some point, Portland will burn through the waiting list and start playing before less than sell out crowds. One of the advantages of playing in a "small" stadium, when compared to demand, is that it takes awhile for drops in demand to appear. If the Sounders have a bad season the drop in demand will show up immediately, Toronto, on the other hand, has had 5 bad seasons and the drop is just now showing up. I'm also not going to accept your evidence of TA's non-profit's memberships continuing to go up despite a two month losing streak. Regardless of the history of the Timbers, they are still an expansion club and because of that they are going to have a fairly significant honeymoon period. Having a crappy first few seasons is to be expected, the question is what happens to the casual fans and the hard-core fans that start to slowly drift into casual fans that start to get disillusioned by the continued levels of suck (if that happens, not saying it will).
I don't see what Montreal's attendance has to do with Portland's staying power. How is that relevant at all? At some point the new-team-smell will wear off. But Portland's attendance will still be good. We'll still have a great stadium in a fantastic location. We'll still be the only game in town during the summer. We'll still have a committed and interested owner that knows how to market the team. Those things aren't going away. Heck, by the time the novelty wears off, we might even have a really good soccer team! Portlanders love their teams with a weird, tribal passion. The Blazers have exactly 1 championship (1977), haven't been to the finals in almost 20 years, and haven't won a playoff series in over 10 years. But they are no less popular now than they have ever been. We don't expect everybody else to get it. But don't worry about our attendance in five years. It will still be great.
Ha ha. A few people outside of Portland apparently have superhuman insight into the minds and future behaviors of Portland fans OR some of the best smelling farts ever emitted by mankind that they can't help but inhale while closing their eyes, tilting their heads back and smirking in delight. Cuz that's the kind of qualifications (or inflated ego) it takes to tell Timber fans that we are more like Toronto fans than USL Timbers fans. Congratulations on yor emanations youshu and Potowmac!
I'm not terribly skeptical that the membership in 107ist has increased. I think ECS "paid membership" has also increased this year, driven largely by "derby fever", and scarcity of away tickets. And of course with the Timbers being the only game in town (in the summer) it is a much easier sell, whether you call that "grass-roots" or marketing+boredom. I think Seattle and Portland will continue to do well, even if things turn south, assuming here that "south" doesn't include the kind of situation that has developed in places like NE. It is our one shared Major League outlet, and it has a decidedly different dynamic than the traditional Pac-10 rivalries. As noted, Seattle could show cracks earlier, given that our "capacity" is engineered to be just a hair smaller than projected demand, but I would be very surprised if any "pull-back" involved dipping below 30K, which would still be a more than MLS gold. Plus our FO has a built-in early warning system to the tune of a 32K STH base, that will alert them that they have to fix whatever is broken. As the Seahawk's have shown, you don't need to be at the top of your league to hold onto your fans, if you are making obvious and honest (even if failing) efforts towards excellence.
Surely. It will almost certainly happen to any/every team. The rate and the nadir of the drop is, I think, the meat of the discussion. It's my contention that the work of my cohorts will have an effect on both. There is no evidence you are prepared to accept, since you will simply point to the compacted timeline to explain everything away. I could point to the team adding sponsorships since the beginning of the season, increased media attention, greater saturation and integration with the suburbs and outer communities, and it would still be chalked up to a "honeymoon" effect. So what's the point of arguing about it? The same thing applies to your question at the end. Your argument that losing seasons will displace "hard-core" fans may be pertinent to Seattle's situation, but we're more than happy to rest on the history you so casually shrug off. There has never been a season where the TA has shrunk, despite all of the lack of attention, headaches, losses and sometimes outright antagonism we have endured to get to this point. You ignore the successes or write them off while chalking up possible future hypotheticals as all but inevitable. Why would any Timbers fan be willing to have a discussion about their team along these lines?