Daniel Snyder’s Washington football team has sent out a survey to season ticket holders about what they’d like to see in a new stadium to replace 18-year-old FedEx Field, and blah blah blah, this is an old gimmick to get people excited about the prospect of a new stadium, so really the less said about it the better, unless you really think Snyder is going to decide on how many seats to build based on an email poll. I do like this bit, though:
“We’ve already seen some preliminary drawings, and I’m going to be very retro with it,” Snyder said then. “It’s going to feel like RFK. It’s going to move like RFK.”
Hey, you know where Snyder can get a retro stadium that feels like RFK, cheap? I’ll give you a hint.
Washington would’ve already started the process of building a 100,000 seat stadium in place of RFK if they had won the Olympic bid, but maybe there’s still time for Boston to hand it off to DC.
The whole building a new stadium to look or feel like an old stadium is a pretty dumb idea… like vintage clothes: people that spend $200 for jeans with holes in the or new shoes with “fashionable” dirt stains on them. Just dumb.
Deep down Snyder wants to one up AT&T Stadium… Redskins play in debatably the 3rd worst stadium (behind O.Co & Qualcomm) while his most hated rival has the nicest.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with FEDEX Field except for its location and the lack of public transit–both of which, if memory serves, were well known to the Redskins when it was built! It has the same lousy game-day field and loutish fans as every other stadium “experience” in the league. I’d also argue that there’s even now nothing wrong with RFK Stadium, despite the lack of attention.
The idea of the Redskins selling 100,000 tickets regularly (even when good) is laughable. The whole reason they ended up with too big of a stadium is because they believed the line about their eternal wait list. StubHub and other tools shattered that myth.
I had the chance to tour M&T Bank Stadium yesterday as part of a team building activity for work. I was surprised to hear that the stadium only cost around $220m. Talk about bang for the buck- it’s a really nice stadium. I can’t wrap my mind around the idea of a stadium needing to cost in the billions of dollars.
P.S. I’m a Redskins fan…
I wonder if this is how the next round of stadium subsidies will happen….20-30 years ago it was that the teams wanted to play in their own, classical, “retro” stadia after playing for 30 years in suburban stadia and “Cookie cutters”…..Well, now those “retro” stadia are getting, well, old…and the owners are thirsting for new and want that “retro” feel….. The stadia of their childhood were the cookie cutters….
@TRPackman
If it means MLB and NFL in the same stadium then why not? Granted Shea was a dump towards the end but it was fun to have both teams I root for call the same stadium home.
Danny is the black sheep of our NFL owner’s club, for so many reasons. Pulling off a 20 year stadium replacement requires charm, guts, vision, razzle dazzle, and all kinds of other qualities that Snyder never will have.
Ughhh…that “Washington NFL Team” has a name…The Redskins.
“Ughhh” is right.
@GDub there are a dozen stadiums with 100,000 seating capacity & Washington despite “the controversy” of their name is easily one of the most popular NFL teams. They are one of the few NFL teams that could pull off 100k seats, and they only play 8 home games a year (without playoffs or schedule expansion) so it’s not like “a regular basis” is a day-to-day occurrence lol were not talking about baseball here……
There are, in fact, zero U.S. stadiums with 100,000 capacity. FedEx Field is #1 at 85,000, and all but three others are under 80,000:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_National_Football_League_stadiums
Washington hasn’t sold well in their stadium for years. Despite the vaunted “waiting list” I get a yearly season ticket offer on the merit of buying tickets just a couple of times.
Fact of the matter is: 1) NFL fans in general don’t really like going to games anymore (see other articles on this site), so there’s lots of fiction over “sellouts” and 2) despite the astronomical prices, the NFL still loves to do things like play Thursday night games and Christmas eve games to maximize fan misery and inconvenience (check out some of the famous FEDEX Field photos of the last several years).
Selling a few more tickets in years where they aren’t terrible is only going to leave Washington with 10k unsellable seats in most years. I think 70k–max–is probably what a two team market will support.
Neil, there are 8 CFB stadiums with more than 100,000 seats, and the NFL is just as popular if not more. It’s hard to compare which is more profitable because of the beautiful system of exploitation the NCAA has pedaled for decades. More importantly, AT&T Stadium has packed 100,000 plus on several occasions, and Dallas in particular is who Synder measures himself up against in regards to a new stadium. It’s a billionaire’s d!ck measuring contest heightened by their rivalry. And if Synder could mask his stadium hopes for an Olympic bid, which was the original plan, I would’ve assumed it’d be closer to 100,000 than 80,000….. Just my opinion.
GDub, you hit the nail on the head earlier when you pointed out that FEDEX Field has a bad location & poor public transportation, but I think the DMV market could easily support more than 70-80k, well just have to agree-to-disagree on that.
But saying fans don’t like going to games anymore is true to an extent, it’s certainly an acknowledged concerned, but it’s more due to fans getting priced out by artificial inflation from the limited number of tickets and $10 hotdogs than it is “the HDTV experience.” There are many reasons watching games on tv is better; the couch is free, convenient, and hotdogs are $1 again. The hassle of driving in traffic from Virginia to Maryland because the stadium that isn’t easily accessible… Then the weather during the 2nd half of the season becomes miserable. Sure, those are all factors, but the will to still go to games is strongest with football, so despite all those factors I wouldn’t bet against it. Roughly 80% of NFL fans still show up to those snow games… college fans can be more fickle, but they also schedule ITT-Tech & University of Phoenix. There’s too much parity in the NFL to make that comparison. It’s apple to oranges.
Jordan,
Actually, I’d argue that the stadium experience for the NFL is miserable at just about every stadium right now. DC’s is just more miserable because of the location–but once you get inside, it is basically the same stadium as everywhere else, from Foxboro to Phoenix.
I don’t think the stadium experience becomes much better just because it is on the Orange Line. The NFL will still do what it wants with scheduling–night games, night playoff games in northern cities in frigid weather, Thursday games, Wednesday games. There also appears to be an emerging number of boring, pathetic, no hope teams that don’t really draw much. All this, plus the fact that tickets are easily priced for demand on sites like StubHub mean that season tickets are really for the die-hards only…and there aren’t 80k die-hards in Maryland and Virginia. Which is probably why Snyder wants something like RFK, in the mid-50s, where he can appeal just to rich guys.
80 percent of turn out, in a league that supposedly sells out just about every game, isn’t good enough in an 8 game season.
Washington benefits from a lot of unproven assertions about fan popularity and loyalty, mostly peddled by media guys in their 40s and up who remember watching Sunday afternoon games in the early and mid 1980s. Those days are gone, and the team simply does not have the cachet with young people that they used to.