Brought to you by the Minnesota United sells 14,500 season tickets before completion of new stadium. Minnesota United A virtual tour that gave fans a glimpse inside a new stadium coming to Major League Soccer (MLS) next season triggered a flurry of season ticket sales before the venue had even been built. Minnesota United have introduced a “fully digital” ticketing platform for their fanbase, which they say has seen the club’s membership base grow by 20 per cent on 2018. The platform, which was built to give supporters and partners a 360-degree view from any seat inside the proposed Allianz Field venue, was introduced to supporters by appointment, via an online portal that “brought the stadium to life”. Speaking in Barcelona this week, Jeanene Valentine, the Minneapolis club’s director of ticket sales, says the 19,400-seater stadium – which is “100 per cent privately funded” – will go ticketless when it opens in March 2019. “We’re actually sold out,” Valentine told the Sports Technology Symposium, held at the Nou Camp on Thursday. “As everybody may know, Minnesota is a highly competitive sports market. We have six professional sports teams in basketball, football, and baseball – we have it all. “With soccer not being so popular in America, we were trying to figure out how we were going to build excitement to get everyone to come and watch soccer and introduce them to the beautiful game. “As part of this, we knew we wanted to build a completely digital experience to show everyone something that they haven’t seen before and just let the momentum take us all the way into the [new] stadium.” The club, which joined MLS in 2015, has been playing its home fixtures at the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium, which is better known as a venue for football. Ahead of the move, Valentine says the club’s membership has grown exponentially – climbing from 4,000 season ticket holders in 2014 to 14,500 for the new campaign, which have been facilitated by online ticket aggregator Seat Geek. “We had to come up with a plan of attack and decided to strategically release on product at a time,” she continued, “and, that way, we can control customer inventory and flow and adjust pricing as needed when rolling out the next product. “This was an opportunity to take our season ticket holders and keep riding that momentum. At peak of this project, we averaged about 4,800 accounts entering the [virtual site] every two minutes. “Our corporate partners absolutely loved it [because] we had created a full experience you can have on an iPad and were excited to see what we were doing with the technology. They felt like our stadium was already there.”
Major League Soccer side Minnesota United has said it sold out of season tickets after taking fans on a virtual tour of the club's proposed new stadium. Its online portal allowed supporters to gain an immersive, 360-degree view of Allianz Field, which is scheduled to open in March 2019. The club currently plays at the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium. Minnesota United's new campaign helped it to a total of 4,000 season ticket holders, up from 14,500 four years ago.