Yeah that's an increase for them. The crowd in Puerto Rico looked a lot better than usual as well. Any number on that?
I hope MN goes to the final and wins it all, so that the fan support grows it’s a organization that needs it. Since it looks like FTL will be in the final.....
Silly me. Here I thought it was because soccer was popular in those countries. I would invite you to look at what those clubs in lower divisions around the world, the clubs whose fans "know" they have a chance to play in a "major league," actually draw in relation to those clubs in the top flight. And then I would invite you to ask yourself how many of those clubs compete with all the other sports - more firmly entrenched, and all fighting for the same limited discretionary income, sponsorship dollars and media coverage - that we have in this country at similar levels. And then I would invite you to get a clue.
I watched the Minnesota Stars game online and what you saw was the general admission side that usually doesnt have many people. I saw a few shots of the camera side and it was quite full. Keep in mind as well that the NSC stadium is 12,000 at capacity and usually the general admission side has a lot less people. The Stars averaged just over 1600 per game in the regular season so 2500 plus was a good turnout for them really.
I thought the crowd looked quite good for Puerto Rico as well. I have watched some of their recent games where they had under 2000, so my guess is they had over 3000 and maybe close to 3500. Hard to tell in their 12,500 seat stadium.
So soccer isn't popular in PNW or L.A.? who knew.... IF U.S. implemented pro/rel in baseball, the crowds in AAA would increase.
I live in a AAA baseball town. A very successful one. You're wrong. And if my team was "promoted" (and they won the AAA championship a couple of years ago), they would be a disaster of biblical proportions in MLB. The market just doesn't have the capital or population to support a major league baseball team, and the state of the art AAA stadium seats barely 10,000. Do you ever post anything that you actually know and can verify as fact?
So how do you know if it never happened before? BTW my point is in general minor leagues that have pro/rel have more fans than leagues without.
Yup. Go Bulls. Indeed. The Bulls don't win it all very frequently, but they're consistently one of the better teams in the league - and they'd go up and have a shitty season trying to play at the major league level, leaving fans disenchanted when their team got comparatively worse. I'm not gonna say pro/rel can't work, but jumping from one of the two models to the other - regardless of which way you went - would be utter idiocy. No.
Hi! Amateur statistician here, reminding you of the existence of confounding variables. Minor leagues with pro/rel consistently exist in soccer in markets where no sport is nearly as popular as soccer is. Minor leagues without pro/rel mostly exist in markets where they have to compete with other sports in a big way. Gee, I bet we could draw a way better crowd too if there were no other teams in town anybody gave a crap about, and it wouldn't have a damn thing to do with how the league was structured.
Not to mention the fact that, ya know, the Rays might not like that. I'm not sure Bud Selig would be too keen on it, either. It's really quite simple. We need to choose between the typical soccer system of pro/rel, or the American farm system used by baseball, hockey and (to a lesser extent) basketball.
Based on what most of us would like for NASL to be a stable and profitable league. I guess that no marketing to go see the best team (and player) in the NASL does mean a lower than preferred turn out.
Calling it a "bad" turnout doesn't make it a "bad" turnout. Just because people have unrealistic expectations, that doesn't make those expectations valid.
And given that we know one of those two(guess which one) has little chance of ever happening in our lifetime, it's pretty clear which path we will take. We will likely combine the typical soccer system of youth academics with the minor league affiliation we see in hockey and baseball. Football and basketball already have effective systems of player development in which they don't need to actively control. The NCAA produces high level players for them.
what link it's a proven fact that teams get better attendance when promoted compared to teams that don't.
But it works the other way too: teams get worse attendances when relegated, so the end result is pretty much the same.
Yes, and this is true under the current American system as well. On the other hand, teams that have self-relegated don't seem to see much of a drop in attendance compared to what happens to teams that get relegated for poor performance.
Yes. This should be a surprise to precisely nobody. Nor should the fact that "we're playing at a higher level" can be used to create buzz for a team, while casual fans might not notice that their team self-relegated from one minor league to another if no big deal is made of the fact. WSW, on the other hand, has apparently decided to attribute the change in attendance to the mere existence of a promotion/relegation system. While such a system demonstrably works for the countries that do it, there is no evidence it is inherently beneficial to the popularity of the sport.
I don't know, but I see no reason not to assume it wouldn't. Or rather. If it was implemented, it would occur only after the league was stable enough that fans could expect their teams to last, so it would likely occur along with a little bit of a rise in attendance for that reason. And teams that got promoted into MLS would see a drastic rise in attendance, as they already do with no pro/rel, because "major league" is useful marketing. But teams staying in NASL? No. Why should they? No other changes to the structure of the league seem to have made a serious impact; I'm disinclined to believe it in the absence of any supporting evidence that isn't the obvious result of a confounding variable. What reasonable evidence pointed you to that hypothesis in the first place?