Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Quick Thoughts on MLS Attendance

Today I saw a tweet from @TotalMLS showing the average attendance of MLS in 2016 thus far.  Along with other twittazens, I wondered what the rankings would look like in terms of population and stadium capacity.  I recreated the histogram using Excel below for comparison. I would like to note that every time I have to use Excel or Word I die a little on the inside so I hope someone finds this useful.

  
The usual comments and questions that come up after seeing attendance numbers are things like 

  • Seattle invented attendance!  Let our capo come to your town and show you how to do it.
  • Why is team X so terrible and why doesn't the league move team X to my city Y?
  • Of course your big city team has great attendance; you have a billion people.
  • My stadium doesn't even hold that many people.
  • The poor attendance is because the stadium is far from the city.

While I refuse to even acknowledge the first two points, the last three we can at least start to investigate.  Below is the average attendance numbers expressed as a percent of each team's stadium capacity.  I see this as a short-run test of the front office's ability since they are at least temporarily stuck with their capacity.
 

 Kudos to San Jose, Sporting Kansas City, and Montreal, who are defying reality and filling up their stadium beyond capacity.  Having never visited these stadiums, my guess is this means they sold all their seats and had "standing room only" type tickets as well.  Portland is hitting 100%, which may not be surprising since the stadium has, as far as I know, the best atmosphere in MLS.  It is a little surprising, however, since I was at the inaugural game this season and noticed empty seats.  Maybe some fans were walking around.  Maybe teams are back to reporting tickets distributed and not butts in seats.  Who knows?

Looking at the teams with the most issues filling up their stadiums, the bottom 6 all reside in football stadiums whose capacity is artificially restricted to prevent the fans from feeling like their in a mostly deserted fish bowl.  I attended Rapids games at Mile High stadium when there was less than 5,000 people in a 76,000 capacity stadium.  No matter how much you love soccer that's just not fun.  The percents here do not use the artificial capacity because that would be cheating.  These teams are 4 of the top 6 when it comes to average attendance and occupy the top 3 spots.  So not only do they (outside of DC) have the best attendance in MLS, they have much room to grow.

The teams not packing their stadiums and selling less than 80% probably have some work to do.  I'm going to throw Columbus and Colorado on the problem list as well because I don't believe Colorado's attendance numbers and Columbus somewhat cheated by replacing its north end seats with a stage thereby reducing its capacity.  So let's look at what percent of each team's metropolitan area population (2016 July population from the U.S. Census and 2015 population from Stats Canada).  This is a more long-run test of success since stadium size is a choice but your metropolitan area population is not.



RSL is killing it. The smallest market in MLS is getting the largest proportion of residents to cheer on its team. Is this due to the lack of sports entertainment competition?  RSL only compete with the Jazz in professional sports so that may be part of the story.  Cynical urbanophiles will say it's because there's nothing else to do in Salt Lake but these concrete jungle types have no idea just how many ways there are to be entertained in the beautiful Rocky Mountain Region.

The lack of professional sports competition is common among many of the other top teams (ORL, SEA, SJ, POR, VAN, CLB) while the abundance of other sports and entertainment options are clearly part of the story for the bottom dwellers located in NY/NJ, Chicago, and Los Angeles.  So who is doing poorly no matter which way we slice the data?  My unofficial list of troubled front offices would include

  1. Dallas
  2. Chicago
  3. DC
All three have lots of professional sports competition.  Dallas and DC have teams in the other 4 major sports and Chicago has 2 NBA and MLB teams, an NFL team and an NHL team.  Both Dallas and Chicago have stadiums that are far from their city centers and are sponsored by Toyota.  Maybe because a prius is the only affordable way to get to games?  DC is working on building their own stadium but do not have the excuse of being far from the city.  I'll give them a pass until the new stadium arrives and continue to shake my head at Dallas and Chicago's bad life choices.

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