Here’s the New York Times on the proposed new MLS stadium in Flushing Meadows – Corona Park in the New York borough Queens:
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Major League Soccer officials are talking about a new soccer stadium, partly as a way to help rejuvenate the park.
The 25,000-seat stadium would replace a large, gummy pond once referred to as the Pool of Industry, and the league has promised to completely restore the park’s raggedy public soccer fields before it breaks ground on a new facility. One argument for having a major league team in Queens is that many New Yorkers who came from soccer-mad nations now live nearby and would presumably support a local franchise. Another is that it could provide a source of revenue to help fix up the park.
The assertion that immigrants will be keen to support a local team particularly stands out. It is something that was also mentioned at the time when Houston’s BBVA Compass Stadium got presented, and has also come up in the New England Revolution’s new stadium debate.
Is this true though? Will immigrants adopt a new or extra home team to support in their new country? While I am not aware of any extensive research that has been done on this, I highly doubt this is the case.
London, for example, is another place with a large immigrant population, but few have adopted one of the London teams as their own and even fewer have bought season tickets for such team.
The typical audience at an English league match, even in areas with a large immigrant population, is still predominantly white British male, mixed up with some groups of tourists taking in a Premier League match.
Few football fans moving abroad change teams, and rather prefer to watch their home country team’s matches on television or over the Internet than head to the stadium to make a new team their own. Even second generation immigrants often stick with the team of their father or roots instead of finding a new team in the country they live.
In fact, in developing football countries it is not untypical that even locals support one of the European giants instead of their team around the corner. And even in parts of Latin America, which does have a long-standing football culture, many fans choose to support Barcelona or Madrid over their local club, regularly justifying this by their Spanish ancestry.
It is therefore highly doubtful that Queens’ immigrants will be flocking to the new stadium, which will likely instead cater for a more typical football crowd coming west from Brooklyn and Manhattan.
That’s not to say that building a new stadium in Queens is a bad idea, but do it for the right reasons.
(Photo credits: © Flickr user CaptainKidder)