The Portland Timbers drew 10,077 people to their Reserve League game against the Vancouver Whitecaps on Sunday. Let that sink in for a second. That's more people than attended 12 different regular-season MLS games at various stadiums this season.
Timbers Draw 10,000-Plus To Reserve League Match
Granted, that’s with a little help from Groupon, but really not that much. Even taking out the 1,700 two-seat packages sold through the online deal, that’s still more than 6,500 people presumably paying $10 a head to see a bunch of bench players go at it.
What’s even more exciting is what this could mean for the future of the Cascadia Cup. It has already been well documented that supporters were not given access to as many tickets as they wanted for the regular-season matches. Now that four of the six games are in the books, not to mention a handful of reserve games, I think we can at least be assured that these fanbases are at least capable of behaving themselves.
Maybe it’s too soon to open up all of CenturyLink Field for these games, but it would be cool to see the Reserve League encounters between these three teams turned into events like Sunday’s game more regularly. At the very least, this was a great chance to expose some new people to the Timbers experience. Experiences like these can only help improve the league.
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