The Inherent Problem

Buried in Luis Arroyave's Tribune article yesterday was a revealing quote from head Fireman John Guppy. Regarding the 4,000 or so empty seats at the Fire-Celtic match on Sunday, Guppy said "I'm disappointed Celtic didn't have a greater draw. Forget about Blanco, I really thought it would be a sold-out event even without him."

I want to contrast this with the fact that I saw two hastily hand-written signs hanging at Johnny O'Hagan's in Wrigleyville promoting a bus or some other promotional package for the match. Guppy's default position here is exactly backwards. If you want to actually do your job getting asses in seats, the assumption should be that nobody is going to show up. None of this does anything to dispel the notion I have that Guppy severely overvalues his product, and in this case, thinks a Fire-Celtic matchup can sell itself.

Well, it can't. The Fire front office should have been reaching out to every Irish, English and Scottish bar and restaurant in the Chicagoland area with posters, ticket giveaways, and whatever other marketing tricks they have in their bag -- except Metro Playoff Fever, natch -- but it looks like they didn't.

Part of this may be the intense excitement among a very small but vocal group of die-hard fans, who may be exerting a disproportionate amount of influence on the front office's thinking. This in itself is ironic, since paying too much attention to the die-hards is allegedly a part of what got Peter Wilt dismissed from the General Manager role in the first place.