As a person of Italian extraction, I am not proud of today’s lead item. Juventus – - one of the top-shelf teams in Italian soccer in Serie A – - will have to play its next home game in front of no fans. The Italian Football Federation as a result of the last home game played by Juventus on 18 April imposed that ban. That game was against Inter Milan; and for the duration of the game, the Juventus fans hurled racial epithets and sang racially derogatory songs aimed at Mario Balotelli who is a native Italian and who is also Black.
On the field, the Italian Serie A is far superior to MLS in terms of the talent on each squad; in the stands, MLS is about a century ahead of the Italian league.
Speaking of MLS, the new franchise in MLS this year is the Seattle team, the Sounders. The franchise has caught on in Seattle; they have sold almost 20,000 season tickets and they have attracted about two dozen corporate sponsors including Microsoft who will pay to have the Sounders display the “X-Box 360 logo” on their jerseys. The Sounders have drawn 28,000 fans to one of their home games and 32,000 to another; they play at Qwest Field so they have plenty of room to expand that audience.
On Monday of this week, the Washington Nationals hosted the Atlanta Braves in Nationals Park. The announced attendance for that game was 12,473. Note that was the announced attendance and not necessarily the turnstile count. Last year, the smallest crowd for the Nats in their new playpen was 20,487. Folks, the bloom is off the rose. Here are three things to note in terms of Nats’ attendance:
1. Last year the Nats said that they sold more than 20,000 season tickets. The club has chosen not to announce how many they sold this year or what the renewal rate was over the winter. Monday’s attendance may explain why they have not wanted to make such an announcement.
2. Come September when the weather turns chilly, football season is about to start and the Nats have not played a meaningful game for the last 8 weeks, might the attendance drop into “4 figures”? Surely, the turnstile count will be in “4 figures” by then; I wonder if the announced crowds will also be there.
3. DC United has averaged close to 20,000 fans per game for its MLS regular season schedule for the past 3 years. On the assumption that DC United attendance mirrors recent years, it is possible – albeit unlikely – that the MLS team in Washington could play in front of a higher average attendance than the MLB team in Washington.
I wonder how long it will be before it becomes undeniable to the MLB honchos that the Washington Nationals are indeed still the Montreal Expos except they are playing at a slightly more southerly latitude?
I read that William “the Refrigerator” Perry had been hospitalized and that he was in serious condition. Naturally, I assumed that it was some kind of coronary or vascular condition that put him there; he was a huge man when he played for the Chicago Bears and the Philadelphia Eagles 20 years ago and has not slimmed down to any extent since his retirement. Subsequent reports say that his problem is not his circulatory system; Perry is being treated for Guillain-Barre Syndrome, which is a chronic condition involving inflammation of peripheral nerves. This too is a serious condition but it is amenable to treatment/therapy more than half the time. According to a report in the Chicago Sun-Times, Perry’s family says that he has been treated for more than a week now and that he is doing much better. Amen…
According to a report in the LA Times, the Los Angeles Avengers of the Arena Football League withdrew from the league and disbanded. The Arena League canceled the 2009 season back around the first of the year with the idea that the league would restart in 2010 using a new “business model”. In the subsequent months, the league and the clubs within the league have not reached any conclusions regarding said new “business model”, yet the league was about to vote on a new collective bargaining agreement with its players union.
The owner of the Los Angeles Avengers thought that this was a bass-ackwards way to approach the financial shortcomings that drove the league into its suspended animation in the first place. When the league would not postpone the vote on the CBA, the Avengers withdrew from the Arena League and closed its doors. They are not the only team in the Arena League to fold in the recent past; the New Orleans Voodoo ceased to exist late last year.
Here is a factoid passed along to me by a reader. It is certainly not important but it can be useful when trading trivia bits with friends:
Only one basketball coach in history has coached at Kansas University and had a losing record for his tenure there. That coach would be James Naismith – - merely the man who invented basketball in the first place.
Finally, here is a comment from Jim Armstrong of the Denver Post about the Washington Nationals – - a commentary from 2000 miles west of Washington DC:
“Some woman was bitten several times the other day after leaping into the polar-bear lair at a Berlin zoo. OK, so I’ll give you that. But name me one other thing more painful than watching the Nationals.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…