How many Season Tickets will Canberra A-League sell?

Before kicking a ball, the team (Seattle) has sold 20,000 season tickets at Qwest Field

Yes that's for an American "soccer" team. So why not Australia and of course Canberra?

Well I reckon we can sell 20,000 season tickets in Canberra for an A-League side. Stop laughing I hear you already those of you who have already howled down even the idea of a team in Canberra...never mind having the nerve to go for gold, 20,000 season tickets.

You are only limited by your dreams, your marketing ability, and opportunity to engage the community. We have all three covered in Canberra.

In Canberra an A-League team long-term is a gold mine. You have a different view? You must be a worn-out Cosmos fan still living in the past or just anti-Aussie football.

and feel free to disagree..just don't bother telling me!

Instead put your energy to better use tell me what we need to do to enable us to get to that golden 20,000 season tickets. Dare to dream.

Full article from the New York Times below.

New York Times wrote:
March 16, 2009, 7:04 pm
Carey Waits for the Other Boot to Drop in Seattle
By Andrew Keh
As host of “The Price Is Right,” Drew Carey knows a bit about the fickleness of good fortune, and as he prepares for his first season as an owner in Major League Soccer, the comedian can’t help but be a little fatalistic.

“It’s like being at a hot dice table,” said Carey, a minority owner of the Seattle Sounders. “Everything has gone so right. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Carey is a recent convert to soccer, but he has embraced the sport quickly and wholeheartedly since attending his first M.L.S. match in 2003 at the Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif. Four years after that game, he owned a piece of his own franchise. Now, as the Sounders prepare for their inaugural season, which begins at home Thursday against the Red Bulls, Carey appears to have every reason to be bubbling with optimism.

The Sounders have been warmly embraced in Seattle, a city still reeling after the Supersonics of the N.B.A. left for Oklahoma City. Much of the buzz around the Sounders can be traced back to Carey, who in the past months has brought a fan’s enthusiasm to the owner’s box.

Before kicking a ball, the team has sold 20,000 season tickets at Qwest Field — more than the average attendance for most M.L.S. clubs — and they recently raised the limit on subscriptions to keep up with the demand. These fans, Carey explained, are effectively purchasing a “say-so” in the club. Season ticket holders will automatically become part of the Seattle FC Alliance, the club’s official supporter’s group, and have the right to vote on various club matters, most significantly the hiring and firing of the team’s general manager.

“You vote for presidents, you vote for mayor, I don’t see why you don’t do it for the general manager of your local sports team,” Carey said Monday during a visit to M.L.S headquarters in New York. Similar systems are employed overseas at clubs like FC Barcelona and Real Madrid of Spain. “We have to bring in a guy the fans like.”

To facilitate the community-oriented aspects of the operation, the club plans to open up a members-only forum on the Internet where fans can share stories, gripes, and multimedia content and make direct complaints and requests to the club. The Sounders will also have quarterly meetings with two fan representatives, an unusual practice for American professional sports.

“Not only are we letting them burn down the castle, we’re giving them the pitchforks and torches to do it,” Carey said.

The fans, for their part, are quick to light the match. When the franchise held an online vote last year to determine the club’s new moniker, the name “Sounders” — which has been closely associated with soccer in the city since the days of the N.A.S.L. — was not even an option on the ballot.

“While we should celebrate the past, we believe the M.L.S. Seattle team should be about where they are headed tomorrow and help position the club globally,” league commissioner Don Garber said at the time.

But a write-in campaign forced the name “Sounders” ahead of the other choices, an outcome with which Carey is now very pleased.

One meeting this summer between the club and its two fan representatives, meanwhile, produced a plan to have the team’s marching band (another Carey idea) escort fans from Seattle’s Pioneer Square, home to several of the city’s bars, to Qwest Field in what Carey called a “drunken march to the stadium” before each game.

Carey also said he wants to distribute team scarves and flash drives containing all of the club’s chants to fans at home games this season. Such subtle details — culled by Carey during his numerous soccer-viewing trips overseas — could help Seattle, as an expansion city, become one of the league’s premier destinations, just as Toronto did in 2007.

“I don’t think this could have happened in Cleveland,” Carey said of his hometown. People in Seattle, he said, are “a little more international. Soccer is not some weird sport to them.”

There are probably few cities, in fact, where the process of expansion could go as well as it has for the Sounders, with the groundswell of support and excitement they have engendered, and for Carey, it has all seemed almost too good to be true. He said that he has begun to tell himself and his co-owners, “Something’s got to happen bad.”

But then he paused to think.

“Maybe it could be one of those magic seasons where everything goes alright.”