Any FCD or Columbus fans care to say what they expect for attendance? Doesn't seem like either have done much to excite the fans this offseason.
I think I could get in front of that, if Ed's busy tonight: since the data are all recorded for previous years with the >20,000 number, it'd be really difficult to go back through the previous years to adjust the stat to be >18,000. I think Ed has said that, if anyone wants to do it, they're welcome to the historical data to make the adjustment themselves.
So does anyone really know who the target audience for NYFC are, and why they aren't Red Bulls fans right now? I am not talking about the casual fans here, I mean who is going to fill their supporters groups? Also, what impact on all of this do the Cosmos have? They did get several 10k+ crowds last season, and dominated NASL while at it.
The most useful numbers Imo are percent capacity. Is olé doing them again? Otherwise I'll try to put something together this year.
The Cosmos did not have several games over 10k. Here are their attendances for the 7 home games. 11,929 6,852 5,598 6,081 6,518 5,409 5,624
I do track at the 18k level for specific team stats. I had some hesitation doing so until I realized that most teams that have 18k as a cap had few prior instances of topping 18 but not 20. So it was a wash for those teams. Changing to an 18k baseline would skew all the historical numbers for not much gain. Yes 20k is arbitrary but it is the arbitrary number the community had devised before I became the steward of this thread. The best solution I can see is a %of capacity threshold. What is needed for that is reasonably accurate historical capacities, and this is where I kick myself. At one time I had every copy of the Information Please/ESPN sports almanac, and they clearly differentiated stadia capacity for MLS from the main capacity. If I still had those it would be simple to apply this new threshold. However for the time being the 20k leaguewide number still works. As it stands I believe only Colorado, Philadelphia, and San Jose cannot physically reach 20k this season (excepting the Stanford/Levi games for SJ), so that is 49 out of 323. Since we are barely reaching 33% I do not think this is much of an issue yet. Hope this helps, and if anyone has access to those old Almanacs via their library, please get those numbers.
Balance as MLSFan123 says is this the date that last year ended or once the season is rolling the date we reached whatever percentage we just achieved. This was added primarily because of all the handwringing that occurred when a season started falling off the pace. People would point out we started earlier or later, or had more weekday games or whatever. As a result there are lots of things I track for the team centric posts that do not show up in the main, such as attendance average by day of the week, by month, and by opponent. These things matter for the team centic but not the league wide where it washes out. The one stat that did seem to have some league wide bearing was the date, so it is included here as a reminder.
I thought Chivas operates the StubHub Center with reduced capacity? I think the capacity they use is under 20k. In general, I'm in favor of maintaining the historical 20k mark. Both marks are equally arbitrary. I'd agree that %capacity would definitely be the way to go, but as you stated, that's not easy to track down. Heck, I spent a good portion of the last year trying to track down all of the attendance data for all of the league's games. I think I have a reasonably good set of data, but haven't had the time to confirm it all yet. I'll be trying to get that done before the season, so that I can maybe provide some other sorts of data in addition to what you provide, but it all depends on how busy things get for me over the next month and a half.
they do, but I believe he was talking about physically reaching 20k. DC United operates under 20k as does Sporting KC, but both can and have breached 20k as could Chivas if they had the demand.
If anyone is interested in the history of % capacity and this thread, it came up as a stat to track many many moons ago and we decided to stop tracking it because the stat became meaningless, especially in the early days because most teams would simply ignore their defined soccer capacity any time the demand was present. If you want to track it today, you will find things more stable I am sure but I can attest that trying to compare it to the early days is going to cause some head scratching unless you toss "soccer capacity" as a concept entirely for the big stadiums.
Overselling however is not really an issue when you are tracking games that exceed a cap threshold and not the actual % of season capacity. So if you are saying a good number is anything at 90% or more of capacity for any given game, and one game hits 150% that does not change anything for the season numbers that is just one more game at >90%. Just like the 20k number it does not matter if 20k is exceed by 1 person or 70000 it is still just one tick in the >20k column. But agreed if you were to track just season % of capacity that single 150% game screws up everything.
unless you keep both a %cap number that counts over 100% as is and one that counts anything over 100% as just 100% ... when i tracked it that is what i did.
I think the changes in soccer capacity year to year in the early days is also problematic for comparison sake. Recently Chivas going from 27k to 18k is going to artificially make their capacity numbers look better. I think the best part of this thread is the ability to compare numbers through out the years. I am not convinced that comparing the capacity numbers (assuming we can find all the variations the teams used in the early years) would be that illuminating because of the flux year to year. But you are significantly better at these stats than I am so if it works for you I will happily digest
I think we all said the exact same thing in three different ways the problem is not in tracking it today, that is easy. Finding the historical caps or coming to agreement on what makes sense for historical caps is the hard part.
As a relative newcomer to this league I personally am not interested in extremely fine grained historical comparisons. This league has changed so much that it is not very useful. And you lose a lot of analytical resolution when you try to do so. My motivation is to track the "heartbeat" of the league, so to speak. Which means current plus recent history. But that's just me.
Even if we had rock solid capacity data, it wouldn't really mean anything across teams. If Seattle has a 90% capacity number, it it a worse draw than a 100% SJ? The only thing I can see capacity showing is whether a team is artificaly limited by stadium size which, frankly, is something we already know for each team. Unless I'm missing something, it sounds like a lot of work for very little reward.
That is certainly a fair point, and even Seattle would fall victim to that to some degree with our incremental cap increases. I would not necessarily try to find all the variations, just the significant ones. It is getting the community to agree to what caps we are using that is the challenge. If we have ever have the EY data it would be an interesting exercise. I would never wholesale change how I track things without a side by side comparison period, which is what I did with the change from the cardinal numbers to formulaic ranking.
It really is not any additional work as excel does all the heavy lifting. All I have to do is derive the formula and have a place for values, which I already do. But you are right % of capacity is definitely much more team centric. What it would account for that the >20k does not are those teams that are building capacity appropriate stadiums for their location/situation. I would much rather have 18k in an 18kish stadium than 18k in a 30k stadium. So if you know your market will consistently support 18k but not 20k, build smaller with room/plans to increase. That is what we are seeing. From a noise perspective 90% of Seattle's 40k is still going to sound awesome but you will notice the empty seats. But 90% would still be a good number, anything under 80% I think would not be, and a 75% Seattle would be visually less satisfying than a 95-100% KC or similar sized stadium. While San Jose and Chivas had close attendance (the Stanford game notwithstanding) the SJ experience looked richer on TV. This is just a matter of preference I think the current system provides a reasonable indication of both the heartbeat and lifespan. Anything that we change should continue to do both.
it is one of those things you use in conjunction with another stat to give you a bigger picture. so SJE's 13K isn't as bad when their %cap is also above 95% but RBNY's 18k isn't as good when their %cap is in the 70%s and as to game by game tracking of %cap that is a given, you determine the cap for each game (regular home, special venue, expanded, whatever) ... but you also need to keep two numbers ... the raw % (104%) and the "adjusted" number capped at 100% where people don't get credit for under reporting their stadium capacity ... i am looking at you SKC.
With the off season Vancouver is having, no one should be shocked if their attendance falls. Officially losing your best player and your #1 draft pick in the same day is ugly.
No doubt. I don't think Vancouver will have a hugely disappointing attendance season, though. They might be a little down, but they likely won't be much (if any) below 2011.