Impact Owner Joey Saputo yesterday "didn’t hide his disappointment in falling ticket sales and fan interest in the team, which played before swaths of empty seats as it finished last" in MLS in '14, according to Bill Beacon of the CP. Saputo: "I can say the buzz for the Impact is not there. That worries me a lot." When the Impact "made the jump" to MLS in '12, they were "third in ticket sales in the then-19-team league." By '14, the team "was down to 11th and the club fears it will be 13th this season." The Impact "has sold only about 5,000 season tickets." Saputo said that the Impact "fell $2 million short" of their ticket-sales target last season. The club "hopes to turn that around with better marketing, and that interest will be renewed by the club’s major off-season player moves," including the signing of Belgian D Laurent Ciman and Italian MF Marco Donadel. Despite the "gloomy numbers and a feeling that the club has failed to make inroads in public interest after three years in MLS, Saputo said he has not considered selling or moving the team." He added that buying into MLS, "building Saputo Stadium and a soon-to-open training centre and bringing in expensive foreign talent has cost the team" more than $100M. The result so far "has been a drop from about 19,000 fans per game to about 16,000." Saputo: "The disappointment is thinking we’d be more relevant in the city after three years. ... When you look at it, maybe we’re not the soccer market we thought we were. If it means we have to work harder, we’ll work harder. But I won’t hide my disappointment with where we are in the overall sports landscape of Montreal" (CP, 2/4).
