A past ECS display
By Martin Corpus
I would like to address the Seattle Sounders FC front office ahead of today’s ECS town hall meeting. I am an ECS member but the views I express here are mine alone. I appreciated Jim Strother’s opinion pieces about his grievances with the club, but I’d like to elaborate on two specifically that deserve a closer look.
First off is the Sounders FC front office’s collaboration with Delta Airlines to create what the two parties have deemed a “tifo”. A little bit of history, it comes from the Italian word tiffosi which refers to concepts seen in many supporters sections throughout the soccer world. Tifo encompasses flag waiving, singing, chanting, and choreographed movements of the body and choreographed deployment of large graphic displays.
Now to explain my frustration with the display collaboration. The Sounders FC front office and Delta Airlines have recently confirmed that they will deploy the piece on the club-level seats prior to the start of the 9/28 home game against the Chicago Fire. The first press release claimed the project would “Unify Seattle” and was repeatedly called a “tifo project.” While it is true that it will be made at least in part by fans, it does not honor the spirit of the tradition. A real tifo display must allow any and all supporters and fans to assist in the display’s creation, not sixty who buy a plane ticket to a derby. A real display must be managed by the supporters and fans themselves, made from hours of volunteer work, and financial donations made to acquire supplies. In other words, a display is made by, and only by supporters, as a visual demonstration of support for their team. The project is merely a PR-style advertisement for the two organizations who are conducting a co-branding marketing scheme. This project isn’t tifo. It’s a commercialized art display. The only element of this project that I am not offended by is the involvement of a Sounders player because this player is a designer outside of his playing career. He is also a player under contract and must comply with the wishes of the club.
I’d like to bring myself into the picture as a case in point. In December of 2015 I moved back to the Seattle area after attending school in Bellingham. Upon my return, I spent several hours on school nights helping create displays. I even went as far as staying overnight at the homes of fellow supporters who were kind enough to let me sleep on their couches after a full night of display-making. The perfect execution of a display that you helped work on gives an indescribable feeling, a sense of something greater than the individual. The hours we spend on tifo, travelling to away matches, and in the pub far outnumber our hours in the stands. It is where our deepest bonds among supporters come from. Being a supporter of the Sounders not only means I support the players on the field. It also means I participate in the norms of supporters’ culture, as countless others around the world do. Tifo is a part of this culture, and therefore belongs to supporters and supporters alone. As someone who has these bonds with my fellow supporters, forged from my hard-spent free hours, this week’s announcement was an insult.
Around the world, in countries outside of the United States, many soccer fans label American fans of the sport with negative-connotation terms such as “fake” and “manufactured”. (Fans of rival clubs like to poke at us specifically about this.) Onlookers from Europe and elsewhere don’t believe that supporters in this country’s leagues are genuine with their support of the team. Acts like this project between Delta and the Sounders FC front office only feed those perspectives. Soccer is nothing without fans. No fans means no revenue be it from ticket sales, or merchandise sales, or advertising clientele. No revenue means no way to fulfill payroll for employee and player salaries. The success of the club so far has rested on its huge crowds and league-leading sponsorships and merchandising. The supporters groups, most evidently ECS, have created an atmosphere where even non-soccer fans still have great experiences at home games and then become fans of the team and the sport. As long as the fans stay behind the club, it will be a massive force in US soccer. The front office would do well to remember this. Should the front office continue to disrespect and frustrate the people who really make the home-game experience as memorable as possible, they will only have themselves to blame for being unprofessional, and for disrespecting a global culture.
The culture of supporters isn’t for sale. Many may try to replicate it, but in this context, I can trust my gut feeling and say this display in question is more for other fans to see Delta branding rather than be visually uplifting for the players. Supporter groups have been making tifo displays in Seattle for over a decade now, and to pretend that the use of the word “tifo” in the club’s release is anything but a blatant appropriation of supporter culture is ridiculous. After ten years of ECS and six full MLS seasons, who makes that mistake?
I’d also like to mention my dismay at the implementation of the dynamic pricing strategy. This policy meant that a ticket to the home match against the Los Angeles Galaxy on July 9th would cost a minimum of $65 (before service charges). A later update reported that tickets to lower profile matches sold directly from the Sounders organization would go for as low as $40. If the club knows that all of its matches sell out, as they advertise having done so 120-some times, then why do ticket prices for different quality opponents need to be different? The Sounders are scheduled to play five matches with the whole stadium open this season and thus have a mechanism to generate increased revenue from matches with above-average demand. Dynamic pricing seems unnecessary in a city with an appetite for soccer like ours, and it prices out plenty of your most ardent supporters.
I’d again like to use myself as a real case in point. I work for a startup business locally on the east side. At a maximum of 4 hours per week and a flat rate of $10 per hour, my paycheck depends on how much work I get done and I cannot go beyond that 4 hour maximum. Pursuing my education takes up the majority of the rest of my time. In other words, I could make as little as a few cents above Washington State’s minimum hourly wage if I only worked a single hour in a week. Naturally, I try to max out my hours. Why? So I can spend anywhere from half to more than double of what I make in a week to see the Sounders play at home. As much as I realize that the current season isn’t the best as far as score lines are concerned, I keep telling myself to keep supporting the guys on the field for home games. At least I know they can hear my passion. But do other actions taken by the Sounders FC front office make it worth that $65 LA Galaxy ticket? For those of us who paint the real tifo displays and drive the long hours to away games but can’t afford a season ticket, the answer is a resounding no. Are we the fans you meant to drive out with dynamic pricing?
