EVERETT — The Seattle Sounders FC hasn’t even played its first regular-season game, yet jerseys for the professional soccer team seem to be popping up everywhere.
Eddie Fernandez has noticed the team’s gear among the crowds at his indoor soccer arena in downtown Everett. There’s palpable excitement among the teen players he coaches at Archbishop Murphy High School.
“You see kids going around wearing replica jerseys, so the buzz is already there,” Fernandez said. “It’s not just the kids. It’s also the adults.”
The Sounders, a Major League Soccer expansion team, play host to New York on Thursday at Qwest Field in their first regular-season game.
There’s a new game in town, and the debate is on: Will youth soccer players turn into adult spectators? Will immigrants switch loyalties from their Âhometown teams? And will fans tune in at local watering holes?
The Sounders might not convert die-hard baseball fans. And their followers might fail to wrest the remote control from other bar patrons. Still, plenty of people think the Puget Sound area is soccer country.
Take James Daniel, a 24-year-old from Lynnwood. He’s been playing soccer since he was 7 and later followed professional games.
With no hometown team, he usually watched English Premier League on television. Now, he plans to switch.
“It’s huge,” he said Thursday as he left a pick-up game at the Everett Soccer Arena. “A lot of people are finally getting into the game.”
As of last week, the Sounders had sold almost 22,000 season tickets for 2009. Most home games, aside from the larger-capacity opening day (32,400), should be able to seat 27,700, meaning a few people without season tickets can still snag a seat.
Those who don’t go in person can catch the games on radio or television.
Joe Ziskovsky, co-owner of Sporty’s Beef &Brew in Everett, said the new team will be an easy sell to those who frequent his Evergreen Way bar. Patrons from Europe and Australia, many of whom work at nearby Boeing facilities, sound excited, Ziskovsky said. He’s not so sure about his U.S. clients.
“They don’t know the game, they haven’t been around it as a much,” Ziskovsky said.
He said he expects locals to warm to the sport, but said the Sounders would lose big going head-to-head with college basketball. Just such a matchup happens Thursday, when the first day of the NCAA men’s tournament coincides with the Sounders’ opener.
“More than likely, we’re going to dedicate 90 percent of the TVs to the tournament,” Ziskovsky said.
Latin American immigrants are other potential fans. The trick is getting them to watch U.S. soccer instead of teams back home.
Sounders management is trying to lure them through a deal with radio station KeBuena KTBK (1210 AM), which will broadcast most of the 2009 regular-season games. It’s the Spanish-language station’s first sports broadcast, a departure from the Mexican music typically broadcast from Tacoma to Mount Vernon.
The station has a weekly program about the Sounders. Victor Hernandez, one of the commentators, said the Hispanic community will support the team.
“The question is how much time it will take them to accept them as their team,” he said in Spanish.
Area Mexican restaurants often show Mexican games on television. Rodolfo Perez, owner of Guadalajara in south Everett, offers them on weekends.
“It gets crowded depending which teams are playing,” he said in Spanish.
Perez said he would be willing to show U.S. games if his clients asked him to, but said he believes they would prefer Mexican games.
Another potential draw for immigrants would be seeing their countrymen on the pitch. MLS teams are allowed to have up to eight foreigners on their 24-person squad. The Sounders have two Colombians, a Gambian, a Frenchman, a Cuban, a Swede and an Englishman.
The team has no intention of bringing on a player just to attract spectators, such as a Mexican to attract a Mexican audience, said Gary Wright, senior business operations vice president for the Sounders FC.
Promoters knew Seattle had an appetite for soccer, Wright said, after crowds packed Qwest Field in recent years for top-tier foreign teams such as Spain’s Real Madrid and England’s Manchester United.
“Demographically, we reached out to the soccer community and we knew who the ticket-buying soccer community was,” Wright said.
The Fox Soccer Channel and ESPN’s broadcasts of foreign matches also have helped popularize the sport.
The team can bank on a strong ties closer to home. Kasey Keller, an Olympia native and one of the most decorated U.S. goalkeepers in soccer history, already is a crowd favorite.
There’s name recognition, too. Past Seattle teams used the Sounders moniker in the now-defunct North American Soccer League of the 1970s and 1980s. A local team with the same name later resurfaced in the semi-pro A-League.
Fernandez, the coach who owns Everett Soccer Arena, once played for the A-League Sounders in the 1990s. His father played for the Sounders’ NASL team.
“There’s a lot of people who don’t quote unquote get soccer,” he said. “We don’t ask them to. They can enjoy their sports.”
Now, he said, soccer fans get a chance to enjoy theirs.
Noah Haglund: 425-339-3465, nhaglund@heraldnet.com.
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