The clock struck 10am on Wednesday, June 12 and thousands of soccer fans, including yours truly, descended upon the Austin FC website to place our season ticket deposit.

Only to be greeted by a crashed website and a 500 internal server error message. 

Chaos ensued.

Austin FC scrambled and posted a direct link to the fevo.com ticketing site about 10 minutes later (seemed like an eternity to me). After the smoke cleared, I ended up placing my deposit at 10:17am, opting for the $100 deposit—now worried about the availability of general seating.

A couple hours later, Austin FC president Andy Loughnane took to social media, posting a video apologizing and announcing the website was back up. (From the look on his face, he didn’t seem too annoyed that the site crashed.)

By late afternoon, speculation was rampant among fans on social media about what this all meant for season ticket demand. Around 4pm, Austin FC confirmed our suspicions with a single, simple tweet “Thank You, Austin”.

The next afternoon (June 13), the team elaborated on the tweet with a press release announcing Austin FC secured deposits totaling over 30,000 seats in slightly over 24 hours. This beat a previous ticket deposit record set by Atlanta United a couple years ago.

What about ticket pricing?

Austin FC is still accepting season ticket deposits. According to the team, it’s not uncommon for professional teams to collect more deposits than there are seats, since a sizable percentage of deposits don’t turn into season ticket purchases

For a 20,000-seat stadium, I expect about 15,000-17,000 will be reserved for season ticket holders—allowing for single match tickets to still be sold. At this time, Austin FC does not intend to increase stadium capacity higher than the 20,500 seats originally planned.

Late 2019 (maybe timed with the stadium groundbreaking?) we’ll get seat pricing info and be able to choose our seats. Austin FC front office will also open an experience center for potential season ticker holders to get a taste of what the stadium will be like.

All in all, season ticket deposit day a HUGE win for major league soccer in Austin. It validates the decision of MLS and Austin FC’s leadership to locate a team here.

In addition, with the potential of a sold out stadium in 2021, it gives the team greater leverage for sponsorship deals and other partnerships. Ultimately, more $$$ from sponsorships mean they can spend more on coaches, players, and facilities down the road.

Update: In September 2019, the club revealed at the groundbreaking ceremony that they had passed the 37,000 mark in season ticket deposits. It has since reached 38,000.