There will be an addition at Sporting Park in the coming years. No Sporting Kansas City will not be adding more seats to the stadium at this time, but they will be adding something the team has felt was lacking, a retail store to Sporting Park.
The new store will be 5,000 square feet, that's more than six times the amount of square footage the stadium currently has for retail (currently 750). The store will cost seven figures and serve as the venue's merchandise hub. The plan is that the shop will open for the start of the 2016 MLS season.
Recently during a fan forum, Robb Heineman called the lack of bigger store one of their biggest mistakes when building the stadium.
Really at the time the stadium was built though there was no way of knowing the team would take off in popularity the way it had. Similar to the capacity of the stadium, there was really no way of knowing Sporting would become as popular as it has in Kansas City based on the history of the Wizards when it came to attendance.
It may seem like a minor thing, but this is something that the team desperately needed to add, the existing stores just didn't provide the space that was needed, too many times the stores were overly crowded making it hard to move around and make purchases. The new store will be accessible from both inside and outside the stadium, which will be good for the team going forward and allow them to have a store that would be open on non-game days that would allow them to sell merchandise, for example, during the Christmas season. It's a revenue stream that was left unfulfilled currently.
The team's growth has the team number 2 in the league in terms of growth sales. The Sporting brand has gotten strong enough that they made scarves with the old Wizards logo on it. The team's VP/Merchandise, John Moncke said that the team sold 5,000 of those throw back scarves, the most sales of a single scarf in the team's history. And based on his quotes in the article regarding the merchandise, I think Sporting is feeling comfortable enough in the branding of Sporting KC that we may start to see a little more throw back merchandise show up.
The new store will be 5,000 square feet, that's more than six times the amount of square footage the stadium currently has for retail (currently 750). The store will cost seven figures and serve as the venue's merchandise hub. The plan is that the shop will open for the start of the 2016 MLS season.
Recently during a fan forum, Robb Heineman called the lack of bigger store one of their biggest mistakes when building the stadium.
Really at the time the stadium was built though there was no way of knowing the team would take off in popularity the way it had. Similar to the capacity of the stadium, there was really no way of knowing Sporting would become as popular as it has in Kansas City based on the history of the Wizards when it came to attendance.
It may seem like a minor thing, but this is something that the team desperately needed to add, the existing stores just didn't provide the space that was needed, too many times the stores were overly crowded making it hard to move around and make purchases. The new store will be accessible from both inside and outside the stadium, which will be good for the team going forward and allow them to have a store that would be open on non-game days that would allow them to sell merchandise, for example, during the Christmas season. It's a revenue stream that was left unfulfilled currently.
The team's growth has the team number 2 in the league in terms of growth sales. The Sporting brand has gotten strong enough that they made scarves with the old Wizards logo on it. The team's VP/Merchandise, John Moncke said that the team sold 5,000 of those throw back scarves, the most sales of a single scarf in the team's history. And based on his quotes in the article regarding the merchandise, I think Sporting is feeling comfortable enough in the branding of Sporting KC that we may start to see a little more throw back merchandise show up.
I am so glad they are no long afraid to acknowledge the old brand. Reading that article though, I get why they felt like they needed to distance themselves from the Wizards. Winning the cup in 2013 made them feel like selling Wizards branded items wouldn't diminish the SKC brand. As someone who was initially disappointed in the rebrand, I am ecstatic that the team is embracing the Wizards. Although the league is still young, our team has a great soccer history that needs to be celebrated.
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