Whitecaps Update

So I’ve been a little lazy with my aspirations for this project, but I have been very busy with school and work so I will try to start pounding some stuff out soon.

I think it may be a good thing to wait until the end of the season too since this past week added a lot more material after such a dismal game.

Oh hai!

I hadn’t realized it had been quite this long since I last posted on here… oops.

I have decided to start writing an essay about my experiences this year with the Southsiders, Vancouver Whitecaps FC’s independent supporters group. Not sure how long it will take, or if you’ll be interested in reading, but it’s been a really interesting experience personally and I thought I would share. So keep an eye out and check back soon as we are also coming up soon on Movember, which I expect to be bigger than ever this year.

Iain

FC St. Pauli Vancouver

I’m the manager of an indoor soccer team here in Vancouver and I have a lot of fun doing it. Our name is FC St. Pauli Vancouver which comes from FC St. Pauli in Hamburg, the first professional team I supported. The team is comprised of mainly my friends and now friends of friends who I only know because of soccer.

I really enjoy leading the team and we’re pretty good too. Last season we lost 8-7 in the semi finals to the eventual champions and last night was our first game of the new season with us coming away convincing 6-1 winners.

We’re thinking about getting new jerseys for the team and are looking for fundraising ideas, so if you’ve got any let me know. And as always, VIVA ST. PAULI!

Update: we’ve received donations from London Drugs ($40 giftcard) and Local Public Eatery ($50 giftcard). Both will be up for grabs as raffle prizes at an upcoming pub night with details coming soon.

Movember: Return of the Stache

Return of the Stache trailer

Mövember

I thought I would update you with a photo I took recently for Granville Island Brewing’s Movember contest. Please vote for it here!

I will be keeping it for another few days until the Gala Parté then making another video!!

Movember 2010 (preview edition)

The current edition of Movember is in full swing and we, as a team, are on our way to beating our mark from last year of $550, but I have a feeling we may land a little short. This being said, I am very thankful to those who have already donated and to those of you who have also been extremely supportive. I am asking now that if you’re able to, please make a pledge of whatever you can. As an incentive, I have made a little video to entice you into supporting me! A full, month long version will be coming out in the first week of December, but in the mean time, please donate here and enjoy:

Whitecaps Tickets

A few months ago, I posted a piece about Major League Soccer’s imminent arrival in Vancouver. I also mentioned how I had joined the Southsiders and how I have a season ticket deposit for next season too. Prices were finally released yesterday, November 4th, and needless to say, the Southsiders are not pleased with the prices. The group’s President, John Knox, posted the following on the Southsiders’ forum this afternoon, and expressed very well how almost all the members are currently feeling.

To all of Vancouver’s football fans and supporters:

The Vancouver Southsiders do not claim to be entitled to any discounts, kickbacks, obligations, special favours or prices. Our money is as good as anyone else’s when it comes to supporting the Whitecaps. We are not “owed” anything for supporting the club up to this point, nor are we claiming to be.

The current uproar within our membership is largely due to the Whitecaps’ failure to adequately manage the expectations of its new and existing supporters, and rightly so.

The Whitecaps’ entire marketing campaign to date has been centred around the $319 price point as the proverbial “cheap seats.”

When you look at EVERY team in MLS (and most football leagues in the UK and Europe, for that matter) the cheapest seats are nosebleeds and the seats behind the goal.

It’s an obstructed view for most down there, which makes it affordable, and that is why your most active supporters groups tend to congregate there. To those fans it’s not about the view, it’s about the experience.

It is therefore not at all surprising that members of the Southsiders (and others in Vancouver who are interested in “supporting” as opposed to “watching”) arrived at the conclusion that the cheap seats would be behind the net.

However, when taxes and fees are included, seats behind the net are **$200 more** than what the vast majority were anticipating as result of the marketing campaign. That’s quite a shock to the system, let alone the wallet.

Here’s the behind the net pricing for the big teams in MLS to illustrate a point:

Whitecaps $560
LA Galaxy $400
Seattle Sounders $400
Portland Timbers $369
Toronto FC $361
NY Red Bulls $272

The pricing for Toronto and Seatlle sparked chaos with their supporters this year… and here we are, set to play in a temporary tin-can venue (Empire Field) with no signings, charging $160 more than Seattle and $200 more than TFC.

The Galaxy have Beckham, and their package includes 3 – 5 major friendlies. Last year they hosted Real Madrid and Boca Juniors. We will be paying more than Galaxy fans just to see FC Edmonton and Montreal.

The Red Bulls are in the most expensive and most lucrative market in North America, with the league’s arguably highest profile signing in Thierry Henry. Those fans are paying exactly what I paid to stand at Burnaby’s Swangard Stadium last year for division two football.

Which brings me to this:

Last year, I paid $270 for the “privilege” of standing on metal bleachers, pissing in port-a-loos, waiting in line at substandard concessions and arriving 2.5 hrs early to ensure I could get a parking space.

Next year I will be at Empire, probably for the entire season. Once again, I will stand on metal bleachers, piss in a port-a-loo, tough it out in long lines for overpriced concessions and pay $30 for parking… and if I want the “privilege” of standing where I have since 1999, I have to pay $300 more more for my ticket than I did last year.

It is absolutely inconceivable that we should be forced to pay the same exorbitant prices for Empire Field as we will at BC Place. There is absolutely no justification for that, not even if we stocked our team with stars in their prime from the likes of Real Madrid.

Speaking of which…

Vancouverites will pay more for their seats behind the net than fans of Real Madrid do. And here’s a kick in the ass – we only get two Canadian Championship matches in our package. They pay less than we do, and they get three matches to the UEFA Champions League!

I’m not so daft as not to know that Canada and Spain’s economies are apples and oranges. I do however think there is an important lesson there though.

The Whitecaps have a stated goal of becoming a top-25 club on the global stage. Real Madrid has to rank in the top 3 on that list easily.

I would suggest that the Whitecaps should be looking to learn from the best before attempting to climb the ranks on the wallets of the supporters who kept them afloat through the dark days of the 1990s and 2000s.

Hell, they can even look at the bottom feeding dregs of the MLS for some wisdom.

DC United’s supporters group, the Screaming Eagles, are paying less than what Vancouverites will to stand behind the net.

In return, their club provides the supporters group with a financial kickback estimated at around $75 per member. This allows the Screaming Eagles to provide their members with a free jersey every year, and free beer at tailgate parties before every match.

On a price-per-match analysis, I will concede that the $560 “Aqua” supporters section isn’t too high, especially for the Vancouver’s vastly overpriced sports market. It certainly pales in comparison to prices for the Canucks.

Unfortunately, Vancouver’s fans don’t have the option of paying on a price-per-match basis. It’s an all or nothing deal, with half due in November, and half due in February…. that’s right before Christmas, and right after. The Whitecaps couldn’t have dropped this news at a worse time, although I acknowledge that the renovations at BC Place have played a role in this timing.

A more comprehensive and accessible payment plan would do wonders to quell this uproar. Almost every team in MLS has one, save for a few, and none of those exceptions are in markets as pricey as we are.

I also question this:

- Why do end zone seats for BC Lions games at BC Place cost 40% less than the corner seats… but at a Whitecaps match they will cost 55% more than the same corners?

- Why are the sections priced in a way so that two people with an aisle between them have a pricing differential of nearly $100 to $200?

It’s a Mickey Mouse pricing plan, plain and simple. The Vancouver Southsiders should have been the Whitecaps’ easiest customers to sell this experience to, and now we have several long-time members questioning whether this is a club worth supporting.

And that’s why we’re pissed off.

Welcome to “modern football,” Vancouver!

Sincerely.

John Knox

Automatica

I have a bit of a beef with automatic units in washrooms. Auto flush urinals are great, you walk up, do your thing, and when you walk, away it flushes, once, this however, is not the case with auto flush toilets. My school, Langara College has a lot of auto-flush toilets and recently, I have tried to become more self conscious about being ecological. I have never really bought bottled water, but that’s mainly out of principle since I just think it’s silly to pay such a premium for a resource that is pumped directly into your house, I have also tried to be aware of what I buy, and what I throw away.

Along my journey to ecological nirvana, I have found the auto-flush toilets at Langara to be extremely wasteful. They flush when you walk into a stall, they flush when you stand up from the toilet, and they’ll give you a goodbye flush as you leave the stall. My friend Alisa informs me that they’re fun when you shake your bum at them, and I understand the sanitary reasoning behind having auto-flush devices, but surely they’re only needed for post-washing devices like the towel dispenser or hand dryer.

Once we’ve finished what we came in to do, we get to the drying issue, this all of course is provided you wash your hands, if not, you may as well stop reading. Paper towels work like a charm, and if you’ve had the privilege to dry your hands in a place where they have actual cotton towels, then you really don’t need to be reading this either, but for the rest of us, we know paper towels really aren’t that great because it just becomes garbage afterwards, and some automatic paper dispenser, like the one at my work is infuriating, it won’t give paper when you wave in front of it, but you’ll be on the other side of the room and it will randomly advance the roll, so if you’re going to have one, please change the settings to automatically advance once one piece has been ripped, I like those the best!

After paper, we have air to help us dry our hands, Dyson Airblades are not only cool, but by far the best hand dryers out there. The old “press button, receive bacon” models are awful and outdated:

I think we all need to be aware of the choices that we’re making in our lives and to be aware of what’s going on around us, not just go day-to-day through the paces. Maybe there are settings that could be changed so that the toilets wouldn’t flush so frequently, or they can lower their inherent eagerness to flush, I don’t know, I”ll leave it to the people at Dyson, they seem to have it figured out.

Red

I went to see Red this past Thursday night and I throughly enjoyed it, despite needing to use the washroom for the entire second half of the film.

It’s a story of four retired CIA agents who “know too much”, and as such, have been ordered killed. I found it to be very light hearted and with the help of DC Comics fronting the bill for production, it has a sometimes silly, outlandish feel to it that I really enjoyed.

I saw the film at the Empire Theatres at Oakridge since they have a student deal, that for $11.99 you get admission, a regular pop and a regular popcorn. Now, last year the deal had been $9.99, but the two dollar increase is hardly enough to keep me away. The best part about the deal is that it’s on offer all the time, no restrictions!

You can go see it at Oakridge, or elsewhere, but if you’re looking for something to do on a soon-to-be raining afternoon, I’d suggest going to see Red.