
Most fans of American soccer missed this, but Tom at Pitch Invasion didn’t. The Portland Timbers, a USL First Division club, drew 15,833 fans to PGE Park for a regular season match against the Charleston Battery last Thursday, topping the stadium record of 15,376 for a Timbers v. Sunderland friendly two years ago.
That’s a huge turnout for a USL-1 match. This is a league which had an average attendance of 4,667 for regular season games last year. Wigan can’t get 15,000 paying customers on a weeknight. Only two first-round Carling Cup matches had five-digit attendance; predictably, those were home games for Sheffield United and West Bromwich Albion, two Coca-Cola Championship clubs. That league drew an average of 18,221 paying customers last season.
However, Portland still fell well short of the USL attendance record of 25,515, set by the Seattle Sounders at Qwest Field in 2002. PGE Park only holds about 20,000 for sporting events, so it can’t top Seattle’s record.
Obviously, Portland and Seattle are natural rivals here, and that also applies to their hopes of landing an MLS expansion club. Given the buzz that Seattle got from MLS watchers after drawing a mere 6,619 for a U.S. Open Cup match, you would think that Portland’s buzz would be even bigger now. On the other hand, MLS will be up to 14 franchises in 2008, and it’s only planning on expanding to 16. With Philadelphia and St. Louis also launching strong bids as expansion cities, it seems very likely that either Portland or Seattle (or both) could be left out.
My prediction — if the Open Cup semifinal match between the Sounders and FC Dallas pulls more than 10,000 people, Seattle has to win out over Portland. They’re a bigger media market with a much bigger stadium, and Seattle has a better-quality pedigree when it comes to major sports.
That’s not a knock on the supporters in Portland, though. The Timbers Army deserves its props for backing its local club so well. If MLS bypasses Portland, it won’t be because there aren’t any soccer fans there.
(Photo by Allison Andrews of SoccerCityUSA.com.)