A record for the most season tickets ever sold for a women's professional soccer league in the USA.
NWSL's fish hooking of Merritt Paulson as owner of the Portland Thorns FC franchise - a deal that makes the Thorns FC the only NWSL team to share ownership with an MLS team (the Portland Timbers FC) and revolutionizes any business model ever attempted in professional soccer in the US - is the clearest reason why the league is off to such a strong start.
The NWSL's Thorns FC deal is seeing fans commit money to season tickets in droves. The latest number confirmed via the team's website is 7,000 season tickets sold.
The last club to draw the old record: the 2001 Washington Freedom, who locked down a 3,000-plus season ticket base during the WUSA era, according to this Equalizer article.
This record-setting start to the third attempt at a sustainable women's pro league in the USA is rolling out despite zero teams opening new stadiums, something that is just not reality for women's professional soccer currently. Instead, the league is building slowly over time, with all eight teams partnering with existing facilities from multi-use university campuses (like Yurcak Field at Rutgers) and recreational complexes (such as the Maryland SoccerPlex) to soccer-specific stadiums (like Jeld-Wen and Sahlen).
With that, here we start a journey through the NWSL ticket pricing landscape, revealing my three favourite strategies in the league.
The goal remains the same: this blog is all about aspiration. We're relentlessly looking around to uncover best practices, and then we look at how we can elevate them. With the goal to contribute to growing the game.
Today we start with a snapshot of each team - listed below - with it's stadium and capacity, which indicates size of ticket revenue opportunity. Later, we release the first of three strategies, hope you'll check back. Thanks for reading.
NWSL Teams Listed by Stadium Capacity
#1 Portland Thorns FC, Jeld-Wen Stadium (20,438, but only lower bowl is planned to be open)
#2 Western NY Flash, Sahlen Stadium (13,768)
#3 FC Kansas City, Shawnee District Mission Stadium (6,150)
#4 Sky Blue FC, Yurcak Field (5,000)
#5 Seattle Reign FC, Starfire Stadium (4,500)
#6 Washington Spirit, Maryland SoccerPlex (4,500)
#7 Chicago Red Stars, Village of Isle - Benedictine University Sports Complex (3,000)
#8 Boston Breakers, Dilboy Stadium (2,500, with an additional 1,000 seats planned to be constructed for second home game on May 4th)
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On the Portland case; do you think aside from the obvious MLS connection that another argument could be made that their market isn't being shared with several other sports programs? Examples ranging from NASCAR, Major League Baseball, to even football towards the later end of the season? I'll be more curious how models in cities that are direct in competition with other sports programs [including Major League Soccer] fare through the first season.
ReplyDeleteCertainly, you're bang on Shawn, and thanks for commenting. Besides the obvious advantages of being able to tap into MLS resources (experienced and full staff, fan base who also might appreciate women's soccer, built in relationships with the community, wide communications platform...) Portland also is a small market and local competition for dollars is not as intense as cities like NY, Boston etc with lots of other pro sports teams. Also the Thorns FC can reap the benefits of Portland already having a pretty solid fan base for women's soccer thanks to local university success (especially the University of Portland who regularly gets 3,000+ to home games). Factors like this should reflect in the ticket strategies we see the team's roll out. I'm going to be taking a closer look so stay tuned if you're interested.
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