Conor Casey, Season Tickets and Embrace the Colours--------------by Section 112 Blizzard

No Conor Casey Announcement? After media reports late last week, complete with direct quotes from Mo Johnston, made it appear that Conor Casey would be joining TFC from Mainz 05, so far there has been no official announcement although Bob Gansler confirmed last night on the FAN 590's Soccer Show that Casey is in Florida at the TFC training camp. The presence of Colombian international forward Hector Hurtado at training camp, Mo Johnston's recent insistence that Alecko Eskandarian is "going nowhere" and the availability of Edson Buddle and Abbe Ibrahim to play up front this summer, makes Conor Casey look potentially surplus to requirements. It will be interesting to see whether the top ranked allocation is being used to enable a trade with another MLS franchise such as Casey's hometown Colorado Rapids similar to Carlos Ruiz moving from the Galaxy to FC Dallas so that Landon Donovan could play in the city of his choice.

Season Ticket Sales With the latest amazing news posted yesterday on the RPB messageboard by TFC's business manager Paul Beirne (mlsintoronto) that only 500 full season tickets remain available for sale (probably based on a season ticket cap of 14,000), following on from the recent news that all 30 luxury suites have been sold out for between $25,000 and $40,000 each I have to admit to being absolutely amazed at how well things are going right now off the field. There was never any doubt in my mind that there was massive support for soccer, particularly amongst recent immigrants, but I was seriously concerned that season ticket prices of $800 and $1060 would scare a lot of people away given the fact that MLS is not even close to being the best league in the word unlike the situation with the Leafs, Raptors and Blue Jays in the NHL, NBA and MLB. With only single season tickets left now amongst the $1060 reds there are obviously a lot of well-heeled people in the GTA who really love their soccer and Paul Beirne and his team clearly knew what they were doing when they set up the ticket prices. We are perhaps seeing the effects of the youth soccer registration boom of the last decade making our sport much more mainstream than it was in the NASL era.

Embrace the Colours One of my fellow moderators on the RPB forum, dinamoBBBArsenal came up with an excellent idea this week when he called on TFC fans to Embrace the Colours by wearing red to the home opener. Paul Beirne has already expressed interest in the concept and has suggested "Red Sea" as a possible collective name for spectators who do this. Perhaps the "The Sea of Red" at Nebraska Cornhuskers games in NCAA football could provide inspiration to TFC supporters in the years ahead. Anyone who remembers what the "white outs" looked like at Winnipeg Jets playoff games will know how effective this kind of thing can be if it really catches on. The goal for a group like the Red Patch Boys (in my opinion anyway) is not to be a small clique acting like an aloof elite stuck in a distant corner of the stadium and ignored by almost all the other spectators but to be a group that tries to kick start and to genuinely help build up passionate support amongst not just dozens but thousands of TFC supporters right around the stadium.