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Sports Business: Soccer has a place in new stadium
Monday, October 30, 2000
By ANGELO BRUSCAS
Lost in the spectacle last week of a 399-pound Seahawk fan trying out the extra-wide seats for the new football/soccer stadium was an item that should prove more significant to the success of the $430 million public-private venture.
After the media finished the seat story, the Seattle Sounders quietly went public with plans to bring a Major League Soccer team to the new stadium for the 2003-04 season. The Sounders promised they would help set up world-caliber international matches for the new stadium, scheduled to open for the Seahawks 2002 season.
For those who questioned if soccer would be given short shrift in tailoring the building for the NFL fan, the appearance of Sounders CEO Neil Farnsworth before the Public Stadium Authority board last week showed soccer has designs on the facility as well.
"I feel we will be able to put together an ownership group for MLS," Farnsworth told board members. "In fact, I am discussing it right now, with some high net-worth individuals who are interested in being the primary contributors to a club program and an MLS team in Seattle."
Farnsworth said those as-yet unnamed individuals and he have met with MLS officials to lay the groundwork for an expansion franchise. MLS commissioner Don Garber, according to Farnsworth, believes that "we have the best plan of anyone in America in terms of how to make an individual soccer team work. So I think there is real potential."
The Sounders are pressing forward with plans for a training facility in Fife or Marysville to develop youth leagues.
Farnsworth said the MLS team would take the name of the A-League team, which would then become Sounders Premier. The organization would create a top-level amateur team called Sounders Select, and youth teams called Sounders United.
"If MLS comes here without this club system, I think the chances of success long-term are limited," Farnsworth said. "If they come here with this club system in place in Seattle, I think the chances of success are very high."
His goal is to have the headquarters and practice fields of an MLS franchise located at the team's training and development facility, and play matches at the new stadium. The object is to build a soccer community that touches all levels of the game.
"This program will be touching thousands and thousands of young people," Farnsworth said. "Those young people and their parents will become fans for both the Sounders Premier A-League team and the Sounders MLS team, and that will drive profits."
Ultimately, the profits will be plowed back into the club program, operating on a non-profit basis to spread soccer to the masses. That's the plan originally drafted by Sounders owner/chairman Scott Oki. It will be interesting to see if the investors are willing to sign on to such an altruistic business model.
"We're very fortunate in Seattle to have a group of people with a lot of money who are interested in giving back to the community, and that's what I'm trying to capitalize on right now, quite frankly," Farnsworth said.
STADIUM TIDBITS: As of Oct. 1, $191.7 million has been spent on construction since the Kingdome was imploded, representing 44.6 percent of the stadium project budget. Including the costs of building the neighboring exhibition center, the construction cost in the $430 million budget is $361.2 million. So far, the project is not over budget or behind schedule. The public contribution is capped at $300 million, with Paul Allen's First & Goal Inc. responsible for the rest, including any cost overruns.
The developer's contingency fund has $1.4 million set aside to address upgrades, including about $100,000 to build a luxury suite for public use, which will be given to fans each home game via an in-stadium lottery.
About 60 percent of the concrete work is complete; 38 percent of the structural steel is in place.
Fifty-five of the 82 suites have been sold. The public suite will have 21 seats on the club level at an angle looking back from the north goal line.
THE ABC'S OF TV: Credit college football fans up and down the West Coast, especially in Seattle, for an end run on ABC's switchboards last week that forced the network to pre-empt cartoons and show the Nebraska-Oklahoma game Saturday morning.
Citing what the network said was a one-time exemption to the FCC's requirement to show family programming in that time slot on the West Coast, ABC's reversal of the West Coast blackout showed that someone back East got the message loud and clear.
Until Friday, ABC's position was that fans could pay $11.95 to watch the game live on ESPN's pay-per-view package. The network wasn't helped by the two universities, which declined to reschedule the game to accommodate a national audience.
ABC Sports is allowed to break into the children's programming time slot once a year, but that had been committed to the Ohio State-Michigan game at the end of the season.
"It's a complicated puzzle and every piece kind of fits in," said Mark Mandel, ABC's vice president for media relations. "We know that the public doesn't really always understand or care how we put it together, they just want to see the game. We respect that and understand that."
Mandel denied that the initial decision was an attempt to force viewers into using the pay-per-view network. ESPN and ABC are owned by Disney.
"Our business is to get over-the-air ratings, and we would never put a game into an area in order to force people to watch another game on pay-per-view. That would be suicide for us," he said.
The outcry from San Diego to Seattle surprised ABC officials, and Mandel noted the change in programming marked the first time in his 13 years with the network that ABC Sports had cut into regularly scheduled children's fare for a game because of fan interest and lobbying.
"Nebraska-Oklahoma, 20 years ago, was an automatic," he said. "You knew that it was a very important game. Over the last 10 years, there's no way you could have predicted it would be anything close to this."
It's great to see any organization in sports bow to common sense and the will of fans.
Now, if only fed-up NFL fans could mobilize to force a long-overdue change to the television blackout policy that has afflicted the Seahawks and other teams for far too long.
P-I reporter Angelo Bruscas can be reached at 206-448-8010 or angelobruscas@seattle-pi.com
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