BMO Field Won't Expand Just Yet
City Won't Rush to Increase Stadium's Capacity
Despite the growing demand for tickets by non-season ticket holders, Toronto FC will not expand BMO Field until the team can prove their fan base is here to stay.
Toronto FC sold out every home game in their inaugural Major League Soccer season and has a league-record 16,000 season ticket holders. After playing just one season at BMO Field, is it already time to expand the 20,000-seat stadium?
Realistically, the answer is no.
There’s been a rumour that a number of construction companies are looking to expand BMO Field by over 10,000 seats next year but that speculation was officially shut down by team officials.
“At this time, we have no plans for expansion,” said Michelle Lissel, the head of Toronto FC’s Media Relations department. She added that expansion is a realistic goal down the road, as planned by developers upon its construction, but the stadium’s capacity will most likely still remain under 30,000.
Some Toronto fans are frustrated that tickets to Toronto FC home games are hard to come by – only 4,000 tickets per game are available to non-season ticket holders.
“Turning away anybody who wants to get into the stadium this early in the franchise’s existence is bad business,” said one blogger on bigsoccer.com.
Retaining a high demand for tickets to home games by keeping the current capacity seems to be the strategy of MLSE at the moment. Fans argue that while keeping BMO Field’s capacity at 20,000 makes Toronto FC tickets a hot commodity, it also allows people to sell their $15 tickets for $80 since the demand is so high.
Not only does this create a large market for scalpers looking to profit from the high demand, it makes tickets less affordable for regular fans. This is exactly what true Toronto FC fans don’t want – a Leaf-game atmosphere with an uninspired crowd draped in black business suits instead of team colours.
The urge to expand may be appealing to fans now, but the team’s future success in Toronto is hard to predict.
Last year, the team had the highest attendance-to-capacity ratio in the league at 97%, and their average attendance was third behind the Los Angeles Galaxy (24,400) and D.C United (20,100).
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the hype from Toronto FC’s first season will transfer into the next three, four or five seasons. The MLS averaged a crowd of 17,400 its 1996 inaugural season and then followed that with three straight years under 14,500. If Toronto averages another sellout crowd in 2008, serious discussions of expansion could be taken seriously.
Overall, the decision for MLSE to wait on expanding BMO field is a good one for the time being. Though many fans will be upset that they won’t be able to buy tickets for the 2008 season, a packed BMO Field is better than a deserted Commonwealth stadium.
