Sounders Open Hawks Nest For All Of 2012 Season

full of win

I still like it

It was used to great effect at Empire Field.

I don’t particularly want to see a tame bleacher section.

Something about FOURTYTHOUSAND just has a nice ring to it.

is it 2300, 2500, or 3000 in capacity? Different sources have different numbers listed. I saw all three last night after I saw the tweets about it.

The entire lower bowl of CenturyLink is now open for business. This is a big deal and since Hawks Nest seats would be considered lower bowl, they’ll likely be in higher demand than the upper bowl seats (even though those are all-inclusieve). This will be true for STH selection and probably on the secondary market as well.

Joe Roth has previously stated that opening the Hawks Nest brings the total “stadium manifest” to 39,000. Since they also include press, staff, and other fieldside personell in attendance numbers, this will mean that most, if not all, games next season will have attendance in excess of 40,000.

As I understand it, opening the Hawks Nest required a renegotiation with Microsoft over the lost add space with the tarp. I’m curious how that played out. Perhaps they’ll redo the tarps over the upper deck with more prominent Microsoft branding. Maybe Microsoft will get more time on the field side boards. There has to have been some kind of concession by the Sounders to their sponser in order to make this work.

Sounders FC management clearly has 2 obsessions that are revealed through the ongoing expansion of available seats.
- First, they’re obesessed with to selling out games. They almost opened the Hawks Nest last season, but I think they got cold feet about the possibility of missing a sellout and decided not to. This season with more success behind them, they’re more confident about opening it up.
- Second, they’re obsessed with breaking their own attendance records. They’ve broken it each year since 2009 and at this point, looking back, you can see how they’ve carefully experimented with stadium expansion year over year. For example, they opened up the upper deck seats for the playoffs in ‘09 and then made them available in ’10 for the whole season. Another example, they experimented with partial season tix packages in ’09 and then in ’11 they used them again for the 3 games that pushed our average up this season. Last example, they’ve already tried to open the full stadium up twice last season with mixed results (45,000 for NY and 64,000 for SJ). We’re not all the way there yet for a full stadium sellout, but we’re moving in the right direction.
Bottom line, I’m more than okay with these obsessions. We’ve got really smart folks in the FO carefully managing and experimenting with attendance.

I wonder if this says anything about the current STH wait list. Is it deep enough now that they’re confident they’ll sell a large portion of the Hawks Nest to STHs? I know at the beginning of last season, they had depleated their STH wait list completely.

Last thing, in the most recent Nos Audietes podcast Aaron made the point that 95% of what the Sounders do off the pitch is designed to piss off the rest of MLS. While his comment was regarding the new neon blue jersey, I think it applies here too. Most of the rest of MLS absolutely hates Seattle because we’re so good at supporting our team.