Sounders vs. Mariners - The battle for summer

The Sounders will be competing with a local team for much of the 2009 season. Both the Seattle Sounders of MLS and the Seattle Mariners of MLB will be playing through spring, summer and into fall. The schedule overlaps almost perfectly. And, of course, the two teams play next door to each other. Each will be fighting for the increasingly scarce entertainment dollars of the average Seattle citizen. The Mariners have been the regions most popular franchise for years, but incredibly, the Sounders have a very good chance at drawing more fans per game in 2009. Seriously.


How do I arrive at this seemingly outlandish conclusion? From the Sounders side, it's simple. With Qwest having a proposed MLS capacity of 24,500, and over 19,000 season tickets sold, it seems pretty likely that the club will sell out every game. If necessary, they might even open up some more seats (the Hawks Nest, to be specific), bumping the capacity to around 27,000. For this exercise, I'll play it safe and give the Sounders an even 25k, not counting friendly matches.

The Mariners, of course, have been trending in the wrong direction as of late. With last season being an abysmal failure by any measure, the attendence dropped to mirror that. For the first time since the magical 1995 season, the team drew less than 30k people - just over 28.5k, to be exact. They dropped by five thousand fans in one season. Now, unsurprisingly, changes happened for the M's over the offseason, including a new general manager who isn't a complete moron. And in the long term the club looks to be on the right track. But they aren't going to win this season, and a lot of fair weather fans have bailed on the club. The casual fan doesn't want to see a team that loses every year. And with the economy being in the toilet, another drop of a few thousand fans per game seems likely, putting the Mariners below the Sounders.

Of course this doesn't mean the support for the teams will be equal. That would be an insane suggestion. The MLB season has more than 5 times as many games, giving the M's a huge advantage in total attendence, and baseball (unlike soccer) draws historically well in Seattle. But for the Sounders to draw more fans per game would be a major victory, albeit largely a symbolic one. It would be a first in MLS history. And yet another sign that the club is primed for success.

The other draft

The NBA draft was yesterday, and many of the top college basketball players in the country have been snapped up by new teams. In that spirit, let's take a quick look at some of the top players available in the 2009 MLS college draft, in which the Sounders FC have the first pick: 

Bruno Guarda, attacking midfielder

Marcus Tracy, striker

Chris Clements, central defender

O'Brien White, striker

Alejandro Bedoya, midfielder

Zach Simmons, keeper

In the coming week I'll hopefully learn a lot more about these players, and see if anyone else is worthy of being added to this list. At this point, Tracy is my favorite of the bunch. As the year goes on and the draft (in January) draws closer, I'll bring some interviews of these college superstars and prospective Sounders.

Team name rumors, ahoy!

The first serious rumor regarding the MLS team's new name has popped up, and if it is to be believed, the club will be called - the Greens?

Yup. And it gets better. According to the aptly named MLSRumors website, the official name will be Emerald City Seattle Football Club with a nickname of 'Greens.' Seriously, that's twelve syllables. It's like they couldn't decide between 3 different names, so they combined them all into one. It's a ridiculous moniker.

Fortunately, we're pretty certain that there's about zero chance that this is true. So deep breath in, deep breath out, and relax. With the naming announcement over months away, expect more of this type of speculation and/or rumor mongering.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

We're not going to do this very often, but today we're going to mention a non-soccer related thing. Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to reach the peak of Mt. Everest, has just passed away. The humble New Zealander summited along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in 1953, and devoted much of the rest of his life to helping reforestation and education in Nepal. His charity earned hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the country.

As one of the greatest and kindest explorers ever to walk the earth, we salute you, Sir Edmund Hillary. Rest in peace.