Sporting Club's CEO recently celebrated his birthday in Mexico and with his down time on the beach he conducted another of his Q&As with his followers on Twitter. As always Heineman touched on a number of topics from the Swope Park Rangers, to offseason additions, to Sporting Park and as always he threw in some of the trolling we've all come to expect. Here are some of the high points.
One of the big questions that is pretty much asked in every one of Heineman's Q&A sessions is asking about the potential expansion of Sporting Park. In the past Heineman has posted about needing to sell out through 2017, or needing so many years of capacity before expansion would take place. He even talked about where the expansion would take place, expanding the East Stand. It always seemed a little bit far fetched when thinking about the size of the site that Sporting Park currently sits. Now Heineman says that there are no seating plans at the stadium. He did say that they are enlarging the season ticket holder base by 500.
In terms of the team's players that are still out of contract, Heineman touched on two of the three, Soni Mustivar and Paulo Nagamura, both restating the club's interest in both players returning but not giving much in the way of details for either one. No mention of the club's other player out of contract, Mikey Lopez. At the same time he did bring some ease to the question of Krisztian Nemeth's future with the club, twice answering questions about the Hungarian's potential departure.
As for new additions, that seemed to be one of the big talking points of the session. Heineman mentioned how the club was looking to still add a player on each line of the team, defense, midfield, and forward to strength the squad, as well as the fact that they're looking at Designated Players, which would be expected.
As for where these potential new players would come from, Heineman was asked where the team was focusing on for players, to which he responded with Spain. That's not been a bad proving ground for KC over the past few years as the team has brought in Oriol Rosell, Toni Dovale, and Jordi Quintilla from the European country to Kansas City. Speaking of Rosell, Heineman was also asked about the rumors of his return to MLS and Kansas City because of being out of favor in Portugal. Heineman didn't sound too optimist of him returning to either the team or the league as a whole. It also sounds like fans shouldn't get their hopes up about news on player signings coming in the next week either. Although if you do want to do some detective work over that time, Heineman was asked for the initials of KC's next signing and he responded with CRH.
Another topic that brought a couple questions was next season's schedule. According to Heineman the schedule doesn't look like it will be out until some time in January. And for those people that were disappointed in the number of Sunday games that KC had last year, it sounds like that won't be changing in 2016 which would seem to mean more nationally broadcast games for KC next year as well. And if Heineman gets his way, 2016 for KC will begin on the road.
Finally a couple odds and ends. It sounds like the national training center will finally start moving dirt in February according to Heineman. Then there's the big question from across the pond that continues to be asked, and that's if Heineman and OnGoal are still interested or if they'd renew their interest in acquiring English Premier League club, Everton. Those in the blue side of Liverpool probably shouldn't be holding their breath.
That said, as always you have to take what Heineman says with a grain of salt.
CRH = C. Robb Heineman
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