MLS Commissioner Don Garber yesterday delivered the keynote address at a Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal luncheon, hitting on the “positive effect of Major League Soccer's arrival in Quebec, the growth of the league and the importance of the Impact in MLS” according to Randy Phillips of the MONTREAL GAZETTE. The Impact plays its inaugural MLS game March 10 against the Whitecaps, while their home debut against the Fire is set for March 17. More than “32,000 tickets have been sold for the game” and Garber and Impact President Joey Saputo “expressed confidence attendance would top 58,542 -- the largest crowd ever for a soccer game in Canada.” Garber said, "We're very excited about being in Montreal. It is an opportunity for us to connect with a new culture. It will now be the third language that we'll have our games televised in, along with English and Spanish, and we're very excited about having our games now televised in French.” However, he added, "We don't have a sense this is going to be a widely successful offering the day we're out of the box. What it's about is a long term plan to try to ensure that we're building something that can be very, very important to the city and the people who live here. Whether it's as good as or better than Toronto or Vancouver … (we) hope they're all good." Phillips notes Saputo “made an appeal for more support from the ticket-buying public.” Only about 7,000 season tickets have been sold to date. Saputo: "We're making progress and heading in the right direction, but I still don't feel that city really grasps, understands, what's coming. Work still needs to be done.” He added, "If I were sitting here today and saying we had 15,000 season tickets sold and 60,000 tickets for the first game and the team's already built, then we say that's good. But we're not there” (MONTREAL GAZETTE, 2/16).
