Didn't watch the game but looked and reportedly it was 43,507. Not sure if this is actual butts in seats though.
First time poster on this board. For some perspective, I played soccer through high school. I watch a bit of Premier League with my 9 year olds and coach my daughters u9 team. I know the game but I don't watch a ton so I'm no expert on my report.
Wow, thanks for the on scene insights. It appears that they did get a late surge in season ticket sales. They are like 4th in the league in that dept presently.
Villa was really good. Diskerud is also really good. I read a stat somewhere that Diskerud has more touches, more passes attempted and more passes completed than any other player. Kind of impressive. That Khiry Shelton was really impressive for NYC FC as well.
Also, the Revs are an average to terrible team without Jermaine Jones. I think they only lost one game when he played with them last year. When I saw them in person, he did it all. He told the keeper where to kick the ball, he set up the set pieces he talked to the ref, he may have even reffed the game as well. He is the boss.
As for the seats. Those bad seats will get progressively emptier as time goes by. If any of those season tickets were in the bad areas then they won't get renewed next season. Having watched baseball stadium soccer before, but in a much smaller minor league stadium where I could sit lower, there are times when you don't even feel like you are in the same stadium as the game because the action is so far away. I think as time goes by, attendance will normalize to 15-20,000 a game which might help with concessions.
That halftime rush is an issue even in the well thought out soccer specific stadiums. It's almost like the people that run the stadiums relearn this every season.
I hope you do continue to go to games at either place. After a winter of watching EPL and Europe stuff I love watching a live game in person again. Plus you could probably get season tickets for the Red Bulls for next nothing right now
Was at Red Bull Stadium last year, it's pretty nice.
I guess it's good neither like Arsenal, or you'd have to by them an airplane.
I totally understand where you're coming from, but I've liked travel soccer for my kids. The boys program for our age group is a bit too intense/political, but our local travel team (can only have 15% out of towners and we have none) isn't much more time consuming than rec. We have 2 practices per week and a game on the weekend for 10 weeks in the fall and spring. We coordinate with baseball so that kids can play rec and some do travel (crazy to me). Anything in the winter is voluntary and doesn't conflict with basketball (my son played 3rd and 4th grade with a ref and keeping score, but my daughter's 3rd grade league barely resembled basketball). The club soccer teams are more intense and much more expensive ($ thousands per year). I would only look to that if my kids push for it in a few years. My son's U9 team has already lost multiple players to those clubs.
It makes it much easier as a parent! I'm in way north Jersey. Our league is the Northern Counties Soccer Association, which is made up of mostly Bergen, some Passaic, a bunch of Essex, and a few Hudson County teams. The furthest my kids have played has been Newark (mostly Portuguese and some Brazilian) and Hoboken which took us about 25 minutes each. We tend to get matched up with a few of the local clubs on a regular basis, but there are always new teams each season.
