NWSL’s KC Current Tap SeatGeek for New Soccer Stadium Ticketing
The Kansas City Current have extended their partnership with SeatGeek through at least the 2024 season—when the NWSL club’s new stadium is set to open.
SeatGeek will ticket the club’s inaugural season at Kansas City Current Stadium at Berkley Riverfront Park, the first venue built specifically for a women’s professional soccer team.
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The Current originally signed a two-season deal with the mobile-first ticketing company in 2022 that runs through the end of this year, the club’s last at Children’s Mercy Park in Kansas City. The extension makes SeatGeek one of the first partnerships the club has announced for the new 11,500-person capacity, $117-million venue.
SeatGeek will continue to handle ticketing for all Current home games, as well as other sporting events, concerts and live entertainment when the new stadium opens in 2024. In addition to the underlying ticketing technology, Kansas City will also continue to utilize SeatGeek’s other offerings, including its event-day operating system, Rally.
“We anticipate fully utilizing this brand new, state-of-the-art venue that we’re opening in downtown Kansas City and [attracting] a variety of events—really being able to own and maximize this stadium from the time it opens while making sure that the KC Current, our team, is priority number one,” Dan Boyd, Kansas City’s VP of sales and ticketing, said in an interview. “There’s going to be year-round utilization that SeatGeek will be our partner on, from the on-sale strategies, marketing visibility to using their technology, even in-venue.”
The Current are one of four NWSL teams to use the company’s primary ticketing platform alongside the Portland Thorns, Houston Dash and Racing Louisville.
“The end-to-end user experience for fans has been overlooked for too long, and a lot of the innovation in this area is coming from women’s sports,” Jeff Ianello, EVP of client partnerships at SeatGeek, said. “Our goal is to help the Current make its new stadium a model for fan-friendly innovation by starting with technology first.”
SeatGeek was founded in 2009 as a secondary sales platform. Its business now extends to primary ticketing and using its technology to assist teams with broader fan experiences. Half of the Premier League, including Manchester City and Liverpool, also call SeatGeek a partner, as do eight MLS clubs. SeatGeek partners with a handful of NBA and NFL teams, as well, including the Utah Jazz, Cleveland Cavaliers, Baltimore Ravens and Dallas Cowboys, and the NHL’s Florida Panthers.
Earlier this year, the ticketing platform announced an exclusive deal with Learfield-owned Paciolan, which has extensive reach in college sports, and a five-year resale partnership with Major League Baseball—extending its influence across all five major U.S. leagues. SeatGeek’s growing portfolio was appealing to Current leadership, which hopes to tap into that expanding network to create a “vibrant, consistent, sold-out” experience for fans and players at the new stadium.
“SeatGeek is really penetrating the ticket marketplace in a very strategic manner,” Boyd said. “Some of their recent relationships with Major League Baseball and Paciolan—what that does is [brings] more visibility. The more users they have on SeatGeek, the more attraction we have to our event pages and our ticketing offers.”
Kansas City averaged just shy of 5,000 fans per game in 2021 and ranked fourth in NWSL attendance in 2022 at an average of around 7,600 fans per game, welcoming a record crowd of 10,395 to the club’s match against Angel City last August. Boyd declined to disclose specific season ticket sale numbers for 2023 as the Current approach the start of this year’s campaign but said the club has seen a “substantial increase in season ticket membership year-over-year,” sparking optimism that average attendance numbers will continue to trend upward.
Kansas City’s owners—which include financial executives Angie Long and Chris Long, Brittany Mahomes, and Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes (who was announced as a new owner in January)—first unveiled plans for the NWSL-specific stadium in 2021. It was originally projected to cost $70 million. The group also funded an $18 million training complex for the Current, which opened in June 2022 as the first built specifically for an NWSL club.
Kansas City will host the reigning NWSL champion Portland Thorns in its opener on April 1.
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