Don’t let lousy customer service be victorious.

On the customer support email they answer like 1 of every 3 emails.

I’m still using Mint. I’ve just had to find workarounds for multiple issues. Luckily none of my issues have been as major as yours.

Seattle Sounders fans were the fourth largest crowd to watch a soccer match anywhere in the world on Saturday night. Only FC Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich had larger attendances.

That’s what the editor of World Soccer magazine wanted everyone to know when he saw the 64,140 fans who packed CenturyLink Field for the Seattle Sounders’ hair-raising 2-1 win in Kasey Keller’s final regular season home game.

(via mlssoccer)

Attendance is what you are missing from your analysis. We already know the Sonics attendance records and we’re only talking about an average 17273 fans per game for NBA. NHL comes in with a slightly higher 17322.

Yep, some folks might have to cut their prices to keep attendance up in the future, but it is a business after all.

(Note – Profit may not be the correct measure since it includes soft expenses like depreciation. Revenue is probably better because it includes TV and ticket sales.)

As to the poster that tries to compare this stadium to a park: Get real. Public parks (to use your example) are non profit spaces. NHL and NBA teams are for profit businesses, plain and simple. Paying for their “factory” with public monies is straight forward corporate welfare – they’ll be sucking at the teat of the taxpayer. Look up the Reason.com articles on the Washington DC stadium for a great take down on the so called economic benefits of publicly funded stadiums.

Seattle and the state of Washington have sunk over a billion into the two albatrosses that are the current stadiums when the streets and water / sewer systems of the city are falling apart. But hey, the masses need their circuses while the city figuratively burns.

Counting the NBA and NHL, as well as the University of Washington football team playing in a new stadium, Councilmember Larry Phillips said the area could have seven major teams.

I didn’t include UW football just because it would be too difficult to figure out which college teams are big enough to count as “major” in all 27 other metro areas. It’s not like I’m getting paid for this or anything, it was just a quick analysis to answer a simple question that was posed by the Councilmembers.

Most sports entertainment dollars spent in a typical US city go to what many consider the big four leagues (MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA). I think this is one of the major contributing factors of why the MLS has struggled to take hold in other cities. Seattle is quite unique in their support of the Sounders. Sounders aside, Seattle only has two of the big four leagues represented, whereas the other top 13 markets all have at least 3 teams from the big four leagues. There are even several markets much smaller than Seattle that have 3 or 4 teams in the big four (Tampa, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland).

If you re-analyize your numbers using just the big four leagues you will find that the approximate population threshold to support one major league team is about 600,000 per team. Even a small city like Green Bay/Appleton with a population of around 530,000 can support one team. Seattle could definitely support the big four plus the Sounders without much difficulty. If you factor in future population growth, when the Seattle area grows it will be even more able to support the teams.

Great discussion!!

@ David – Jacksonville may be the largest city in Florida, but it is the 4th largest area in the state and only a fraction of Miami, Tampa, and Orlando metro areas. Jacksonville has been aggressive about annexing everything around it. It’s actually a very small market, comparable to Milwaukee, WI or Oklahoma City. I think it’s #29 in market size among NFL teams (only Green Bay, Buffalo, and New Orleans are smaller).

Also – the WNBA is not a major sports league simply in terms of attendance. Not even close. The MLS would be considered a major sports league depending on the market. If you look closer you will see there are a handful of teams that draw very well and more who do not. In Seattle, the Sounders would outdraw both the Seahawks and Huskies football on an annual basis with their currently scheduled home games.

You have to include the SeaTac region in general. The Mariners recently said that 40-60% of their attendees come from outside the city limits or drive from more than an hour away. As we see with baseball tv deals, franchise value is incredibly dependent on the value that team will fetch for television rights. The Seattle market is the primary market not only for Washington, but largely Oregon, Idaho, Montana and parts of B.C. The Seahawks and Mariners own the rights to those territories, so thus, the value of the television deals will be incredibly valuable. Exceptions would be seen in Oregon for the NBA (Blazers) and MLS (Timbers & Whitecaps), but the NHL team would own rights to Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana.

As you say there needs to be a more thorough look that includes factors such as average incomes, but also local businesses. The reason KeyArena did not function for the NBA’s current economic structure was because of a lack of suites. Businesses will spend hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, for suite ownerships with specific teams. As we well know, Seattle is ripe with many elite companies. Their presence alone make it an attractive market for NBA and NHL.

Denver is the best possible comparison to what the situation will be like in Seattle (though you seem to discount them because of a lack of a WNBA franchise, but as I said earlier, its a stretch to include that as a definitive pre-req). They are easily able to support the NFL/NBA/NHL/MLB. They struggle a bit with the Rapids of the MLS, but that is still a league that has yet to capture mainstream attention. The Rapids are part of what MLS fans call “MLS 1.0″, whereas the Sounders are “2.0″. MLS 2.0 began with the introduction of Tornoto FC in 2006 and the next wave of expansion. Since the arrival of Toronto FC, every MLS expansion market sense has been widely popular and much more profitable than 1.0. In Denver the MLS is still growing, and is perhaps the one franchise that is not supported as well.

The only time Denver has not supported a team as well has been the teams don’t perform well. The Rockies are a prime example, and could be compared with the current Mariners situation. In the late 90′s, early 00′s the team was terrible. As a result the team went from leading the league in attendance (like the Mariners in ’00 and ’01), to one of the lowest in the league. However, beginning in ’06 the team began to win, in ’07 went to the World Series and last year improved attendance by over 1,100,000 fans from the bottom level of 2005. If the teams win, fans will support it.

And I’m not “assuming that all pro sports teams have similar market demands,” I was just trying to answer the fairly straightforward questions posed by the Councilmembers: Does “any other ‘midsized major market’ support [six pro sports teams]?”

By the way Detroit has a WNBA team, along with the major 4′s.

I’ll just leave this here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dl9VzmnuNs

Have a nice day! :D

Well, okay a Phoenix isn’t quite the same as an eagle, but it’s definitely not a melting bottle cap….

http://www.phoenixclosures.com/

So many options! :-)

– Matthew

Jb