By Mark Baber
Janaury 11 – Major League Soccer will host the 2013 MLS All-Star Game on July 31 at Kansas City’s Livestrong Sporting Park.
The official announcement follows in the wake of Tuesday’s revelation by eagle-eyed blogger Mike of downbythebyline that Ticketmaster had already started selling tickets for the event.
MLS All-stars will be playing an as yet unannounced international club. In recent years the opponents have included Manchester United (2010, 2011), Chelsea (2006, 2012), Everton FC (2009) and Fulham (2005), West Ham (2008) and Celtic (2007).
For the past eight years the MLS game has always been a sell-out but, with only 18,467 seats, will mean the match will have the lowest attendance ever for a MLS all-star game.
“There’s been a massive financial commitment by the team and the community to build this stadium, and they deserve to have this showcase rather than playing it in a larger venue where we could arguably make more money,” said MLS commissioner Don Garber. “We’re proud of that.”
However, the television audience is expected to be massive with the game being broadcast live at 8:30 pm ET on the ESPN, Univision, TSN and RDS family of networks and having reached 530,000 viewers on ESPN last year.
The Kansas City stadium was opened in June 2011, won the 2012 Venue of the Year award and has a six-year partnership with the Livestrong Foundation, under which a portion of revenues are donated to the foundation.
A promo video for the game uploaded to YouTube by Sporting Kansas City shows clips from the 2010 game against Manchester United which the MLS lost 5-2 and of the US team celebrating their 3-2 victory over Chelsea last year.
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