I found that video fascinating, reassuring, and relevant.

I’m really interested in seeing opposing players’ reactions to playing at Qwest. Not just the turf, but also the atmosphere. How players react will go a long way toward either fueling or dampening our critics.

I see no reason why, some years down the road, we can’t represent the largest, most popular “SSS” in the US. It will happen. Teams already have home field advantage. Imagine the difference when teams have to face 50k-67k crazy fans whenever they roll into Seattle. Turf or no turf, that kind of support will blow anyone’s arguments about Qwest out of the water.

I agree. I am always reading comments about stadium being a downfall to the league. If people would check out the Sounders web-site, then it is pretty obvious that it looks like it is made for soccer. If someone shows a link to the previous video on one of the conversations on Goal.com or Ives, then maybe they’ll see for themselves. Of course, if people around the country, just turn on ESPN on Thursday it will be pretty obvious how ridiculous these debates have been all along.

I think a bit part of this discussion is the financial aspect.
It is my understanding that the Sounders will be playing ‘rent-free’. That is HUGE.

The Red Bulls pay $100,000 per game and they don’t get the benefit of parking and concession monies that they’ll have in their new stadium. They’ll have their own stadium soon, but they’ll have a mortgage to pay.

So say a town like, ahem, ahem, Phoenix had some interested parties, U of Phoenix stadium is a great venue with a roof, a must-have in Phoenix. But the Bidwells and the City of Glendale are not about to give it without payment, and again you won’t be getting max benefit of the revenue stream. Now you look to build a stadium(with a roof), and of course it will be ‘soccer specific’, i.e. it’ s primary purpose is for soccer. And it will be pricey.

In the young MLS, financial survival must be #1. So Kraft in New England doesn’t have to rush to build as he owns Foxboro stadium.

Seattle has the perfect storm, and it’s great. Perhaps the Bidwell’s will see the great success and consider MLS. ooops, sorry I just came out of a dream. :)

A soccer-specific stadium doesn’t have as much seat space, no wide aisles, and no luxury amenities, because you only need to be in the stadium for 105 min. The priority should be viewing the game, not comfort.

Maybe Seattle should convert Memorial Stadium into a soc-spec-stad. It’s the right size, right?

PedMe, if you were right than none of the stadia in the EPL would be soccer specific. And again you bring up the size cannard. Is Camp Nou soccer specific?

Not “as much seat space, no wide aisles, and no luxury amenities”? A stadium has to be ghetto to be soccer specific? Surely newly built stadiums in Europe consider more seat space, aisles, and luxuries as improvements to their designs. We just have that already. We’re ahead of Europe!

There’s not a bad seat at Qwest; they didn’t seem to find it necessary to sacrifice comfort for view. We can eat the cake, too.

It think it boils down to the fact that players do not like the other turfs in MLS. They’ll change their mind when they play here.

Qwest is a gem, with spectacular sightlines,the thunderous 12th man history, and a loyal fanbase that dates as far back as the NASL years. It’s turf is also spectacular, and that was the most brilliant movie to come out of the SoundersFC website so far.

I don’t even get mad when people post about the turf on the boards. I just say, “You’ve never played on it, the pitch size is technically perfect, it was newly put in last year and it’s in gorgeous condition, w/ European goals, and the fans as so close to the action as you can get. Everyone’s just jealous of our beautifully large SSS.”

This franchise is gonna be very fun to support.
I’m standing ECS for forever.

Just tell me there will be no damned U.S. football lines on the field when soccer is being played and I’ll be happy. It drives me nuts.

They are already off, which makes me think that you haven’t gone through the pictures on the SoundersFc website yet, Wiggen.

The pitch looks beautiful and green, and there will never be US football lines on it for Sounders games.

Jon, this site though a little more detailed than most will be accepting of all levels of fans. And I don’t know that I would use the word never, if Sounders FC make the Open Cup Final, but it has to be the day after a Seahawk match they might have to have lines if they are to host.

I’d rather host a Cup championship than not.

But they won’t be there for any league match, nor for the A-B-C exhibitions

Wouldn’t be a problem, Dave. The Open Cup final is on Wednesday.

Qwest is as much a soccer stadium as an American football stadium. It’s great. Grass would be ideal, but that’s just nitpicking.

Qwest is great for soccer. I look at it’s size simply as potential for growth. I believe we could come close to filling it in the future. Per capita, Washington state has the most youth/adult soccer players in the country. Seattle is a soccer city with a great soccer history (why I hope we see some classic reto kits in the future).

I would like to see grass at some point. I’ve never been on the pitch, and I’m sure it’s real nice, but there’s something about authentic grass. The sport was meant to play on it. I love the smell. I love the grass and dirt stains from a wicked slide tackle. I even like the occasional mud. I’m not one to complain about it though. It’s the players opinions that really matter in this case.

I’m sure you have a great surface there in Seattle, but speaking as a Red Bulls fan who has had to endure several years of soccer played on a synthetic pitch, it’s no substitute for real grass. Field turf makes is very difficult to weight passes properly, and the bounce of the ball becomes a real factor. It’s been a major problem at Giants Stadium and personally I cannot wait until we no longer have to play games on the stuff.

As long as you don’t have American football gridlines you will be in better shape than we are at the moment, but I suspect more than a few fans will become disenchanted with playing on fake grass.

Eurosnobs will dog ANY stadium that’s used for anything other than soccer. They bemoan football lines cluttering their dear, precious, clean palette of green, green grass. They fume at the sight of any artificial surface, never mind that many of the world’s soccer giants practice on FieldTurf, and some clubs have installed FieldTurf pitches in their stadiums (Costa Rican giants Saprissa come to mind), mindful of the costs of upkeep for those precious grass fields – watch a match at the San Siro, where the cost of frequent resodding is beginning to approach the costs the Milanese giants spend on their players due to previous stadium expansion causing parts of the pitch to die from lack of sunlight! They even rank on the word ‘soccer’, and dub American football ‘throwball’. That’d go over real well in Australia. Who’d beat the tar out of the snob first, NSW Waratahs fans, Geeleong Cats fans, or Manly Sea Eagles fans?

Some soccer fans simply refuse to come to the realization that soccer isn’t the biggest game in town here, and may never be. To grow the game, to build the league, to ensure its long-term survival, allowances have to be made, bargains struck. I’m sure that there’s more than a few Seattleites who refuse to accept Sounders FC because Qwest Field ’isn’t a real football stadium’, the turf ’isn’t real grass’, Drew Carey, ‘MLS is an inferior product’, all that tripe. They want the team they prefer to root for, the league they prefer to support, be it the EPL, Bundesliga, Serie A, what-have-you, they want that…….mystique, if you will. Mystique, and big (and often unpronounceable) names playing for big bucks, of course. They want their favorite teams and leagues playing here, and right now. They could care less about that ‘inferior product’.

Let them. We have before us something all true fans of the game here have wanted since MLS came into being: our team. Let the snobs whine and moan. I look forward to driving up from Nevada to see my team play at least once this season, sneaking away from a family reunion to do so. I look forward to driving to Oakland (yep, Oakland – I checked the schedule) to see my team play San Jose. I’ll gladly pony up the extra bucks to get the DirectKick package on my DirecTV to watch my team play as often as possible. They can get happy when Chelsea comes to Seattle this summer for their friendly, crowing about how superior Chelsea is, how superior the EPL is. Don’t care. They can root for their team. I’ll root for my team.
Our team.

I found this as ironically, I’m posting a video of the new Citi Field (Mets) here in New York (and a subsequent one for the new Yankee Stadium later today). I’ll admit to the lack of familiarity with the specifics of soccer/football, but what’s intriguing about this clip was the description of the field.

When the NFL first played at Wembley Stadium in 2007, anaylst Howie Long pointed out that the difficulty that the players had with the field (pitch, sorry) was that while they may have been used to running on soaked grass and mud back in normal NFL stadiums, playing in those conditions in Wembley was tough because of it was a different type of grass. On average, Long said, soccer players are about close to six-foot and 165 pounds, yet between both the NY Giants and Miami Dolphins, you have over a dozen players of 300 pounds or more.

I bring this up because I’m wondering if for the Sounders’ pitch, are they installing a different grass compared to the Seahawks or will it be the same field? Obviously, the Red Bulls have to fold to the whims of their NFL landlords, but if considering that there is a joint agreement between both Seattle teams, I’m more or less curious to see how it was handled.

Great work.

Matt, there is a dramatic difference between the Field Turf at Qwest and in the Meadowlands. There is an entire generation of the surface between the two.

Jason, one of the main reasons that Qwest has the FieldTurf is so that it will endure the beating that the NFL gives a grass surface. Remember the huge vat of mud at Heinz Field a few years back? Seattle has never had that even though the stadium is below the water table.

Joe, I don’t think any allowances are being made except for the fact that banners for both franchises will fly. FC Dallas has hosted high school football and then played with those lines, yet they are considered an SSS.

Ah yes, the glorious muddy MNF game between those same Dolphins and the Steelers. I’m a huge NFL fan and I’m happy to be a beat writer for the Giants, but that really was the worst NFL football game I had ever seen.

Yes, I understand that the surface in Seattle is much better than what we have in New York. But then again you’d be hard pressed to have a worse surface than the one at the Meadowlands. I saw Chelsea play AC Milan in Philadelphia on a Field Turf surface that is pretty similar to Seattle’s. While it was an improvement, I still prefer real grass. But you have to take what you can get.

Last year they laid a real grass surface over the Field Turf for the US-Argentina match at Giants Stadium and man did it look gorgeous.

Dave, I was inferring that MLS teams, in their pursuit of SSS, or at least smaller stadia better suited to the game and the expected audience size, would – and are – making allowances to achieve their objectives. Note the proposed deal between Houston Dynamo and Texas Southern University, and the recently-deceased Miami bid’s plan to play at Florida International University’s field.

It’s a fact of life – and business – that SSS would also serve for other sporting and non-sporting uses, to maximize said stadium’s revenue. The HDC, Rio Tinto Stadium (RSL) and Dick’s Sporting Goods Park (Colorado) have all hosted elite- and international-level rugby matches recently, or will do so in the future, for example. Local small-college and high-school soccer and football programs also benefit from SSS as well. HDC has also hosted events from the X Games, and its adjoining tennis center hosts ATP and WTA Tour events. And then there’s Cal State – Dominguez Hills, the rapidly growing NCAA D2 school on whose property the HDC is situated. CSUDH uses a smaller adjacent field for its soccer teams, and has no football program as of yet, but given the 27k-capacity (or so) facility on its campus (which meets the NCAA’s criteria for D1 football as well – NCAA D1 programs must have a proven attendance of at least 15k/game through an entire season, which is why the U of Idaho played a season in Pullman as they expanded their ugly-ass Kibbie Dome to ‘justify’ their move to 1A from 1AA), it’s probably only a matter of time…..

Hello,

Just want to point out that Zenit St Petersburg has a fieldturf pitch (and they played on it during a recent UEFA Cup match). Arsenal and Tottenham have a pitch that uses 100% natural grass reinforced with synthetic grass fibers.
http://www.dessosports.com/en/desso-grassmaster.html#c518

Jon, having lived in England for four years during my teens, I expect I’ve seen at least as much high level ‘football’ as you.

I know there are people who delight in posting on these forums and claiming to more more about the sport than we poor unsophisticated louts, but don’t try that with me.

My point was a legitimate one, and you have no more idea on whether or not football lines will re-appear on that field in August or September than I do.

Chill man.

I was informing you that there are beautiful pictures up on the Sounders website for you to look towards. That’s it. That’s my expectation, anyways.