With all the heavy hitters playing away this week and the holiday weekend I'm expecting a low average. Plus the Cosmos get the lucky added bonus at starting when Women's World Cup final kicks off.
Another "Cosmos need a stadium" issue: we have such horrible dates for games this year. We played at 2PM on Mother's Day, another game on Memorial Day Weekend, and now this weekend. That's half the ********ing games so far at the worst dates you could pick.
So that is two 7k+ sellouts and one more JUST shy (6,851) for the Rowdies in six home games so far this year. Pretty big improvement over just a couple of seasons ago. The Fall season is a much longer slog, so it'll be interesting to see what the final numbers are and if they can pull off any more sellouts. Even just one or two more would be a big boost to average attendance overall.
Agreed, looking at the schedule we have a bunch of weeknight games, that will no doubt hurt the numbers.
There's been rumours that the unpaid seats are paid for by the stadium in Fort McMurray so basically FC Edmonton would get the same for hosting the game there regardless of how many people showed up.
The oil companies paid them big money to play in Ft McMurray. They were never going to get many rig pigs to come watch soccer in that town of 100,000 mostly transient oil workers.
Code: Week 12 Season Average(2014) Weekly Total Indianapolis 10,400(10,465) N/A Jacksonville 9,757 N/A Minnesota 9,192(5,577) N/A San Antonio 6,477(6,476) N/A Ft. Lauderdale 6,351(3,679) N/A New York 6,207(4,834) 3,647 Tampa Bay 5,917(4,815) 7,002 Carolina 4,813(4,907) 3,075 Atlanta 4,770(4,730) N/A Ottawa 4,673(2,683) 6,150 Edmonton 2,489(3,577) 1,112 Season Average Week Average NASL 2015 6,322 NASL 2014 5,161 Difference 1,161 NASL 2015 Fall 4,197 4,197 NASL 2014 Fall 3,497 3,497 Difference 700 Dismal week even by last year's standards, and more proof that the split season only hurts teams. Despite that, and despite Edmonton having the worst attended game since prior to last year, somehow still managed to have better attendance than the first game of the Fall Season last year. By the way last year the worst attended game was Ottawa at 2,158. The first game of the fall season last year Edmonton was able to draw 3,609. Their worst of the season was 2,849, which they have only topped 2 out of 6 games. Something is going wrong up north.
To be fair, they didn't have a game in Fort McMurray last year and as stated, if the oil companies paid to bring the game there, they didn't lose any money on it. There was also the World Cup final yesterday which surely hit attendance, especially in New York.
The split season was one of those "gimmick" attempts to differentiate itself from MLS, and emgratiate itself with the "this is pure soccer" crowd. I agree it doesn't work, and basically hurts teams. Time to move on from this one IMO.
There's a report out there that the Borough Boys (and I think both the Cross Island Crew and La Banda Del Cosmos too) boycotted the nasl cosmos game in protest of the club banning some of their members after altercations with the Third Rail at the NYCFC US Open Cup game... Could be an element in the low turnout... I'm posting this report around the internet to try to get confirmation...if true there's been quite a strange radio silence on the subject here in the metro area...
Is anyone really surprised that a city full of transient oil workers who are losing jobs at a pretty rapid rate are not showing up for a soccer game? If the Eddies can only draw ~2800 in Edmonton after 5 years of "marketing" then 1100 actually doesn't look too bad . Also, where are these rumours about oil companies financing the games in Edmonton coming from? Never heard of them until reading this thread. Genuinely curious here, it would be the only way this game made sense.
Most people outside of Edmonton probably did not know they weren't playing in their normal stadium. I certainly did not until just 2 minutes ago.
Correlation is not causation. Who is hurt by the split season, how, and how do low attendance numbers for the first weekend prove your hypothesis? (I think it's a gimmick, obviously, and the fact it's 10/20 is even worse, but how, exactly, would it/does it "hurt teams?" And what does that even mean?)
Lets be honest if they did boycott the game that would be what 200 people max so that certainly isn't the reason. Just a poor stadium situation. In an article recently about the hofstra field it mentioned that the team doesn't get choice dates, they were told in advance that they could only have one game date in July and that was the 5th. Now they could have made it a 2pm game and that would have helped some, because scheduling it against the WWC final wasn't to bright.
Yeah, about a dozen Five Points members are currently banned for life and both the supporters group and team are currently talking with Hofstra about lifting the bans. But yeah, I think the attendance has less to do with that and more to do with the horrible date.
For me it's hard to correlate "hurts" the teams as much as it creates a number of potential problems for both the teams and the league. But if there is one thing that I can agree with that poster on in saying the break portion of the format hurts teams is in the fact that in essence the league is taking its product off the shelf for an entire month. A product that relies very heavily on grassroots and word of mouth advertising because most teams have little more than a shoe string budget for advertising and marketing. Granted we are seeing some improvement in that with some teams, but overall I think it can easily be argued that the break serves no legitimate purpose and might do some harm in the aspect of keeping your team's visibility up over the course of the entire season.
Exactly, I think the Cosmos would have gotten a great regular season crowd after the NYCFC open cup win but that momentum was lost by the having no regular season games to follow that up with.