Sounders paying off for Pioneer Square

Seattle soccer fans aren't the only ones giving thanks for Sounders FC this year.

Many Pioneer Square restaurants and retailers, hit hard by the economy, are grateful for a team with 31,000 enthusiastic followers who spend money eating, drinking and shopping for sports paraphernalia before each game.

This Sunday's Major League Soccer Cup between Real Salt Lake and the Los Angeles Galaxy will cap the season at Qwest Field with a crowd of more than 40,000 people.

When Sounders fans started showing up last March for Seattle's first MLS season, the owner of F.X. McRory's Steak Chop & Oyster House across from Qwest Field wasn't sure the throngs would last.

"We wondered, 'Are the fans going to follow these guys from March until October?' And by God, they've been more than fans," Mick McHugh said. "They've been exuberant, filling the lower bowl (of Qwest Field), and they know what a beer's for, that gang."

During 30 years in Pioneer Square, F.X. McRory's has seen ups (Mariners playoff games in 2001) and downs (when it first opened in the late 1970s), and McHugh knows, to the day, how dependent the restaurant is on sports.

"The Mariners play 81 home games, the Seahawks have 10 home games," he said, "And the Sounders — God bless them, we're happy to have them — had 15 regular-season games and two friendlies this summer with Barcelona and Chelsea."

For the two games with well-known European teams, attendance topped 65,000, the same as a typical Seahawks football game.

Game days are vital to the Pioneer Square neighborhood, where restaurant, hotel and food-service income is substantially higher than the sales of all other retailers combined.

Business for both types of businesses has slowed since 2007, according to the state Department of Revenue. Restaurant, hotel and food-service sales were $6.3 million for the second quarter of 2009, down 13 percent from the second quarter of last year. Sales for other retailers were $3.6 million, down 28 percent.

McHugh's restaurant was no exception — he had to lay off a manager last December because business was slow.

Restaurants and sports shops feel it when the Mariners have a bad season, because "when attendance is down to half, that's only 50 percent of the people walking through the area," said Lisa Dixon, program director for the nonprofit Pioneer Square Community Association.

The popularity of the Sounders, who played one playoff game at Qwest before their season came to an end with a loss in Houston, has "added that many more days of higher levels of business, and in this economy that has a huge effect," Dixon said.

For the Sports Den, a sports-apparel shop in Pioneer Square, "the Sounders have kind of filled the void of the Sonics leaving and the other teams not doing so well," manager Kevin McCluskey said. "We were pleasantly surprised."

Soccer fans are particularly fond of Sounders scarves, he said, which cost about $25.

The team's supporters set an MLS record for merchandise bought in one season.

Tod Leiweke, CEO of the Seahawks and the Sounders, said even die-hard Chelsea fans who visited Seattle for the game were "blown away" by the Sounders spirit, including the game-day March to the Match where thousands of fans rallied from Pioneer Square to Qwest Field.

"The vendors around us tell us they did gangbuster sales, and we see a sea of green around us on game day," he said.

One of the promises of Qwest Field, when citizens voted in the late 1990s to help fund it, was that it would create economic activity and help revitalize that part of downtown, "and I think it has," Leiweke said.

Not everyone buys that argument.

"In general, it (the stadium) doesn't bring anything to Seattle," said Dennis Coates, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has studied stadium subsidies. "If you don't go to a Sounders game or a Mariners game or a Seahawks game, you go to the movies or theater and any number of alternatives where you can spend your entertainment dollar."

He argues that cities would get more for their money by bankrolling venues that are open more days a year.

Stadium spillover to neighborhood businesses has diminished with modern stadiums, which tend to be more self-contained with their own extensive food and entertainment options, said Frank Stephenson, an economics professor at Berry College in Rome, Ga., who has studied concession sales.

He said Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs play, is an example of an old-style stadium with so few amenities that fans frequent surrounding restaurants and bars. In contrast, the new Yankee Stadium in New York is said to offer little spillover to surrounding businesses, Stephenson said.

"What neighborhood effect there used to be is considerably reduced, because they put much more stuff inside," he said.

Seattle's stadiums appear to fall somewhere between the extremes.

Pyramid Alehouse Brewery across from Safeco Field sees its average sales grow two- to fourfold when any of the teams is playing, said Pyramid President Mike Brown.

The alehouse gets the most business from Mariners fans, because they have more home games. Baseball fans also tend to hang out after games. "They make a whole day of it," he said.

But Seahawks games bring more people to the neighborhood, and they're rowdy, Brown said.

The Sounders crowd comes before the game rather than after, and fills the place with cheers.

"They're very gregarious, and the whole alehouse turns into a big Sounders party with chants," he said, singing one heard on game days: "Here we go, Sounders, here we go!"

Melissa Allison: 206-464-3312 or mallison@seattletimes.com