Did you know Seattle was long such a crappy sports town that they shut down a Stanley Cup winning hockey team, had an NBA franchise stolen from them, narrowly missed losing their MLB team ("rescued" by an owner who never in his life attended a baseball game!), and even were at risk of the now-mighty Seahawks relocating to California. The wacky story is that the one sport they truly love up there -- soccer -- saved their NFL franchise!

Why was the Kingdome so despised?

Without soccer they could never have gotten public money to build a new football stadium:

One day Mendoza read a newspaper story about Allen’s struggles to get funding for a football stadium and he was hit with a thought. “I immediately went ‘Whoa, football has a rectangular stadium and that would be perfect for a soccer field,’” Mendoza recalls.

He phoned Allen’s offices and left a message. The next day he found himself sitting in the office of Bert Kolde, one of Allen’s top advisors who was helping to run the stadium effort. He told Kolde there were some 300,000 people involved in soccer around Seattle, many of them dearly wanted an MLS team and if the proposed football stadium could be marketed as a football and soccer stadium … well there might be more than a few votes in it.

It's odd that Seattle has no pro NHL team, but in basketball the Atlanta Hawks might move to Seattle.