The Adventures of an MLS Away Fan (Part I)

By: Michael | August 6th, 2007

If you’ve thought to yourself over the past week “Gee, the Wizards have played a couple of games and I don’t see anything at all about them at kcwizards.theoffside.com,” then I must say, pat yourself on the back, because you are certainly an astute follower of this blog. The reason for my brief absence was a noble venture which my wife and I recently returned from: a road trip to Foxboro, MA to see the Wizards visit the Revolution at Gillette Stadium. Because the Wizards don’t play another game until the 19th, I’ll be chronicling the trip over a few parts. This first installment I’d like to call:

Part I: Getting Tickets to an MLS Away Game.

On the surface, getting tickets to an away game was a quick and painless process – especially since my wife did it, unbeknownst to me, as a birthday present. Somehow, she managed to avoid buying them from ticketmaster and instead employing the ticket-finding capabilities of coasttocoasttickets.com. For those of you wondering if this switch in carrier came with a greater price, than an emphatic “yes!” in reply is in order, to the tune of 40 or 50% over the price at the gate.

How do I know the markup, you ask? Far too late into the trip to turn back our tiny, AC-less, so-blue-it’s-really-purple 2000 Chevy Metro LSI, we realized we left the tickets back home. No joke. A simple call to our ticket supplier, who can simply have new tickets forwarded to the box office, right? The following process is necessary for an away fan who bought their tickets at coasttocoasttickets.com:

1) Call the Coast to Coast Tickets customer service. With luck, your customer service representative will know a bit of the same dialect of English as you. Enough, anyway, to insist CtC can not help you except to inform you that the tickets were acquired through PhatTickets.com.

2) Call PhatTickets.com’s customer service number and remember – with an unnecessary “Ph-” in the name, you know the company has got to be chock full of helpful associates. So helpful as to inform you that they have no idea why you wouldn’t even bother tracking down your tickets because MLS seats are as easy to come across as seats to… well… something that never sells out. Besides, PhatTickets.com obtained the tickets from yet another ticket vendor.

3) Obtain the number for said ticket vendor and give it a call. Make sure you call on “one of 4 days a year” the company’s boss is around after closing time and happens to take a call. This will increase your hope of actually acquiring the left behind tickets and make the “…but sorry, you’ll need to call tomorrow at 9 or 10AM when we open,” even more disappointing.

4) Sleep. Wake up on game day in time to call the ticket vendor again.

5) Getting service from said ticket vendor is a three step process. You must (A) become flat-out rejected by the vendor, (B) remind the associate that you spoke with the boss last night, who said it shouldn’t be a problem, and (C) receive a fearful, stammering promise to find more information out and return your call.

6) Wait.

7) Receive a call from said ticket vendor associate and give them your last name to confirm your order (of all things…). Receive a renewed promise that your tickets will be forwarded.

Wait.

9) Receive another call from said ticket vendor associate. Find out that even though they forwarded all the necessary information to the Gillette Stadium ticket office, ticket-forwarding is only accepted for Patriots games and concerts. Not for NE Revolution games.

10) Buy new tickets at the gate an hour before gametime, two sections over, nine sections back, and twenty bucks cheaper – each! Be sure to have some sort of justification for overpaying for tickets, losing them, and then buying another set… something like “If I had my way, MLS would be popular enough for tickets to cost as much as I spent anyway!”

Thus concludes the first thrilling installment of “The Adventures of an MLS Away Fan”. Tune in next time when I describe the best way to get to Gillette Stadium and realize that more people are interested in a Patriot’s training session than a professional soccer GAME.