[Acajack]

Originally Posted by blueandgoldguy

Montreal is once again proving they are a Habs town and not much of a sports town. Only 3 years after its inception, the Impact are down to a measly 5000 season ticketholders. Could they be the next Chivas? Saputo didn't mince words when expressing how disappointed he was with the ticket sales thus far.

http://montrealgazette.com/sports/so...back-to-impact

“The buzz is not there anymore,” Saputo said at a gathering of media at the team’s home stadium on Wednesday. “Not only for the CONCACAF game, I can say the buzz for the Impact is not there.

“That worries me a lot.”

When the Impact made the jump to MLS in 2012, it was third in ticket sales in the then 19-team league. By 2014, Montreal was down to 11th and the club fears it will be 13th this season. The Impact has sold only about 5,000 season tickets.

Saputo said the Impact fell $2 million short in its ticket sales target last season.

“It’s disappointing where we are now, but I don’t want people to start thinking we’re going to sell the team or shut it down,” said Saputo, who also owns part of the Italian club Bologna FC. “We’ll continue to be there, but we hope the trend changes.”

Buying into MLS, building Saputo Stadium and a soon-to-open training centre and bringing in expensive foreign talent has cost the team more than $100 million, he said. The result so far has been a drop from about 19,000 fans per game to about 16,000.

Saputo feels the 2014 season wasn’t a total disaster. The team won the Canadian championship, which put it into the CONCACAF Champions League. It got through the group stage and now has a quarter-final tie Feb. 28 in Mexico and March 3 in Montreal.

So far, about 15,000 tickets have been sold and Saputo said that, unless interest picks up, it looks like they’ll be lucky to get 30,000 fans.

This is very sad and even worrisome.