[taylor]

Hey everyone. I'm semi new to this forum. I normally hang out over on the DC & YA Abroad forums, but Maxim-1 told me this board might be a source for some help or peer review for my econometrics project.

The project will be an estimation on the demand for attendance for the Columbus Crew from 1996 to 2003. The model will be computed in SAS and minitab to calculate a non-linear model. I'll be using all the bells and whistles on the programs (well at least the ones that I know of e.g. proc model autoregress, binary, transformation etc...). I'm planning to use around six variables (price, stadium, weather, winning record short term, long term, and net average goals using the aboved mentioned techniques) but am open to more variables (e.g. over fitting it) or expanding the scope to several teams or MLS as a whole.

If any of you have any suggestions and or comments, I would appreciate it. Especially if anyone can provide some new raw data, I would be forever in their cyber debt and would buy them a beer or two if you ever come to Berlin, DC, or Bloomington. Finally, as a caveat, if you write and I don't immediately respond, please don't take offense. Life as a grad student can being very draining (e.g. I haven't slept in 30 hours).
Cheers,
Taylor

[mpruitt]

Gosh, all of that seems way over my head at least, and certainly a very ambitious project. One that probably should've been done for quite some time now. In terms of getting at data, I wonder what kind of stuff Kenn has. Unfortunately he's been kind of MIA. I'm sure you know his site and the numbers he has gathered, that may be of at least some assistance to you in terms of days, times, double headers etc etc. Other than that in terms of correlating it with weather or winning percentage, obviously the game reports are all there on MLSnet.com and the pricing information wouldn't be hard to find off of the team's websites. Unfortunately gathering all of that would be pretty labor intensive but definately doable. One question I wonder is if game reports from MLSnet.com include weather and temperature. I know you see that kind of thing from game reports on Soccer Times, at least then it'd be all there for the taking providing you'd want to take it.

Edit: just went back and answered some of my own question. This of course is the list of links with game reports, which do include weather and temperature, also the team's record at the time. So there's that. I'm curious though are you trying to look for how tickets are distributed throughout the stadium by price or what?

[taylor]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I have collected all the data for the Crew for this time period. If anyone has the data for other teams and or familiar with regressions involving sports it would be great to discuss here on the board.
Thanks again.

[taylor]

Originally posted by maxim-1
I'm curious though are you trying to look for how tickets are distributed throughout the stadium by price or what?

Well, you already hit one of the nails on the head. The problem is that there is (probably) going to be some really high measurement error for attendance because
A) It is unclear how many actually pay full price or recieve some sort of MLS price cut
B) I don't have receipts for different categories of actual sales for different seating. Also, if you have ever been to Crew stadium (I have) price segragation (sorry, I am forgetting the offical term for seperating product right now) doesn't work because one can easily walk down to the closest seating without any trouble.

Any ideas as to how to minimize these problems????
I also forgot that I took July 4th data and double headers data, although interestingly enough the Crew had the least amount of double headers that I oberservationally noted.

[mpruitt]

Originally posted by taylor
Well, you already hit one of the nails on the head. The problem is that there is (probably) going to be some really high measurement error for attendance because
A) It is unclear how many actually pay full price or recieve some sort of MLS price cut
B) I don't have receipts for different categories of actual sales for different seating. Also, if you have ever been to Crew stadium (I have) price segragation (sorry, I am forgetting the offical term for seperating product right now) doesn't work because one can easily walk down to the closest seating without any trouble.

Any ideas as to how to minimize these problems????
I also forgot that I took July 4th data and double headers data.

I'm not sure that you'd be able to get your hands on that kind of information without getting it directly from the club, which would probably be a little bit dicey, You could always try but breaking it down to price points seems like it might be a little unobtainable, to me at least.

[mellon002]

DC is expected a sell-out crowd for opening day because of Freddy and judging by the preseason hype (DC-KC game sold-out) I'd say you can take it to the bank that when DC comes to town you will have a sell-out.

[mpruitt]

Originally posted by mellon002
DC is expected a sell-out crowd for opening day because of Freddy and judging by the preseason hype (DC-KC game sold-out) I'd say you can take it to the bank that when DC comes to town you will have a sell-out.

Well whether you ment to suggest it or not, that might be another variable for taylor to take into consideration, team opponents.

[mellon002]

http://www.kenn.com/soccer/mls/index.html

This site could help. These attendance numbers haven't been updated for a while but they should provide good insight into 1996-2002.

[microbrew]

Other things that may affect attendence:

Time of day and day of the week. Games at the wrong time may conflict with local kid and rec league games. Weekday games tend to have a much lower attendance.

I thought about various promotions, but the only one that might significantly affect attendance is the 'buck-a-brats', or so I've heard.

Is there any effect due to soccer games as the same time as NFL or college football games?

[ChrisE]

Originally posted by microbrew

Is there any effect due to soccer games as the same time as NFL or college football games?

I don't know anything for sure about this regarding MLS, but I'm pretty sure the Sounders fans have recorded a pretty significant difference in attedance on days when the Mariners are in playing in town.

(And I'd be shocked if Columbus didn't see a lot of the same thing with Ohio State.)