Part one of this series explained how Seattle fell in love with the sport of soccer in the 1950's and 60's, and how that love affair resulted in one of the more popular teams in the NASL in the 1970's. The second post in this series examined how a tight knit soccer community kept the sport going in the absence of top flight soccer until the MLS Sounders were born in 2009. This third-and-final post looks at how the MLS Sounders translated the area's passion for the sport into the best attended team in the league by connecting to the club's history and taking actions to ensure they achieved far more than the typical expansion franchise.
Achieving Unparalleled Results
One of the 22,000 inaugural season ticket holders was Jim Simmons. He had watched the NASL Sounders in his youth, had become a parent of soccer players, and was actively involved in coaching and administering youth soccer within the state of Washington. In his view the arrival of the MLS Sounders was the continuation of a 40 year relationship with the sport that may be best represented by an NASL Sounders scarf he still proudly displays today.
Packages were sent out to each ticket holder as the first match for the MLS side approached. They not only contained a season’s worth of tickets, but also a gift from the club that they hoped would serve as a special memento. The inaugural match ticket would come attached to a Sounders scarf that clearly identified the person wearing it as a “2009 Season Ticket Holder.”
The emotions Jim Simmons recounts from the day he opened the box were completely unexpected, yet completely appropriate given the moment.
The package came, and I was pretty excited about it. To open it up and see the first game ticket attached to the scarf… I loved the colors. The colors, although slightly different shades, were the green and blue the original Sounders had. I just went back to the warm summer nights in High School Memorial Stadium, the lousy field but great atmosphere. I went back to the camps. I went back to the things I had seen and the people I had met. It literally brought tears to my eyes.
Simmons would unfortunately miss the inaugural match due to a long-planned trip, but 32,523 other fans would show up to see the Sounders beat the New York Red Bulls by a convincing 3-0 score line. What started with a raucous home win would grow into the second best inaugural season for an expansion franchise in MLS history, bettered only by Chicago’s championship winning side of 1998. By the end of June 2009 the Sounders had earned 25 of an available 48 points, maintaining the 1.5 points-per-match pace required to make the MLS playoffs. It was at the 16th match in late June, halfway through the season, that the Sounders achieved the 32,000-attendee mark again after a string of home matches attended by 28,000 fans. Since that final weekend of June 2009, the club has never had a league home match with fewer than 32,000 supporters in attendance. Sprinkled in the middle of each of those inaugural season sellouts were friendlies against Chelsea FC and FC Barcelona, each attended by 65,000 people. Seattle was officially in love with their club, and the club had easily become the hottest ticket in town. The Sounders would finish the year with 47 points from 90 available - good enough to qualify for the playoffs and the second best point percentage for an expansion franchise in MLS history, easily besting every other MLS expansion team’s record outside of the 1998 Chicago Fire.
Fans from the USL and NASL days would notice a key difference in the atmosphere of the MLS matches during the inaugural season – the rise of the urban youth and the club’s supporters groups. NASL Sounders matches were never quiet affairs, but they also had very few of the chants, scarves, or supporters sections that are critical to a club’s success in modern day soccer. A number of the people interviewed for this article mentioned the NASL Sounders’ emphasis on a family atmosphere being critical to their success. They say such an atmosphere still exists in the MLS side, with many of these longtime fans now parents or grandparents who feel comfortable bringing their children and grandchildren to Sounders matches. They also recognize that family appeal only takes attendance so far, so the successful blending of such an atmosphere with one that encourages supporters groups and the vocal nature of the younger fan is crucial to filling 36,000 or more seats on a weekly basis.
Scholarly research suggests the Sounders are striking just the right balance. Graduate student Blaine Uhlman and Associate Professor Galen Trail, both of Seattle University and Sounders fans themselves, have written a research paper entitled An Analysis of the Motivators of Seattle Sounders FC Season Ticket Holders. The paper explores the motivations behind first and second year season ticket holders’ purchase of tickets and support of the club. What they found suggests that the Sounders are successfully balancing paying homage to a club with a history that identifies with Seattle while simultaneously attracting the type of fan interested in a world-class atmosphere more likely to be found in matches in Europe rather than MLS.
Using online surveys and advanced statistical methods, the two researchers found that first year season ticket holders overwhelmingly said they identified with the Sounders because the club represented the city. Uhlman and Trail label this phenomenon “community attachment.” Professor Trail explained this identification in the following manner.
I think that [community attachment] goes back to the NASL days, in that the Sounders are Seattle… There’s always been this belief among soccer people that Seattle is soccer, which is probably distinct from a lot of other places in the United States. It’s not that soccer is a secondary sport to baseball or football. It may be, but the belief is that soccer is a core component of who Seattle is. That comes from the NASL days.
While season ticket holders from the second year continued to say they identified with the club due to community attachment, they also said they identified with the Sounders because of what the researchers called “sport attachment.” Such a term is used to describe people who are fans of the global game, the ones who get up early on weekend mornings to see the world’s best players ply their trade in the best leagues of Europe. Uhlman and Trail theorize such fans took a wait-and-see approach to the Sounders, and were convinced to buy season tickets after attending a few inaugural season matches. During those matches they saw firsthand the European-style atmosphere in the stadium as well as the team’s on-pitch success, and being hooked on the experience they then bought season tickets in the second year. Again, Professor Trail explains why he thinks this happened in Seattle and not elsewhere:
I think what the Sounders did was make it feel like an international match. Most of the MLS teams prior to this tried to Americanize it, whereas the Sounders didn’t at all. Making the atmosphere into a European or a South American feel, that’s what attracted that second year season ticket holder.
While the Sounders organization deserves a good bit of the credit for making the atmosphere possible, the best laid plans would have come to nothing if not for the vocal supporters that attending the first season’s matches. Those vocal supporters drew in more fans, who then became vocal supporters, who then drew in more fans. This created what is best described as a “positive feedback loop” for Sounders supporters, leading to the third conclusion of Uhlman’s and Trail’s research.
Sounders fans also identify with the club because of what the researchers call “fan superiority” – Sounders fans believe they are the best supporters in MLS. This is a reputation Sounders supporters have earned league-wide over their brief time in MLS, with some supporters of clubs with a longer history in MLS poking fun that “Sounders fans believe they invented soccer in America.” Rather than see this as a bad thing, Uhlman sees it as a marketing advantage for the club.
I don’t think they cater to [fan superiority], it’s just something that comes naturally. We’re the ones who fill [the stadium] up every day. Who else does? At the point when someone else does maybe we’ll stop. Regardless of outside stereotypes, I think it is perfectly valid for the Sounders to cater to it because it is pretty much unmatched.
Professor Trail sees it as something the league should encourage.
You want to have that [attitude] because it’s good for the league in that if Seattle says, ‘we’re the best soccer fans in the United States’, which they are showing, maybe that’s going to elevate the other teams to figure out what [the Sounders are] doing and what makes them the best.
Both researchers see continued, incremental success at both the MLS and international levels being key to Sounders attendance numbers and fan support going forward. The organization has set some aggressive goals to be one of the premier clubs in the CONCACAF region, and will need to deliver on those goals to keep the interest growing in the fans that identify with the club via sport attachment.
Given the difficulty in qualifying for CONCACAF Champions League play via winning the MLS Cup or the Supporters’ Shield, the club saw an advantage in qualification via the US Open Cup as it appeared that a number of MLS sides didn't take the competition seriously. The Sounders have won the Cup each of their first three seasons in MLS, being the first team in forty years to win three straight US Open Cups. On August 8th they will attempt to become the first team in the history of the tournament to win four Cup titles in a row. Along the way they've set consecutive US Open Cup Final attendance records, and effectively forced a change in the process for bidding for home pitch advantage given the financial resource advantage they utilized in bidding during the 2010 and 2011 tournaments. Where other MLS clubs saw a competition unworthy of their best talent, the Sounders saw a way to make an immediate impression that they were competing for championships each and every year.
The Sounders success would grow from that inaugural year and continue through their second and third season. When personnel problems arose, as they did with Freddie Ljungberg and Blaise Nkufo, the club’s leadership did not hesitate to make quick decisions to minimize the impact to on-pitch performance. When the club was beat 4-0 at home in their second season by the LA Galaxy, they issued a public apology and sent a message to both fans and players by refunding the purchase price of the match’s ticket to all season ticket holders. Supporter’s expectations for the club were high, and management’s expectations were even higher.
The net effect was that the level of play on the pitch would continue to incrementally improve. During the 2010 season the Sounders would rally from abysmal start that had them at a 5% chance of making the playoffs at the midway point of the season to full qualification as the 6th seed. They’d be bounced from the first round of the playoffs for a second year in a row after facing a tough LA Galaxy team, and would have a horrible campaign in the group stage of the CONCACAF Champions league. The 2011 season would be a continuation of where the 2010 season left off in terms of form. The team would finish 2nd overall in MLS, and would cap a more successful CONCACAF Champions League group play campaign by finishing second in their group and qualifying for the knockout stages of the tournament. The model, while not intentional, was clear: steady improvement was the way forward.
All the while the love affair between club and city continued to grow. A string of sellouts that packed more than 36,000 fans into CenturyLink Field each week led the Sounders to have an attendance figure 50% higher than the next closest team in MLS. During the 2011/12 off-season the club made the decision to take further advantage of the stadium’s available seating. They struck a deal with Microsoft to remove the software company’s advertisement tarp from the north end of the stadium and open up an area affectionately called “The Hawks Nest” by local fans. Such a move brought total game day capacity to more than 38,500 seats, with the Sounders filling up those seats in every league game this season.
Can it Be Sustained and Replicated?
While sports columnist Art Thiel believes the Sounders are the “greatest success story in sports business” of his more than three-decade career in Seattle, the obvious question is how the club can maintain the momentum it now has? Thiel feels an MLS Cup is key, especially given fan’s expectations of the team. Hearkening back to Seattle’s dearth of championships in any sport, Thiel says,
[A championship is] especially important in the Seattle area where there is a paucity of championships. A title would really be embraced here, and solidify not only their hold on hardcore soccer fans but would also really get casual fans drawn in.
The supporters I interviewed for the article had no less of an expectation, but given their long association with the multiple incarnations with the Sounders they are a patient bunch. Bill Creech may have best summarized their views.
When they announced this team, and they signed Ljungberg, they stated their goal was to be the best team in the world. Their goal was to win championships, and to win them internationally. I believed them. I’ve got patience, because I recognize the limitations of the salary cap.
Drew Carey and the rest of the ownership group recognize the supporters’ goal. His response is very blunt when asked what success over the next three years looks like to him given the success of the first three years.
Winning an MLS Cup. That’s it. We have to win an MLS Cup. We’re happy about everything. We’re glad we’re making money, but if we don’t win an MLS Cup I don’t know what we’re doing.
Whether the team achieves such lofty goals in a league built on parity remains to be seen. The Sounders still need to get over a key stumbling block before they start dreaming of championships. They need to make it out of the first round of the playoffs, which they’ve failed to do their first three years in the league. They were highly competitive in 2011, and if not for Mauro Rosales’ injury at the end of the season they might have set up a Western Conference Finals for the ages against the Los Angeles Galaxy. If their newly minted captain can stay healthy, and attacking players like Eddie Johnson can prove to be good partners with Fredy Montero, the Sounders will be tough to stop offensively. Perhaps the biggest adjustment is coming goal where three-year captain Kasey Keller has been replaced by the long-injured but very good Michael Gspurning. Shipping off young up-and-coming talent for an established player like Eddie Johnson in the pre-season and buying players like Christian Tiffert in the summer transfer window, the Sounders have made moves indicating they wanted to win an MLS Cup now. It remains to be seen if such moves were enough to deliver on that goal.
In talking to supporters, columnists, and researchers the final question always is “can this be replicated elsewhere?” All the answers came back to a few fundamentals that had to be in place for MLS clubs to succeed, while specific cities that could achieve such success ran a wide gamut of answers.
First, all of those interviewed felt one of the keys to success was a stadium located in the heart of a city. The passion of soccer, especially in the modern fan, is built around constant interaction of supporters. Professor Trail pointed out how the communal experience of bussing into downtown Seattle from the suburbs stood in stark contrast to the American sports norm of driving individual cars out into the suburbs to attend a match at remote stadiums. The former is far more engaging of the fans, and is critical to a sport like soccer that is built more around the supporter interactions and experience on match day than perhaps any other sport in the world. To that end, cities like Houston, who built a new stadium downtown for the Dynamo, were singled out for praise.
Several of those interviewed highlighted the need for historical roots in the game when deciding where to award future MLS franchises. They pointed to the subsequent success of the Portland Timbers and Vancouver Whitecaps, who had a long history going back to the NASL days like the Sounders. Bill Creech thought the Minneapolis area might be a good location for future expansion given their high attendance numbers during the NASL days.
The two insiders I interviewed, Drew Carey and Frank MacDonald, singled out the Seahawks organization as a key ingredient to the club’s success. Having one of the Sounders co-owners, Paul Allen, also serve as the owner of the Seahawks allowed the Sounders to learn more about their prospective fans and how to reach them faster than they would have otherwise. Carey emphasized this as a potential element to consider when MLS awards future franchises.
Perhaps the most direct reply came from Professor Trail.
There’s no reason the Fire shouldn’t be able to do this. There’ no reason New York shouldn’t be able to do this. It’s mismanagement on their part. They didn’t come at it from a soccer perspective. It was, ‘this is America, we’re going to do it the American way’ and that’s not what appeals to all of the Americans in the US who are international fans. They have this idea of what true soccer is and it’s not what MLS has been providing.
Regardless of who is able to imitate it or replicate it, the Sounders organization and the club’s supporters deserve to bask in the wonder of what Art Thiel labels “one of the most phenomenal developments in pro sports history” when it comes to the love that translates into the attendance figures the Sounders have seen. Such love transcends the league, and it is based upon a more than sixty-year relationship with the sport in the Seattle area. The Sounders aren’t a three-year-old franchise. They’re a nearly forty year old club built upon the collective history of hundreds of thousands of players, coaches, and supporters in the State of Washington who kept the dream of top flight soccer alive even when MLS told them “no” multiple times. The latest incarnation of the Sounders built some history of their own by leveraging that collective history, and look to continue to add to it for years to come.
