DC United Signs New Lease At RFK Stadium, Plans To Make It More Soccer-Friendly

“It’s a great branding opportunity, but it’s more important that our supporters become accustomed to a 20,000-seat stadium, and we expect that limiting the capacity will encourage an increase in season ticket sales,” United President Kevin Payne told the Washington Post.

In previous years, capacity was about 45,000, a number that made RFK seem cavernous. The largest crowd United drew last year was 26,622, and was the only game all year that drew more than the new capacity. Last year, the team averaged about 15,000 fans and just 16,134 showed up for First Kick last week.

As nice as it has been to have stadiums built specifically for soccer cropping up seemingly every year, few of them have been true architectural wonders. The drawings for Houston’s BBVA Compass Stadium promised to change that and now real life pictures are showing just how gorgeous the stadium is going to be. Not to take anything away from places like Red Bull Arena and Livestrong Sporting Park, but this is just spectacular.

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Up until now, details of the Earthquakes’ stadium plans have been scarce. Current plans call for a relatively spartan, 18,000-seat, $60 million stadium that will be privately financed.

For more on the stadium, be sure to check out Earthquakes blog Quake, Rattle and Goal.

The facility was first built for the 1976 Montreal Olympics. It’s most frequent tenant was the Montreal Expos, but after the baseball team left in 2004 they have been without a regular occupant. The stadium is largely seen as a drag on taxpayers and it remains the largest stadium in Canada when it is expanded to its full 66,308-seat configuration.

The Impact have a history of playing games there, though. Most notably, they played in front of a crowd of 55,571 in the 2009 CONCACAF Champions League against Mexican club Santos Laguna.

Not much more to say about it than that, but it really is pretty amazing to think that just 10 years ago there was just one purpose-built stadium in MLS, Crew Stadium. Once this one opens up, there will only be one team that neither controls their current stadium nor has plans for a new one.

Check out the video after the jump.

Now, that is clearly not the most creative name for a stadium, but it has all the things you want in a nickname: it’s short, rolls off the tongue and is memorable. Will some people be confused? Maybe, but isn’t that the fun of a nickname?