Jarrek
Active Member
Did you call the ticket office ?
I'm afraid scalping or showing up really early gameday time is your only option.
I'm afraid scalping or showing up really early gameday time is your only option.
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- Thread starter Jarrek
- Start date
Urban Shocker
Doyenne
When I saw them massing at King and Bathurst before the game I was surprised that the fans were such an un-multicultural crowd, given the global popularity of the game.
Blixtein
Active Member
http://www.sportsnet.ca/soccer/columnist.jsp?content=20070502_120641_3192
Toronto FC’s home opener was dominated by one single ethnic group: Canadians.
It was quite a moving sight to see that big, excited, noisy crowd file into BMO Field for last Saturday's Toronto FC home opener. New team, new building -- and honestly, a new crowd as well.
The place looked -- and felt -- great. The songs started long before the game did. And if TFC had somehow found a way to finish their chances and defeat the visiting Kansas City Wizards, they'd probably still be singing in the Wheatsheaf Tavern and the other pubs in the general neighbourhood.
I've spent a lot of time in the years since the old NASL expired in the early eighties wondering who the audience would be if top-level professional soccer were ever to return to Toronto. The old crowd wasn't going to be enough. Honestly, it really wasn't enough back then.
In the NASL days, the vast majority of serious Toronto soccer fans were recent immigrants. Their unshakable loyalty was to their favourite teams back home, where the soccer was better, the camaraderie and history so much stronger.
They'd turn out in numbers, sometimes, for local ethnic semi-pro sides like Toronto Croatia and Italia, First Portuguese and Serbian White Eagles. For the expansion Toronto Metros of the North American Soccer League? They'd come, but not in great numbers -- and they were more enthusiastic in their mockery than in their cheers. "When's the first team coming out?" a grumbling fan with a thick Scottish brogue once asked a much younger me in the middle of an early Metros match.
Things changed, somewhat, in the mid-seventies, when the financially struggling Metros were bought up by Toronto Croatia. The new team, Toronto Metros-Croatia, imported Portuguese superstar Eusebio, and garnered some pretty decent ethnic support. They won Soccer Bowl '76 -- a 3-0 stomp job on the Minnesota Kicks -- at the Kingdome in Seattle. But the NASL was never comfortable with the Croatia link. They wanted to forge a universal game, with no obvious ethnic links. The Met-Cros became the Toronto Blizzard two years later.
This is how different the world was then: Soccer coverage in Toronto, literally, consisted mostly of the beer-soaked memories of those self-same disinterested immigrant fans. Global TV, if I remember correctly, sometimes accidentally televised a Toronto Metros road game. For a brief, golden while we got a one-hour package from England featuring heavily condensed mini-broadcasts of two or three First Division matches. Oh, and for some strange reason, Cologne of Germany got their games shown weekly in Toronto for a season or two.
That was it.
A quarter century later, of course, Toronto is awash in top-level soccer matches from around the globe. And it wasn't until I saw that very first TFC home crowd that I really understood how much things have changed. The 20,000-plus horde that shoe-horned into that simple, functional and really quite lovely stadium on the Exhibition grounds was dominated, overwhelmingly, by one single ethnic group:
Canadians.
Oh, sure, they were English Canadians, Scottish Canadians, Italian Canadians, Portuguese Canadians. But this was a very different crew from the ones that used to show up at Varsity and Exhibition Stadium. This crowd was younger -- many too young to have ever seen an NASL match.
Which means they grew up in a city saturated with televised soccer. They saw games from all over the world. And, yes, they adopted favourite teams. Maybe they even travelled abroad sometimes to actually watch them play in person. But they never had that ongoing, week-by-week experience of seeing their team play live -- over and over, again and again.
And probably they never even knew what they were missing -- until last Saturday. Suddenly, the real stadium is right in their backyards, and there is actually a team they can really call their own.
Toronto FC does not have to win these fans away from Juventus, Manchester United, Bayern Munich or Boca Juniors. The fans who showed up Saturday will always care about those teams -- but Toronto FC will give them the real thing.
And, yes, I know MLS doesn't even rank among the world's top soccer leagues. But Saturday's experience -- from the smoke and confetti in the supporters' section to the stadium-wide singing of "All we are saying, is give us a goal" -- was genuine.
Varsity Stadium was never like this. Oh, it approached it from time to time, but even at Varsity the seats weren't this close to the field, and the chanting and singing were never this intense. As for old Exhibition Stadium, well, it never had a chance. The old bomb crater was so mind-numbingly vast, its closest seat was -- once you factored in angles and sightlines -- essentially further from the touchline than the furthest seat at Varsity. Even when there was a big crowd, huge gulfs of distance separated players and fans.
There was one particularly significant moment late in Saturday's historic, inaugural match, when Eddie Johnson of the Wizards beat two Toronto defenders to score the game's only goal. Johnson went straight over to the TFC supporters and celebrated right in front of them. He got a couple of beers thrown at him for his trouble. A moment later, the PA system burst forth with a short, snappy lecture on sportsmanship -- aimed at crowd and players alike!
It was the match's shabbiest moment in many ways, but it signified, and solidified, how close the fans and the game are really going to be to each other at BMO Field. The fact that the Kansas City players got chewed out too was priceless.
And there were so many red scarves and shirts! The whole day, in fact, I only saw one fan wearing a non-Toronto soccer shirt -- a single white Leeds United jersey on the Dufferin Street railway bridge after the game.
Toronto FC has found its audience -- Canadian-born soccer fans starving for The Real Deal. And there's no reason the same miracle can't happen in Vancouver, Montreal and Edmonton.
The goals will come, TFC fans. Everything else -- the unlikely team, the impossible stadium -- is already in place. Real soccer is finally here. Let's keep that stadium packed and jumping for the rest of our lives.
Onward!
Toronto FC’s home opener was dominated by one single ethnic group: Canadians.
It was quite a moving sight to see that big, excited, noisy crowd file into BMO Field for last Saturday's Toronto FC home opener. New team, new building -- and honestly, a new crowd as well.
The place looked -- and felt -- great. The songs started long before the game did. And if TFC had somehow found a way to finish their chances and defeat the visiting Kansas City Wizards, they'd probably still be singing in the Wheatsheaf Tavern and the other pubs in the general neighbourhood.
I've spent a lot of time in the years since the old NASL expired in the early eighties wondering who the audience would be if top-level professional soccer were ever to return to Toronto. The old crowd wasn't going to be enough. Honestly, it really wasn't enough back then.
In the NASL days, the vast majority of serious Toronto soccer fans were recent immigrants. Their unshakable loyalty was to their favourite teams back home, where the soccer was better, the camaraderie and history so much stronger.
They'd turn out in numbers, sometimes, for local ethnic semi-pro sides like Toronto Croatia and Italia, First Portuguese and Serbian White Eagles. For the expansion Toronto Metros of the North American Soccer League? They'd come, but not in great numbers -- and they were more enthusiastic in their mockery than in their cheers. "When's the first team coming out?" a grumbling fan with a thick Scottish brogue once asked a much younger me in the middle of an early Metros match.
Things changed, somewhat, in the mid-seventies, when the financially struggling Metros were bought up by Toronto Croatia. The new team, Toronto Metros-Croatia, imported Portuguese superstar Eusebio, and garnered some pretty decent ethnic support. They won Soccer Bowl '76 -- a 3-0 stomp job on the Minnesota Kicks -- at the Kingdome in Seattle. But the NASL was never comfortable with the Croatia link. They wanted to forge a universal game, with no obvious ethnic links. The Met-Cros became the Toronto Blizzard two years later.
This is how different the world was then: Soccer coverage in Toronto, literally, consisted mostly of the beer-soaked memories of those self-same disinterested immigrant fans. Global TV, if I remember correctly, sometimes accidentally televised a Toronto Metros road game. For a brief, golden while we got a one-hour package from England featuring heavily condensed mini-broadcasts of two or three First Division matches. Oh, and for some strange reason, Cologne of Germany got their games shown weekly in Toronto for a season or two.
That was it.
A quarter century later, of course, Toronto is awash in top-level soccer matches from around the globe. And it wasn't until I saw that very first TFC home crowd that I really understood how much things have changed. The 20,000-plus horde that shoe-horned into that simple, functional and really quite lovely stadium on the Exhibition grounds was dominated, overwhelmingly, by one single ethnic group:
Canadians.
Oh, sure, they were English Canadians, Scottish Canadians, Italian Canadians, Portuguese Canadians. But this was a very different crew from the ones that used to show up at Varsity and Exhibition Stadium. This crowd was younger -- many too young to have ever seen an NASL match.
Which means they grew up in a city saturated with televised soccer. They saw games from all over the world. And, yes, they adopted favourite teams. Maybe they even travelled abroad sometimes to actually watch them play in person. But they never had that ongoing, week-by-week experience of seeing their team play live -- over and over, again and again.
And probably they never even knew what they were missing -- until last Saturday. Suddenly, the real stadium is right in their backyards, and there is actually a team they can really call their own.
Toronto FC does not have to win these fans away from Juventus, Manchester United, Bayern Munich or Boca Juniors. The fans who showed up Saturday will always care about those teams -- but Toronto FC will give them the real thing.
And, yes, I know MLS doesn't even rank among the world's top soccer leagues. But Saturday's experience -- from the smoke and confetti in the supporters' section to the stadium-wide singing of "All we are saying, is give us a goal" -- was genuine.
Varsity Stadium was never like this. Oh, it approached it from time to time, but even at Varsity the seats weren't this close to the field, and the chanting and singing were never this intense. As for old Exhibition Stadium, well, it never had a chance. The old bomb crater was so mind-numbingly vast, its closest seat was -- once you factored in angles and sightlines -- essentially further from the touchline than the furthest seat at Varsity. Even when there was a big crowd, huge gulfs of distance separated players and fans.
There was one particularly significant moment late in Saturday's historic, inaugural match, when Eddie Johnson of the Wizards beat two Toronto defenders to score the game's only goal. Johnson went straight over to the TFC supporters and celebrated right in front of them. He got a couple of beers thrown at him for his trouble. A moment later, the PA system burst forth with a short, snappy lecture on sportsmanship -- aimed at crowd and players alike!
It was the match's shabbiest moment in many ways, but it signified, and solidified, how close the fans and the game are really going to be to each other at BMO Field. The fact that the Kansas City players got chewed out too was priceless.
And there were so many red scarves and shirts! The whole day, in fact, I only saw one fan wearing a non-Toronto soccer shirt -- a single white Leeds United jersey on the Dufferin Street railway bridge after the game.
Toronto FC has found its audience -- Canadian-born soccer fans starving for The Real Deal. And there's no reason the same miracle can't happen in Vancouver, Montreal and Edmonton.
The goals will come, TFC fans. Everything else -- the unlikely team, the impossible stadium -- is already in place. Real soccer is finally here. Let's keep that stadium packed and jumping for the rest of our lives.
Onward!
wyliepoon
Senior Member
Reuters Article by FAN 590's Roger Lajoie (via Yahoo! News)
Link to article
Hockey city Toronto embraces MLS team
By Roger Lajoie
TORONTO (Reuters) - Sports fans in Canada's hockey hotbed are embracing the world's most popular sport like never before.
While the Toronto Football Club (TFC) might never match the popularity of the city's beloved Maple Leafs ice hockey team, Major League Soccer's newest expansion franchise looks like carving out a niche in the city's crowded sports marketplace.
The home of the Leafs, the Toronto Raptors of the National Basketball Association (NBA), the Toronto Blue Jays of Major League Baseball (MLB) and the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League is also now the home of the TFC, who recently played their first game before a sell-out crowd in the new BMO Field.
Cheered on by a passionate crowd of scarf-wearing, red-clad fans, TFC lost 1-0 to the Kansas City Wizards.
The final score was the only disappointing aspect of professional soccer's return to the city for the first time since the Toronto Blizzard of the defunct North American Soccer League folded 23 years ago.
TFC say the majority of ticket buyers are either young families with children who play soccer, children and grandchildren of immigrants who have a soccer connection, or career professionals in their 20s and 30s.
That demographic is encouraging for the team, given the make-up of Canada's largest city.
Toronto is a culturally diverse city and the atmosphere at the home opener was more like a European match than a typical North American soccer league game, complete with chanting and singing fans reminiscent of an English Premier League game.
SCOTTISH INTERNATIONAL
TFC head coach Mo Johnston spent six seasons with the Wizards as a player from 1996 to 2001, and coached the New York Red Bulls for a season. The Glasgow-born striker played 15 seasons in Europe before moving to the United States.
Johnston's career featured stops at Partick Thistle, Hearts of Midlothian, Falkirk, Celtic and Rangers in Scotland, as well as Watford and Everton (England) and Nantes (France). He made 35 appearances as an international for Scotland, including the 1990 World Cup in Italy.
Johnston came away from TFC's opening home game very impressed by the crowd's passion.
"Our fans were magnificent, it was like a European atmosphere," he said. "For the first time in a long time I've had goose-bumps at a game."
Interest in the team is high, many people believe, thanks primarily to the novelty of the league and the new stadium, which is fortunate -- on the field Toronto's start to the MLS season has been unimpressive.
TFC are the only team yet to score a goal, losing all four of their games while being outscored 10-0. They are the only team in league history not to score a goal in their first four games and numerous line-up changes have already been made.
MLS commissioner Don Garber said fans understood that a new team would not be a powerhouse overnight.
"People expect there to be some tough times at first with any expansion team," he said. "Hopefully the club can make some adjustments and start producing before too long.
SEASON TICKETS
"The fans here are great. I can tell you their supporters' group is the largest in the league and boy, I tell you, they're into the game.
"We don't have too many stadiums that rock like this one."
The facility is certainly playing a big part. The soccer-specific stadium cost $62 million (Canadian) to build but offers great sightlines for the 20,148 fans, at an average ticket price of $50.
With 14,000 season ticket holders (sales were capped at that number) and another 4,500 seats sold across the board for the remainder of the season already, there are little more than 1,500 seats for sale for the rest of the home games, virtually assuring sellouts for most of the season.
That makes Toronto one of the top draws in the 13-team league, which is expected to get an enormous boost when former England captain David Beckham joins the Los Angeles Galaxy later this year.
As soon as Beckham's signing was confirmed, ticket sales skyrocketed throughout the MLS, including the final 2,000 or so season tickets sold by the TFC, even though Beckham is making just one Toronto appearance this season.
"I never thought I'd see so much world-class soccer in Toronto," said resident Gary Thomas, who attended the home opener. "Who would have thought all this would have happened in a hockey city like this?"
Link to article
Hockey city Toronto embraces MLS team
By Roger Lajoie
TORONTO (Reuters) - Sports fans in Canada's hockey hotbed are embracing the world's most popular sport like never before.
While the Toronto Football Club (TFC) might never match the popularity of the city's beloved Maple Leafs ice hockey team, Major League Soccer's newest expansion franchise looks like carving out a niche in the city's crowded sports marketplace.
The home of the Leafs, the Toronto Raptors of the National Basketball Association (NBA), the Toronto Blue Jays of Major League Baseball (MLB) and the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League is also now the home of the TFC, who recently played their first game before a sell-out crowd in the new BMO Field.
Cheered on by a passionate crowd of scarf-wearing, red-clad fans, TFC lost 1-0 to the Kansas City Wizards.
The final score was the only disappointing aspect of professional soccer's return to the city for the first time since the Toronto Blizzard of the defunct North American Soccer League folded 23 years ago.
TFC say the majority of ticket buyers are either young families with children who play soccer, children and grandchildren of immigrants who have a soccer connection, or career professionals in their 20s and 30s.
That demographic is encouraging for the team, given the make-up of Canada's largest city.
Toronto is a culturally diverse city and the atmosphere at the home opener was more like a European match than a typical North American soccer league game, complete with chanting and singing fans reminiscent of an English Premier League game.
SCOTTISH INTERNATIONAL
TFC head coach Mo Johnston spent six seasons with the Wizards as a player from 1996 to 2001, and coached the New York Red Bulls for a season. The Glasgow-born striker played 15 seasons in Europe before moving to the United States.
Johnston's career featured stops at Partick Thistle, Hearts of Midlothian, Falkirk, Celtic and Rangers in Scotland, as well as Watford and Everton (England) and Nantes (France). He made 35 appearances as an international for Scotland, including the 1990 World Cup in Italy.
Johnston came away from TFC's opening home game very impressed by the crowd's passion.
"Our fans were magnificent, it was like a European atmosphere," he said. "For the first time in a long time I've had goose-bumps at a game."
Interest in the team is high, many people believe, thanks primarily to the novelty of the league and the new stadium, which is fortunate -- on the field Toronto's start to the MLS season has been unimpressive.
TFC are the only team yet to score a goal, losing all four of their games while being outscored 10-0. They are the only team in league history not to score a goal in their first four games and numerous line-up changes have already been made.
MLS commissioner Don Garber said fans understood that a new team would not be a powerhouse overnight.
"People expect there to be some tough times at first with any expansion team," he said. "Hopefully the club can make some adjustments and start producing before too long.
SEASON TICKETS
"The fans here are great. I can tell you their supporters' group is the largest in the league and boy, I tell you, they're into the game.
"We don't have too many stadiums that rock like this one."
The facility is certainly playing a big part. The soccer-specific stadium cost $62 million (Canadian) to build but offers great sightlines for the 20,148 fans, at an average ticket price of $50.
With 14,000 season ticket holders (sales were capped at that number) and another 4,500 seats sold across the board for the remainder of the season already, there are little more than 1,500 seats for sale for the rest of the home games, virtually assuring sellouts for most of the season.
That makes Toronto one of the top draws in the 13-team league, which is expected to get an enormous boost when former England captain David Beckham joins the Los Angeles Galaxy later this year.
As soon as Beckham's signing was confirmed, ticket sales skyrocketed throughout the MLS, including the final 2,000 or so season tickets sold by the TFC, even though Beckham is making just one Toronto appearance this season.
"I never thought I'd see so much world-class soccer in Toronto," said resident Gary Thomas, who attended the home opener. "Who would have thought all this would have happened in a hockey city like this?"
Jarrek
Active Member
Two friendlies were announced today, one versus Benfica, the other versus Aston Villa.
See www.torontofc.ca for details
See www.torontofc.ca for details
ganjavih
Senior Member
Got my two tickets... DC United May 19!
Oooh, a friendly against Aston Villa. That would be sweet to see except for Toronto getting slaughtered.
Oooh, a friendly against Aston Villa. That would be sweet to see except for Toronto getting slaughtered.
rdaner
Senior Member
never say never
Bogtrotter
Senior Member
At the risk of sounding irreverent, I'm just hoping FC will score a dam goal sometime 
indense
Active Member
Friendlies will be a good test for the fans - making sure that Toronto doesn't become the visiting team in their own building. And I hope that this level of support carries over to the national team too.
I'm having my family bring me a TFC home jersey in Amsterdam when they come visit.
Ajax fans were rioting in the city yesterday - fighting with police, smashing windows. Way to celebrate a championship guys.
I'm having my family bring me a TFC home jersey in Amsterdam when they come visit.
Ajax fans were rioting in the city yesterday - fighting with police, smashing windows. Way to celebrate a championship guys.
G_DOG
Active Member
jarrek,are you going to can vs arg u20 on friday ?
Jarrek
Active Member
Yes, I have season tickets and the Argentina-Canada game is a part of that package.
You?
Bogtrotter
Senior Member
Anybody know how well the U20 tournament is selling? Considering it is a significant soccer event you don't see much advertising for it.
G_DOG
Active Member
they've sold over 600,000 tickets^
yeg-yyz
New Member
was on the TFC webiste looking to purchase the scarfs handed out for the openner, but it appears that they are not available. any ideas? also is there a TFC shop/jerseys at the stadium?
ElChico
New Member
There is a TFC shop(s) at BMO. I didn't see any scarfs for sale in the stadium, but there were some entrepreneurs selling knock offs outside the stadium.