I come in peace. I've been debating with a number of MLS detractors who still claim that the league grossly exaggerates attendances at games. As a Galaxy fan, I've been at games where the crowd has been snapped and tweeted claiming "empty seats" when the truth is, it was either a restricted capacity game (common with midweek matches while CSUDH is in session), the game hadn't started or it was an occasion when many attendees weren't in their seats until well after kick-off (again, common on weeknights due to logistics of SoCal traffic and Carson location). This one was apparently snapped in August/September comparing OKC Energy with FC Dallas. The claim made is that FC Dallas claimed 12,000 in attendance, with the poster claiming to have been there and attendance being 4,000 at best. Can you guys shed any light on if this is legit or not? Again, not looking to bag on you guys or cause trouble. Just looking for info: Thanks.
There's several issues at play here. First, people need to understand more pro leagues present attendance number based on "tickets sold" - so that will not generally represent or equal a resulting "butts in seats" (aka: how many actually attended). Second, "tickets sold" also falls into a semantic debate because all leagues, including MLS, allow for a certain number of promotional tickets to be considered sold. So, giving away tickets for $0 can add to this count. Third, all teams have a certain number of corporate sales, season tickets sold to companies at bulk rates in grouped sections with the intention the company will use the seats for marketing and sales purposes. Unfortunately these seats very rarely get sat in for anything other than the biggest games (this is a serious issue in sections 105-107 in Frisco). The attached pic is one I took last Saturday in section 107. I'm told this is the result of both unsold seats and corporate seats unused. But it's a massive bald spot. Fourth, unsold seats - just what that says. Unsold tickets either as single game day or season tickets. When you combine certain percentages of all of those together, you get these giant open blank spots in seats. Trying to compare the OKC stadium, which holds less than half of Toyota Stadium even in its currently reduced capacity, is silly. Not only from the standpoint of the reduced number of seats to fill, but also the competitive landscape of the two markets. OKC has a basketball team and a few other minor league sports. Dallas, well, has all the sports. Now, back to your question. There is very clearly a return back to MLS teams reporting inflated attendance numbers and getting away with it because they spin the "ticket's sold" bit and not the "butts in seats" truth. The biggest offender of this appears to be Houston who for a few years now have been reporting averages attendances around 20K, but game in and out look to be just past half full. The contention is Houston has sold a stunning number of corporate seats, but no one believes its anywhere close to what would equal the number of empty seats repeatedly seen. Houston is running a bit and MLS knows it, but won't do anything about it. I believe because Houston runs counter to the narrative everyone wants to believe that putting your SSS in a downtown location is some sort of soccer ticket sales panacea. As for FCD. The club has a sales problem. They're just not very good at it, mostly because the Hunts refuse to put any real effort to properly promote, brand and market the club. There is little to no community connection, little reason for people in the DFW area to gravitate to the stadium and because of the club's really silly pricing model they held onto for so long (until this offseason) tickets were really cheap and easy to get. There was no real demand. Proving this out is Houston. Who before the ownership change had done a rather good job of selling itself. When that stopped, so did the legitimately large attendances. FCD can go on to win MLS Cup, build a Hall of Fame and play beautiful soccer - but until the Hunts stop working under the premise of "Build it and they will come", and better understand in the DFW area it's really more about "Let's us convince and sell on you on why your sports entertainment dollar should be spend on us because FCD is the most wonderful game day experience, something you can connect to and is the coolest damned thing in North Texas" will continue to struggle to sell even 16K.
The FCD game in the photo looks like it's against Houston. We always get a pretty good crowd against them, especially with all the traveling fans from Houston. Like LA, we are victims of late arriving crowds. I don't know why. I've seen games in LA (on TV) and in Frisco (live) and thought, "Damn, this is a really weak crowd for a game this big." Then at halftime I look around and the place has filled up considerably. You'll probably see smaller than usual crowds (even for us) this year due to the big ticket price hike from last year to this year. My season tickets went up 183%. The price raise wasn't really THAT big, but for the last bunch of years they've been giving me the same price as the previous year if I bought by October. So last year, I paid the same as I did in about 2010 or so. Many people who sat in the center sections and low (most visible on TV) have moved to cheaper seats nearer the end lines. I agree with Hitman's post above on the sales difficulties. FCD has gotten gradually better over the years, but not enough to make much impression on the DFW sports scene.
We are legit MLS Cup contenders this year, barring major summer turnover and/or injury. We have the best coach in the league, we have great players, we have white guys and Hispanics and black guys so we appeal to all the racial demographics, we have old Dallas players (OP) and homegrowns so we appeal to all the age groups. I'm not sure what else the FO can do with the product on the field except possibly buying Cristiano Ronaldo. I don't think the team is the issue; it's the marketing, advertising, location, gameday atmosphere, etc. that keeps FC Dallas from challenging for butts in seats in the Dallas area.
Full disclosure, the debate was with pro/tel advocacy Twitter "activists" and I'm fast learning they're more prone to spin than MLS could be if it tried. Three home games into LA's season and all three have been depicted as having massive gaps in the crowd. Our last game was packed in every section but the two corporate ones and sure enough, a pic of that one part of the stadium was posted alongside the caption "a sea of empty seats at the California Classico". I'm getting tired of people from this country crapping on their own league, just because the entirely amateur D6 club that plays on the HS field down the street "can't get promoted".
The atmosphere can be electric at Toyota. It's definitely night and day better than it was 3-6 years ago. The playoff game against Seattle last year was the best atmosphere I've ever seen at an FC Dallas game in 20 years going to games. As others have stated, once the Hunt boys decide to treat us like an actual professional team, we will have a lot more butts in seats.
It's strange how they changed the pricing. I was in section 103. My price increase per seat was very close to being doubled. So with how they've tired it now, as you go higher up the stands the price decreases, vs. previously where each section was a price. It turns out it was cheaper for me to move closer to the midfield (section 104) and move back 5 rows (which is arguably a better height to watch the game from) then it was to stay in the same section. Having talked with those around me there's at least 6-10 other people in my immediate vicinity for whom that was true. Back onto the bigger picture issue, a sense I get from having lived in the area for the past 10 years, is that Dallas tends to be very trendy/band wagon driven in terms of fans and where people want to go/be seen, and FC Dallas just hasn't managed to get the attention. There's tons of soccer fans in the area, but for whatever reasons I continually run into people who put down FC Dallas and MLS in general to the vastly (!) superior Arsenal/Barca/PSG/Munich, and refuse to acknowledge it. That's a common issue everywhere in the country i'd imagine, and not sure what the Hunts/MLS can do to get around that, but if they manage to make FC Dallas a hot ticket item, I feel they'd convert a lot of people. The team is very exciting to watch, and as others have pointed out, despite the less then full crowds, the crowds are infinitely more aware and into the game now then they were 4 or 5 years ago even.
I do, over the years I've grown fond of the team, and having been to so many games it's nearly impossible to not root for them. Some times i'll even wear a FC Dallas scarf if it's cold enough out, and when I do my morning runs I always wear an old FC Dallas hat.. It wasn't always that way, at first I'd pretty actively cheer against the team. Unless of course the play LA.
This team is fun so it makes it easy to convert. I doubt too many were thrilled by some of the stuff Hyndman or Clarke through out there.
Hyndman was the coach when we played for an MLS Cup title that one time! So, it wasn't ALL bad during his tenure. Also, we won the division and played for a U.S. Open Cup under Clarke. I actually thought we were getting incrementally better under Clarke, in fact. He just couldn't get us through the playoffs.
We did have that one good year when Hyndman took over. Looking back it seems more like the players won in spite of him and he liked getting to the championship so much that within two years I think only Shea was left. Clarke won games but they were low scoring boring affairs mostly. Morrow might have done better with time but he got fired for doing what he said he was going to do (and a lot like what Pareja has done) which was to bring in a lot of young players and play a lot of different formations. When the youth got exposed vs the Glam Gals he was toast.
I've never quite understood this image Clarke has of having low scoring teams. Of his 3 years as coach he had one year when the team didn't score much (1.133 goals/game) but that was in 2004 when he had just inherited the 2003-Southlake-Jefferies disaster. In 2005 we scored 1.625 goals/game, and then 1.500 goals/game in 2006. So if you give him a pass for inheriting the worst team this club has ever seen, he averaged something like 1.56 goals/game. Morrow's team couldn't score. He inherited a pretty solid 2006 Clarke team and coached them to 1.233 goals/game in 2007.
Is that good? Anyone know what an average MLS goals per game is? I could be misremembering the Clarke years as the team was fairly decent. For some reason I always thought we were very defense first back then while not controlling possession much.
According to Wikipedia, MLS averages around 2.75 goals per game. That's for both teams of course. Dallas were in the top four with 52 goals in 2005 (highest was 58 for DCU) and top two with 44 the following year (DCU were top again with 52).
So let's resurrect this horse so we can beat it dead again and keep beating it... http://www.bigdsoccer.com/2016/8/24/12623918/dfw-doesnt-deserve-a-mls-franchise Which sparked this r/dallas debate about why the average Dallas area Joe won't go to FCD games.... https://www.reddit.com/r/Dallas/comments/4zfelc/fc_dallas_blogger_cant_understand_why_casual_fans/ If you don't feel like reading the 178 (!!!) comments/opinions about the matter, survey says: Frisco is the issue. I know, I know. We've heard it all before. So I decided to map out every team's stadium and how far that stadium is from the "city center" according to Google maps. This is what I got... Chicago - 14 miles (suburb) Columbus - 4 miles (city) DC - 7.5 miles (city) Montreal - 6.5 miles (city) New England - 28 miles (suburb) NYC - 9 miles (city) NYRB - 10 miles (suburb) Orlando - 1.5 miles (city) Philadelphia - 15 miles (suburb) Toronto - 3 miles (city) Colorado - 8.5 miles (suburb) Dallas - 29 miles (suburb) Houston - 1 mile (city) LA - 14 miles (suburb) Portland - 1 mile (city) Salt Lake - 13 miles (suburb) San Jose - 3 miles (city) Seattle - 1 mile (city) KC - 14 miles (city) Vancouver - < 1 mile (city) As you can see, we're the worst in the league distance wise. Even worse than New England. Just seeing if any of the few souls who frequent this board wanted to chime in now that we have more "average Joe" opinions on the matter.
Our family of 3 drives 22 miles each way. We just renewed our season tickets, but we moved from the east side which is hot as $&@! in the summer to the west side. That 5pm game vs Vancouver was hell on earth. We became fans as our son's interest in soccer ramped up. We spent most of 2014 attending games as we could before we became STH. It has been tricky at times getting to the games due to our son's sports schedule. I'm not sure if we are the ideal target audience for the front office or not because of this. I imagine it is harder for those with multiple kids and thus multiple schedules to fulfill.
I've had this argument fifty times on BigSoccer alone. There are lots of reasons attendance is sub-optimal in Frisco. No denying that. But the #1 reason, cited over and over by lots of different people, is that Frisco is far away. Not only far away, but far away down a toll road. I've heard all the arguments as to why that's a lame excuse, but the reality is that people in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex don't want to drive to Frisco.
And that reality is mostly driven by people who couldn't even find Plano on a map, let alone know that it's right next to Frisco or that it's home to over a quarter of a million people by itself. I mean, holy shit, look at that list of distances that were posted above. They're all from the downtown of those various cities. Sure, way more people live in downtown and in Uptown than they used to, but it's still comparatively speaking not that many and if you're someone who lives in north Dallas or outside of 635 -- and a metric shitton of people do -- you don't really give a rat's ass how far Toyota Stadium is from downtown. The bottom line is that more people live closer to Frisco than downtown Dallas than live in a few other MLS markets. You know why FCD struggles with attendance? Because HSG can't even get people from Plano and McKinney and Richardson and Allen to come to Frisco. They can't even establish mindshare in Plano or McKinney or Richardson or Allen. A few months ago, I was in Portland. You can't go more than a few minutes without seeing some sort of Timbers sign in front of a store or a bar or whatever there. Try that for FCD in Collin County. So no shit that they can't get people from Oak Cliff or Cedar Hill or the wilds of Tarrant County to come to the games. The location argument lets HSG off the hook. Those assholes couldn't sell tickets when in 2004 and the beginning of 2005 when they played a couple of miles east of downtown. And when those assholes sold the underwhelmingly attended KC Wizards to OnGoal, OnGoal proceed to move the Wizards to a minor-league baseball park in the burbs next to a NASCAR track and a Cabela's and proceeded to sell out every game, continuing when they moved into their new SSS located a less than a mile away in the same suburb, next to the same NASCAR track. Somehow, they never got the memo that "suburb" = "attendance poison." Don't go full Reddit and quit letting HSG off the hook. Those assholes could put an SSS right across the street from Dallas City Hall and they'd still have a lot of empty seats.
On the same topic, a few months ago, I was in Orlando visiting family. You couldn't drive anywhere without seeing the OCFC bumper stickers EVERYWHERE. Trying to be realistic, I'd see probably 10 stickers on a 20 minute drive. It didn't seem to matter what part of town we were in. Their stadium is downtownish somewhere, but frankly that's not a real hoppin' downtown, transit is about as (not) good as DFW, every new highway is a toll road, and there are more people north of 30 and east of 360 than there are in all of metro Orlando. I'm not going to pretend I've been going to many games, but I will still play the new-parent card, as it's too hot for the day games and too late for the night games. Anyway, my continuing interest in this administrative train wreck led the missus to spend more on two season tickets last year than I've ever spent on any sporting interest ever. I'm also sure we were listed as attending every single game, so there's that. I'm coasting, just like the Hunt boys! HSG is not going to sell unless they have the perfect buyer, because the team is doing well with a cheap payroll, and financially they're doing fine with a stable venue, the youth club, fields, concerts, SUM, and especially expansion fees. They have franchise rights to the #4 metro in the US. Anybody bitching about "not a soccer market" or "Dallas doesn't care" doesn't matter; #4 means the Hunts will squat on this thing for damn near forever and just watch it appreciate until the last oilfield runs dry. Let's just be thankful this blind squirrel of a FO stumbled onto the OP acorn, and hey, at least they stopped actively chasing off their biggest fans. Benign neglect is a relative blessing. And for what it's worth, /r/dallas thinks the world ends outside Beltline, even though half of them probably live in their old bedrooms in Garland.