The debut of St. Louis City SC, St. Louis’ Major League Soccer expansion team, is still 2½ years away, sometime in 2023, the stadium site itself still consists mostly of dirt, but fans apparently can’t wait for the soccer show to get started.
The team began accepting deposits for season tickets on Wednesday morning and in the first 15 minutes, the team said 30,000 seats were reserved. The number hit 50,000 in the first 24 hours.
The stadium is expected to seat about 22,500.
The number of deposits is an MLS record. The expansion team in Austin, which begins play next year, held the previous record, with 44,000 deposits placed when it put season tickets on sale in June of 2019. City’s number dwarfs some other recent expansion teams. Charlotte, which enters the league in 2022, had deposits for 24,000 seats after it began accepting them in May of this year. Miami, playing in an 18,000-seat stadium, didn’t sell out its season tickets until shortly before its first season began. Nashville sold only about 5,000 season tickets.
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How those deposits translate into actual sales is a question for which the answer won’t be known for years. The team will start selling tickets in the more expensive sections starting in 2021 and won’t get to most of the seats until 2022. Fans were able to request as many as eight tickets with one $50 deposit for the bulk of the stadium locations and may have chosen to err on the side of more seats than they’ll actually need.
But even if that’s the case and everyone buys less than the number of tickets they initially requested, it would seem the team is headed for a waiting list for season tickets from the very start. Though the exact breakdown between season tickets and single-game sales hasn’t been determined yet, the team plans to sell single-game tickets for each game, so even though it looks like it could, the team won’t have only season-ticket holders. In Austin, the stadium will be 75% season-ticket holders, 25% single-game tickets.
“I’m once again blown away by our fans, supporters and community and how they continue to rally around City,†said Carolyn Kindle Betz, the team’s CEO, in a statement released by the club. “This is just another testament to why I love St. Louis so much. When given the opportunity, our region shows the rest of the nation why we’re a force to be reckoned with.â€
City said the successful ticket roll out was the second major milestone it had hit since announcing its name and logo in August. The other is “record-breaking numbers†in merchandise sales.
Deposits received a time stamp when made, and that’s the order the team will sell them tickets. Fans can still make deposits, and get in the back of the line, through the team’s website, .