KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Sports franchises love to put their brands on everything they can: clothing, bumper stickers, flags, glassware, you name it.
All stuff you might find in a bar, right? Sporting Kansas City took that one step further – and put their brand on an actual bar.
No Other Pub – named for supporters' “No Other Club” chant – opened earlier this month in Kansas City's trendy Power & Light district. It's part sports bar, part game room, part bowling alley – no, really – with a street taco bar thrown in for good measure, to augment the fast-casual menu.
And so far, one Sporting official said, the response has been solid.
“It's been great,” said John Moncke, the club's vice president of brand revenue. “We've worked on this project for, really, about a year and a half and spent a lot of time over the last year in here, just in the dark, listening to saws, sawdust everywhere.
“So it's cool to see, now that we've been open several weeks – and last week having the Big 12 tournament down here – the overwhelming response, just in terms of revenue. We were one of the top venues down in this area. So we're very happy.”
Revenue is, of course, the bottom line in any branding decision. But the nod to a supporters' chant is appropriate, because it was fans' match-in, match-out packing of Sporting's home stadium that helped to drive the club to look for new ways to expand their brand.
"We have a good problem, where we have a sellout streak going back several years now, and so to really extend our footprint beyond Children's Mercy Park,” Moncke said on Thursday, during a happy hour event featuring Sporting-owned USL side Swope Park Rangers. “We really needed to do something creative. We have great partners here, and the location's fantastic. We thought we could take the experience that we've already created and create another cool experience here in a restaurant/bar atmosphere.”
(Credit: Gary Rohman)
Make that atmospheres, really. No Other Pub is broken up into several distinctive spaces, from the secluded to the social to the outright participatory.
“We didn't want it to feel like one big 20-something-thousand-square-foot box,” Moncke said. “So we wanted to figure out a way to segment the space in a way that made sense. We were working with this concept of 'Every day is game day,' so part of that is that we've got a really, really cool sports bar with a great viewing experience for watching games.”
Or, if people choose, playing them.
The pub, which has two full bars – one of which features Kansas City-area craft beers on tap – also includes four full-size bowling lanes, shuffleboard (the real kind, with sticks), a golf simulator, darts, table tennis, pool and beer pong. There's even a video game arcade near the street taco bar.
If pub goers just want to hang out with friends, they can do that as well.
“One last aspect of it was we wanted to create kind of a more intimate kind of neighborhood bar feel,” Moncke said. “So that's where the space you enter in, that's kind of the neighborhood bar.”
Steve Brisendine covers Sporting KC for MLSsoccer.com.
