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<\/p>\nBaseball. But there’s a complication with baseball. I love rugby games in baseball. Stadiums. I think that the extra space that the baseball stadium usually provides is pretty cool. The unique configuration of the stands and a baseball stadium make it more fun.<\/p>\n
Certainly baseball stadiums lend themselves terrifically well to Sevens tournaments because you can, as happened in AT&T Stadium in San Francisco. Everyone sort of hung out at center field, having a beverage or two while watching the games out there, which sort of cut across laterally the outfield and the infield. And that little crescent area of deep center field was where people were warming up so you could see both of them at the same time. It’s really great. But I, think baseball teams are going to have a tough time, worrying about lines on the field, field getting chewed up with multiple rugby games on there, having to get rid of the pitcher’s mound and then replace it.<\/p>\n
It’s a big job to do that. And going into October we don’t even know who’s going to be vacant and who’s not. So you can’t plan that until the end of September. First week of October is when you know who’s playing or not. I suppose you could look at the All-Star Break and say, okay, we’ve got an opening for one more baseball stadium. Who’s in last place? It’s a bit silly. So ultimately we come to football, stadiums, probably NFL stadiums, plus some high end major league soccer stadiums or multi-use stadiums, plus the odd outlier stadium that might happen.<\/p>\n
What they’re going through right now. Ross Young, people working with him have been going across the country examining venues. Not only examining venues though, what they’re also doing is meeting with and talking to the people who are in charge of the venues.<\/p>\n
It’s not always the same kind of people. Sometimes it’s a football team, sometimes it’s a convention and visitors bureau or a sporting entity. Or it might be the city itself. Sometimes, I think it’s Baltimore, where the Ravens are essentially tenants in their own stadium.<\/p>\n
They don’t have control over who plays, what happens in there. Yes\u00a0they have input. They can say, hey, could you please not put a country music concert on in the, or a tractor pull the day before a football game. Of course they wouldn’t do that, but it’s someone else. It’s not necessarily the people playing the sport that are in control of the stadium. How do they decide whether they want rugby, the Rugby World Cup in that place?<\/p>\n
It might be some places they sit there and go, this is great. We actually don’t have a lot of football going on here or a lot of sport. This time we’re going to fill it. We’re going to make\u00a0a lot of money with visitors and things like that. This\u00a0is where they say, yeah, this is an option we want.<\/p>\n
We’re going to be available for multiple pool games all the way through. We’ll be happy to do it. We’ll even make, you know, something like that. We’ll, we’ll maybe make a tenant move for a bit or something like that. Okay. They’re going around and finding out not only then which venues work, but which controlling entities are interested.<\/p>\n
If they’re not interested, waste of time. Okay. Finding the venues.<\/p>\n
I think you heard that everybody’s thinking big. They’re not thinking about 10,000 seat stadiums. There’s no point. It remains true. I found out another surprising piece of information, but that is true, that per-game Rugby World Cup outdraws the FIFA World Cup.<\/p>\n
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That’s a surprise to me. But when I thought about it, I thought, actually, that does seem to work. There is a reason for that. What we did know, and we knew when the bid came through, that the number one attended FIFA World cup in total fans and fans per event was United States, 1994. Nobody’s eclipsed that since. Why?<\/p>\n
Everybody wants to visit the United States. It’s a really fun place to visit. Lots of different places, Very, very different. So if you want to go to New York, you want to go to New Orleans, you want to go to Miami, you want to go to San Francisco, you want to go to San Diego, you want to go to Memphis or Nashville, you’re going … or Chicago. Right. You’re going to very, very different places with different cultures, different food, different vibe, really interesting no matter what.<\/p>\n
So, that’s, that’s one of the reasons why people want to visit the United States. It’s also very easy to get around. An unmatched highway system, and airport system.<\/p>\n
Really. Probably the only country that I can think of easier to get around is probably Germany. Or as easy to get around is Germany. So they’re going to go big on venues. 60, thousand, 70,000, maybe 80,000. [The ] United States has a lot of those. They also have a pretty good amount of 20- to 30,000-seat stadiums, usually soccer stadiums. What the USA doesn’t have a lot of is that 35, 40 to 55 [thousand] seat stadiums just don’t have a lot of them.<\/p>\n