White is the Colour...Sucker is the Game...

The Vancouver Whitecaps are into stoppage time as they try to score a new waterfront stadium in Gastown.

A number of community activists oppose a stadium being built on top of the existing railyards near the SeaBus terminal, but this page is concerned that despite their good intentions, (mixing metaphors in 5...4...3...) they amount to pawns being manipulated by Vancouver's real estate overlords. The arguments agaisnt the stadium aren't resonating because they're not really based in fact: How disruptive to Gastown residents can stadium events be when Gastown has almost no residents? How does the stadium deprive people of a waterfront view when the waterfront is concealed by Gastown itself? The stadium would give a waterfront view to 15,000 people at a time. How many people would get an ocean view from overpriced condominiums on the same site?

There are some practical arguments against rushing to build a wee waterway Wembley. Even if Greg Kerfoot is ponying up his own dough to bake this bread, will he still be good for it once construction costs run up against the Olympic venues, the Canada Line, and the Gateway Project, not to mention the perpetually sprouting condo crops around town? Everybody wants everything at once (at least before the five-ring reckoning of 2010), but there's only so many bricks and bricklayers around.

Also, it's not like the Whitecaps are a franchise that would evoke wailing and gnashing of teeth if they skipped town. These are not your Dad's (or your older brother's) Whitecaps. This is a team in the minor-pro, semi-amateur United Soccer Leagues who adopted the Whitecaps name to stir up memories of Vancouver's brush with soccer greatness in the 1979 NASL Soccer Bowl. Kerfoot knows his marketing, and it's not a surprise that the soccer stadium is coming to a head during the FIFA World Cup. Is there that serious an appetite for soccer in Vancouver? At the least there's a serious appetite for drunken flag waving and horn honking on Commercial Drive which looks like a serious appetite for soccer. That perception of momentum might allow the Whitecaps to set the offside trap for stadium opponents and break ground, or something above ground, relatively soon.