Here’s the 2014 fan appreciation event. (Post here.)
L to R it’s ticket partner, player I can’t remember, Ben Zemanski, me, Jorge Villafana, Michael Nanchez, and Darlington Nagbe. I’m too lazy to check spelling of everyone’s names.
Here’s the 2016 fan appreciation event. Fan-girling all over again seeing pictures with these players.
These were our seats for the championship match. Please note besides giant pole we can’t even see the entire field.
So what happened? Some of the shine had worn off just in terms of life in general but we still loved the matches.
But then, in 2021 we had a championship match in our stadium.
I can’t tell you how many thing had to line up for that to happen – and this was my dream come true.
And the very first thing that happened is our season ticket went away and we had to fight for tickets with all the fair weather fans and ticket scalpers and other randos.
Fallout from the pandemic poured gasoline on the situation.
For various reasons our work schedule was modified so we started at 7am which made weeknight matches a chore.
The season ticket prices have gradually increased as you would expect. But it’s escalated and adds up to 25% over the last 2 years. Meanwhile the secondary market is bleargh so if you try to sell your tickets you even can’t get what you paid for them. Which also means you can grab a cheap ticket the day of match — why invest in a whole season?
This probably sounds cheesy but it used to feel like we were a part of something. There was a local TV show with features about the players. One of them had a food cart. I once saw a few players walk up the Timbers Army line on their way into the match. We got to go to the end of the year player banquet. We had a friendly section usher. (Miss you, Louisa!)
The fan group had a falling out with the organization (more below) so that’s all haphazard. The chants lost some of their vigor. There are more eff-you chants. Most of the matches are on Apple TV which I do not have. They offer a free pass with your season tickets: for 1 household. Sure $100 a season for all the matches is great but I don’t watch all the matches and I don’t want to pay $100 more on top of what I already pay for TV and season tickets.
Cumulatively, so many off-putting bits.
I hate the ticket apps — tech bros scraping money and data off us. Remember actual tickets? We used to get a book of them at the beginning of the season.
Then there were the scandals and these were really the nails in the coffin. We probably would have dropped last year but the report on the women’s team came in after we paid.
I don’t want to write all the gory details. In short, the women’s team scandal had to do with improprieties between the coaches and players that were covered up. There’s a Guardian article here.
With the men’s team there was a DV cover-up that wasn’t reported plus additional fall out from there. Oregonian has a timeline of all the scandals here.
We have found that our enthusiasm has dwindled to almost nothing and while it’s hard to give up those kick ass seats plus something that had brought a lot of joy. Everything ends sometime.
Leaving on a good note. Another amazing event: PTFC for Peace. The Timbers and Thorns joined up and played each other in a charity game to raise money for Ukraine. Another event that far exceeded my expectations.
(The Timbers tagged posts are epic. I could write 10 posts with great Timbers memories.)
