The Seattle Sounders and the Alliance Council held their Annual Business Meeting on Sunday, part of the Fan Fest for season-ticket holders.
As is usually the case, Sounders majority owner Adrian Hanauer, President of Business Operations Hugh Weber and General Manager Craig Waibel were the main speakers. In addition to giving a general overview of how the Sounders are doing both on and off the field, they fielded a host of questions from the audience.
Sprinkled throughout the session were a few pieces of genuinely breaking news, as well as a few other nuggets that are worth noting. Here are some of the key takeaways:
Sounders games are returning to local broadcast
It has been rumored for quite some time — and apparently hung up on the details — but Weber announced that the Sounders will start re-airing their games on Fox 13. Sounder at Heart has confirmed that the first of those matches is scheduled for tonight and that there will likely be a press release with more of those details soon. Although the matches will be airing two or three days after they’re actually played, this should help close the visibility gap that has been apparent ever since MLS moved to Apple TV in 2023.
“We believe this will widen the aperture,” Weber said. “People can actually walk into bars and restaurants, and even though the game will be 48 hours old, it will be a Sounders match that you can watch and experience and be front of mind.”
This is part of a larger package that they first announced a couple of months ago that includes Fox 13 carrying live Seattle Reign matches. It also includes some shoulder programming as well as increased coverage during the week.
Weber also said that Sounders matches are currently getting more worldwide viewers than they did when most of their games were aired live on broadcast television. I’ve seen no evidence to support that claim and I’m pretty skeptical that’s true. Anecdotally, I’ve talked to dozens of people over the years who have said they regularly watched matches and now barely think about the Sounders. I’ve always been skeptical there was quite a direct correlation between attendance and the move to AppleTV, but the move has almost undeniably softened the Sounders’ ability to be part of the normal sports discourse in the region. Hopefully, this helps change that.
Efforts to boost attendance are working
One of the big topics of conversation at last year’s meeting was the downward trend in attendance and the club’s efforts to reverse that. We’re still only about halfway through the home schedule, but it does look like some progress has been made as the Sounders are on pace for their first year-over-year increase since 2017. That said, on its current trajectory attendance will still be down about 30% from 2017.
The improvement seems to be down to two main programs:
- Reviving the group sales efforts. This is a key reason the Green Zone (aka, the Hawks Nest) has been so much more full this year than in recent seasons. We saw that again in the Austin match.
- The launch of the First Match On Us program. Weber said there are anywhere from 800-1,500 fans using this program at any given match. They got more than 15,000 entries to this program and about 72% of the people have actually shown up when given tickets. That compares pretty favorably to the normal season-ticket show rate of 78%.
The Sounders also believe they’ve improved the matchday experience, having injected some energy back into the concourse that had started to get pretty stale with things like pregame player autograph sessions.
Separately, the Sounders said that expanded bike parking has returned for the summer. I’ve not be able to independently confirm this, but it was promising to hear.
‘We don’t have an affordability problem’
One of the frankly more head-scratching statements Weber made was on the question of re-opening the upper deck and offering more inexpensive tickets.
“We don’t have an affordability problem,” Weber said, pointing out that the team makes 600 discounted tickets available for virtually every match that they rarely sell out of. “That’s not the issue.”
While the presence of this program has been discussed previously, almost no one I’ve talked to outside of the organization was actually aware of what it was or how to use it. That’s likely because the Sounders do almost nothing to promote it, at least not to the general public.
Doing a bit more digging, it appears Weber is talking about their “Soccer For All” program that's intended for students and requires a .edu email address to use. Fans can sign up for tickets using this link.
The biggest flaw of this program is that it’s effectively reserved only for college students, as most local school districts block outside email addresses from sending messages to their students.
But even if this program were more widely available — including to non-students — that wouldn’t really address the broader issues of “affordability.” Everyone, including the Sounders, seemed to recognize that price was a major factor in tamping down attendance at the Club World Cup. It defies basic logic to suggest price isn’t a significant factor in the downward trend of Sounders attendance, as it mirrors almost exactly the club’s decision to employ variable pricing where certain games are more expensive than others and the overall cost of tickets has far exceeded the general rate of inflation.
Putting that element aside, Weber explained that the reason they’ve closed the upper deck was more about “protecting season-ticket value” and a desire to create more scarcity in the marketplace. The Sounders want to get back to a world where demand outstrips supply and believe one way to do that is to make sure the lower bowl is as packed as possible before opening up additional seats, which they have pledged to do when demand warrants it.
That prompted another somewhat odd statement by Weber: “No offense to PSG, but there there was 52,000 people in the building and they were spread out around 70,000 seats. I just don’t think that’s the atmosphere we want in terms of a competitive advantage for our players.”
