More on Santos

Here's a story about the doubleheader at the Coliseum on Wednesday. Santos Laguna beat FAS of El Salvador by 2-0 after Marquense of Guatemala and Marathon of Honduras had tied 0-0. Santos then beat Marathon in penalty kicks to win the "tournament."

But like someone had asked earlier the reason for this match, it's pretty much $$$. According to the story, Santos charged $100,000 to participate while the Central American clubs charged $25,000 apiece. It cost the organizers somewhere around $130,000 to rent out the Coliseum. Add that up and the attendance and, according to the story the organizers took a bath.

Ticket prices were between $30-45, which I think scared away people. Why not sell them at $10-25 and have more people show up then jack up the prices like that and draw a small crowd?

Now, the story says there were around 4,000 fans there. Maybe from up above it might have seemed like less and since I was in the stands and (briefly) on the sidelines perhaps it seemed a bit more. I estimated the crowd size to be at least 100,00, and since I've been at all but one of Chivas USA's home games, I know what a crowd of 10,000 looks like.

Anyway, there were quite a lot of Santos supporters there. The FAS contingent stayed on the other side of the stadium which was good because it seemed like there may have been some scraps had they sat closer together.

The worst thing, though, was my camera. I didn't have it with me and the only passes they had were field passes. I went down for about the final five minutes or so on the sidelines and watched a penalty kick shootout from the field, which was a first for me. After it ended, I wanted to talk to the Santos coach, Daniel Guzman, and players so I waited for the shootout to end and approached Guzman myself. I felt like I was at a high school football game for a minute instead of watching the best Mexican soccer team of the Apertura 2007 season.

I had to wait for a minute for Guzman, though, because he was talking to Pablo Montero. That's the TV star Pablo Montero, not to be confused with the soccer star Paolo Montero. Pablo apparently is a big Santos fan and had a jersey signed by the entire team. Don't know if Paolo is into Santos Laguna.