Crew SC’s history of fi rsts would move, too
Putting into words the contributions of a club he has chronicled for 20 years, local soccer historian and author Steve Sirk calls Crew SC “the team of firsts.”
In Major League Soccer, a league that in its 22nd season is still in its infancy compared with other major American sports, the Crew has been at the forefront of several league trends.
The club was the league’s first charter member, the first among its peers to build a training center and a soccer-specific stadium. The Crew made Brian McBride,
a forward who is now in the team’s Circle of Honor, the first MLS draft pick on Feb. 6, 1996.
Sirk remembers another first: May 15, 1999, the day Mapfre Stadium, then Crew Stadium, made its debut on national TV with a 2-0 Crew win over the New England Revolution.
“I remember just feeling like, ‘Soccer really is gonna make it in America,’ ” Sirk said. “It wasn’t totally accurate because the league almost folded a few years later, but that’s what it felt like. ‘This is real, it’s happening, this (team) is going to be around forever in this league.’ ”
MLS is healthier than ever as it expands and explodes into new markets. The Crew’s 2017 season is continuing into the Eastern Conference semifinals, but “forever” in Columbus might come as soon as the end of the 2018 season. Last week, Crew investor-operator Anthony Precourt announced the club would concurrently explore relocation to Austin, Texas, as well as a downtown stadium site in Columbus.
If the Crew leaves Columbus, a sense of the club’s legacy and contributions to what MLS has built will depart along with it. And in relocation discussions focused
on business metrics, attendance, corporate partnerships and stadium locations, history has not been a key talking point.
To some former Crew players, it hasn’t been for a while.
“I think if you look at some of the things that have happened over the course of the time (since 2013) that (Precourt) has been the owner, I see little remnants of, ‘You don’t really care about the history. You don’t really care about the tradition,’ ” said Dante Washington, a Columbus resident and former MLS forward who was with the Crew in 1996, 2000-02 and 2004.
Washington, 47, remembers being a fan of the October 2014 rebrand of the club to “Columbus Crew SC,” but not the full scope of changes made to Mapfre Stadium.
“As I looked at what happened inside the stadium, the crests (below the upper deck) representing the (2008) MLS Cup, Supporters Shields, Open Cup, when they reskinned those, they just redid them to make them look very vanilla and very plain and that didn’t sit well with me,” Washington said.
Asked early last week about considerations of the team and stadium history in the wake of a possible move, Precourt said, “I would recognize that Mapfre Stadium is a special place.”
“It’s the first soccerspecific stadium built in the United States,” Precourt said. “It has been a home for many historic matches whether it’s
(a series of 2-0 wins by the U.S. national team over Mexico in World Cup qualifying) or Crew SC matches, but it’s 17 years old now and I would recognize that the stadium and the site are now challenges for Crew SC.”
Fans struggle with the location of Mapfre Stadium, with parking ingress and egress, and with a lack of entertainment options near the Ohio State Fairgrounds, Precourt said. Over the course of a season, the Crew’s home schedule is impacted by the Ohio State Fair and the All American Quarter Horse Congress.
The exploration of possible relocation is a business decision, but one that will affect hundreds in the community who have based their locations on the Crew’s permanence in Columbus. One is Justin Stone, a Columbus-based soccer agent and founder of Stone Sports Management.
“One major reason for being in Columbus is that it had an MLS franchise. With the uncertainty, it will more than likely force me to relocate, but it’s not just my individual situation,” Stone said.
“Think about all of the (Crew) staff members, many of which are from local universities, who are going to be out of a job, and the homegrowns and the academy players, coaches and families, many of whom have traveled hundreds of miles to be a part of the Crew academy for the chance to earn a homegrown contract.”
Columbus’ situation has been compared in recent weeks to that of Sporting Kansas City, whose turnaround as a franchise coincided with a move to a soccer-specific stadium in Kansas City, Kansas, in 2011.
It also has rekindled memories of D.C. United’s years-long pursuit of a new stadium, during which the fanbase dealt with fears of the team moving to Baltimore, St. Louis or another stadiumfriendly market. D.C. United recently played its final game at RFK Stadium and will begin play at soccer-specific Audi Field next season.
But in Columbus, it’s not all about the stadium. Viewership for Crew SC games on TV is down 20 percent from last year, and average home attendance dropped this season by 1,686 from 2016.
Precourt also recently revealed that a search for a jersey sponsor went until the 11th hour before a three-year deal with Acura materialized and MLS commissioner Don Garber said in a statement that Crew SC is “near the bottom of the league in all business metrics.” But without a detailed look at the club’s balance sheet, it’s difficult to know the severity of those poor metrics, with corporate sponsorships and attendance being primary among them.
When a decision on the Crew’s future for 2019 and beyond is made by Precourt, it will come down to business metrics, land and financial projections. The possibility of sudden moves is why Fox soccer analyst and former U.S. national team player Alexi Lalas approaches American professional sports fandom with a “buyer beware” attitude.
“If it’s your own business and you’re responsible to that business to make it work, you need to do the things that you feel are appropriate to not just keep it surviving but to get to a point to where you can thrive,” Lalas said. “Especially when you’re comparing and contrasting with others.”
But, Lalas said, with more than two decades of club history at stake, fan passion and anger are part of the equation in exploring relocation.
“There’s no way to spin this and no matter what, the Columbus Crew and Anthony Precourt — maybe more so Anthony Precourt — is going to be vilified,” Lalas said. “And he should have expected that. So if this is a surprise, then he’s delusional and naïve. I don’t think that he is, so the vitriol and the anger that is coming his way is warranted and should be expected.”