Roundtables, apathy and too much, too soon When Joey Saputo, surrounded by three other senior members of club management, convened the Montreal Impact's annual roundtable with selected media members on Wednesday, he pulled no punches in admitting the club intends to tackle creeping supporter apathy.

Noel Butler Analyst, TSN Radio 690 Montreal Archive

The mood was sombre, the skies grey. The tone and outlook rather grim.

Whilst the club’s technical staff has been going about their work, in a most effective fashion, resulting in a dramatic upgrade on the pitch, the highly vital business off the pitch for the Montreal Impact, meanwhile, has screeched to such a grinding halt it has found a reverse gear.

This all we found out at Stade Saputo Wednesday afternoon when Joey Saputo, surrounded by three other senior members of club management, convened the club's roundtable with selected media members.

It was no surprise that when the Impact joined the league in 2012, the club would immediately pole vault itself towards the very top of the MLS box office standings. This, after all, was an organization which would routinely fill Stade Saputo to a 13,000 capacity for a Sunday lunchtime fixture in the USL or NASL.

MLS had originally fluttered its eyelids at the Montreal marketplace when league President Mark Abbott was setting about writing the league’s constitution ahead of its 1996 debut season. Not many other markets across North America could claim the soccer pedigree that Montreal can. Joey Saputo, though, had always designed it so that the Impact would only make the step up to MLS once the organization had its own stadium. In Saputo’s perfect storm, all three Canadian clubs would join the league simultaneously.

We now know that scenario did not exactly play itself out that way. My though, how Montreal responded when the MLS circus finally arrived in town - embrace it fully they most certainly did. For the inaugural home opener, in excess of 58,000 packed into Olympic Stadium to welcome the Chicago Fire into town. In doing so, the Impact could claim a record attendance for a Montreal-based football club, a record which the Manic had held since 1981 in the midst of those halcyon NASL days.

With the significant upgrade to Stade Saputo required to bring it up to MLS standard and specification during the inaugural 2012 season, the club was required to play its first five home games in the Olympic Stadium. Great for the accountants, but with the opportunity cost of this, the Impact was able to falsely inflate its average home attendance to over 22,000. That works out at a 110 per-cent capacity of Stade Saputo and good for a bronze medal on the MLS attendance podium in 2012.

Aggregate attendances for the Impact, we now know, have been on the steady decline since 2012, to the point that only 5,000 season tickets were sold in 2014 as the Impact fell to 14th place in the 19-team league. This dramatic fall off far more alarming when you factor in 2013’s run to the MLS playoffs. If that is not bad enough now, consider that for 2015 season tickets, the club is currently at a rather meagre 60 per-cent retention rate.

Additionally, the mere fact that only 15,000 tickets have been sold so far for the return leg of the the team's CONCACAF Champions League quarter-final against Mexican side Pachuca demonstrates that what worked in the early days of MLS is neither reaching, nor connecting with both Impact supporters or the Montreal public in general. Merchandise sales are not immune, either, as this core revenue stream is providing diminishing returns, as well.

He certainly has his critics does Saputo, but it would be far more worse if he didn’t. You have got to admire the unplugged way the club president laid it all out on the table for those gathered for Wednesday’s roundtable. There were no PR focus groups present or a "Let’s bury it on a Friday afternoon"-type strategy for him. Saputo was brutally frank and forthrightly honest, instead, about the current harsh reality.There were no excuses, but just a sense of responsibility and the recognition things had to be revised around how the club markets and promotes itself with the very sizeable and still growing soccer audience in Montreal.

Patrons flocked to their favorite pubs, cafés, bars and restaurants right across the city last weekend to take in football action whether it be in the BPL, La Liga, Serie A or even Portugal’s Primeira. For instance, the public house where I took in the match-up between Chelsea and Manchester City, the top two teams in the BPL, was packed to capacity, despite the encounter proving to be less than enthralling.

Since arriving in Montreal over two decades ago, I have noticed the culture of going out, more often than not, at unearthly hours of a morning to watch a match at your favourite spot has grown at an extraordinary rate. This in spite of the fact that, these days, you could take the much easier option to stay home and cheer on your team from the comfort of the sofa, under the blanket with coffee cup in hand.

What compels fans to, on the one hand, go watch Barcelona and, on the other, not attend Stade Saputo is one vital and vexing question to which the Impact front office must find an answer and reason as they set about finding solutions for the current prevailing apathy for the Impact.

Joey Saputo freely admitted Wednesday that growing the soccer culture in Montreal was much more difficult than the club had envisioned. This doesn’t come as a surprise. You can’t create culture. Not even the finest, brightest and most successful marketing minds can. Don’t even think you can control it, either. Then add into the mix that football runs counter-culture to North America’s glorious traditional sporting landscape.

All you can do is your utmost in an attempt to influence the process. Effectively connect with your market and put the vital foundation blocks in place and, just like something that goes viral, let it take root and leave it alone to shape and form itself. After all, soccer culture wasn’t formed in a laboratory or created in the offices of an advertising agency.

Having had time to properly and fully digest what Joey Saputo disclosed Wednesday - what many think was one of the greatest and grandest football nights in the Impact’s two decade-plus history was actually a case of too much, too soon and likely a root cause of where the club is today.

I’m referring of course to when over 55,000 jammed into the Olympic Stadium to take in February 2009’s Champions League quarter-final first leg. The perfect script also included a 2-0 victory over the heavily favoured Santos Laguna. Following, did apathy - a word Saputo used often Wednesday - actually set in with the Impact’s front office?

We all know how the second leg played itself out.

One only learns in adversity. It’s not what happens that counts, but how you respond. The team’s response to that demoralizing second-leg defeat in early March 2009 was to go and be crowned USL Playoff Champions some eight months later.

On the evening of the meltdown in Santos Laguna, I was hosting a post-game show. Opening up the phone lines to listeners, you really couldn’t script who was first up any better.

Saputo was on hold. Not able to travel to Mexico, he watched the match from home and the Impact president wanted to apologize to the supporters for the club letting them down. Taking and finding the time, he certainly did.

On March 3, Impact supporters have their opportunity to respond to the adversity their club is now going through.

I don’t for one moment expect them not to respond. After all, when members of your family or friends face adversity, the natural reaction is to support and rally around them. Come out in their droves Impact supporters most certainly will, as will many Montrealers, who have not ever set foot in a soccer stadium before.

The job of the front office and the team will be to compel as many as possible to attend Stade Saputo this MLS season and then convince them the Impact is their club and not Chelsea or Real Madrid.

Noel.Butler@BellMedia.ca

@TheSoccerNoel on Twitter