Looking to Kansas City as a model for the new D.C. United stadium

For every D.C. United fan gushing about Mayor Vincent Gray's announcement of plans for a long-awaited new stadium at Buzzard Point, there's someone pointing out the obvious pratfalls. It's a $300 million project, with $150 million coming from D.C. taxpayers' pockets. Mayor Gray insists the stadium will help revitalize struggling neighborhoods and makes use of an area that's currently just a dilapidated industrial wasteland. But as anyone who's read Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski's seminal Soccernomics can tell you, promises of economic growth from stadiums are nebulous at best.

The proposed stadium, with Nationals Park down the block
and the Capitol in the background

It can work, though. I currently live in Kansas City, home of the recently-rebranded Sporting Kansas City. Like D.C. United, they were a founding member of Major League Soccer back in 1996. While MLS has grown in popularity over the last two decades and new teams like the Seattle Sounders average over 40,000 fans at each game, some of the older clubs are struggling in 2013. Seven of the ten teams with the worst attendance in MLS this season are founding members of the league. The novelty has worn off the founding clubs, and teams born in the more soccer-friendly environment of the 21st century have more ease gaining a fanbase.

Sporting KC found a way to buck that trend. The former Kansas City Wizards were virtually a non-entity in the KC sports landscape, and when they rebranded themselves with a more European-sounding name in 2011, they essentially tricked the city into thinking it had a new sports team. Their average attendance nearly doubled immediately.

Sporting Park and its revitalized fanbase

The driving force of the rebrand was SKC's new state-of-the-art stadium, Sporting Park (it was originally Livestrong Sporting Park, but... ya know). I've been to a handful of games there, and it's a beauty to behold. They sell out every single home game, have a presence all around the city, and even got an in-depth New York Times feature yesterday dedicated to how awesome they are.

Kansas City has become a reliable home for the U.S. national team, hosting multiple World Cup qualifiers while Washington, D.C. hosts... zero. It's embarrassing that the United States is now one of the only countries in the world not to play meaningful national team matches in its capital city.

The U.S. national team playing a World Cup qualifier at Sporting Park.
Shouldn't the nation's capital get games like this?

The new stadium's location within the District of Columbia is its huge advantage over Sporting Park. Sporting Park is in the outskirts of suburban Kansas City, Kansas, rather than the city core of Kansas City, Missouri. Buzzard Point isn't exactly Chinatown, but with the combined forces of D.C. United and nearby Nationals Park, it's a step in the right direction. Not to mention easy Metro access... something Sporting Park doesn't have at all.

The Buzzard Point project is key to revitalizing and expanding D.C. United's fanbase. I wouldn't go so far as saying the team needs a new name, but some sort of rebrand could be in order as well. As soccer becomes an increasingly important part of American sports culture, it's critical that D.C. maintains a successful MLS club, especially with D.C. being such an international city. I hope this leads to long-term economic development stemming from the stadium.

2013 MLS jersey rankings update: Sporting KC third kit!

A quick update to my ranking of Major League Soccer's assorted club uniforms for the 2013 season: last month, Sporting Kansas City unveiled a third jersey. What do you think?

Black with an argyle light/dark blue pattern across the chest. It's apparently a reference to the team's original jerseys back in the '90s when they were known as the wonderful Kansas City Wiz, later extended to the Wizards.

The jersey is great. The design is original and striking. The sponsor logo below the argyle pattern makes the whole thing look a bit too busy, but we can't escape big ol' sponsor logos even in specialty shirts... or can we?

Scottish giants Celtic and Rangers seem to be able to convince their sponsors to minimize their logos when the clubs want to release commemorative jerseys. Celtic's new 125th anniversary kit features the Tennent's sponsor logo in small white-on-white lettering below the team crest:

Why couldn't Sporting KC convince Ivy Funds to do the same?

Anyway, the dark new third jersey is so good, I'm not sure why it's a third jersey. Really, it should replace SKC's decent-but-unremarkable current away jersey:

But the whole "acknowledging our uniforms from the '90s" thing may be a sham. I don't recall nor could I find online any evidence of 1990s argyle jerseys in Kansas City. I guess the jerseys are meant to be a reference to this beauty:

A black shirt with a wavy design on the chest. But way more groovy than Sporting KC's new third jersey.

Overall, Sporting's new kit is a great design, but it doesn't quite bump the team up in my previous jersey rankings.

Kansas City, I Am Alive, and Lollipop Chainsaw

It's been a while since I've posted. My girlfriend and I have been in the middle of a move to Kansas City, Missouri! Now that we're all set up and I finally got internet in the apartment, I'll get back to my regular writing.

Right before leaving for KC, I finished Ubisoft's I Am Alive. It's received mixed reviews, but I loved it. Although it's obvious the developers wanted to create a more epic game than they were finally allowed, I Am Alive is a fantastic exploration of a nearly dead genre.

Survival-horror, once the bastion of Resident Evil and Silent Hill fame, has devolved into action and explosions. Perhaps this is because higher-fidelity graphics mean modern games don't need to rely on psychological horror to scare players. Perhaps it's because society today is increasingly ADD and doesn't want to spend more than 20 seconds walking through a room without shooting something. Regardless, survival-horror is an increasingly rare genre.

But there is hope! Swedish indie developer Frictional Games has been hard at work carrying the torch (or lantern?) for survival-horror with their Penumbra titles, and most recently, the iconic Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I Am Alive is an Xbox Live Arcade game in that same vein. While not as overtly scary as Amnesia, I Am Alive explores the "survival" part of "survival-horror." Bullets for your pistol are limited. Exposure to the dust around the city causes your stamina to fall. You can't climb forever like Lara Croft without hurting yourself. Most encounters with enemies are an exercise in finding a way to escape without a firefight.

I Am Alive has flaws. It's clear that the game's budget was slashed in the middle of production, with inaccessible areas and an abrupt ending. But the new ideas and unique approach in this title make the download worth it. Its emphasis on the struggle to survive and lack of empowerment of the player is a breath of fresh air in today's industry.

In other news, Suda 51's new effort, Lollipop Chainsaw, comes out on the 12th. And I'm worried. Grasshopper Manufacture's work has been getting increasingly silly and stupid. I know Suda is all about silly, but it seems he's beginning to phone it in. His 2005 opus, Killer7, had plenty of irreverent humor, but it was very dark and creepy at the same time. No More Heroes was less serious and more happy-go-lucky. Then Shadows of the Damned injected even more penis humor. I just hope Lollipop Chainsaw isn't as campy and half-hearted as it sounds like it's going to be.

At least Killer Is Dead has been announced for 2013.