May as well get this thread going. Average daily attendance for the three Thorns games during their pre-season invitational tournament at the University of Portland's beautiful Merlo Field: 3,154. Admission was free for the three games the Thorns weren't involved in, so no numbers for those games.
In light of the amazing attendance numbers we are seeing worldwide this year, NWSL attendance will be particularly interesting to watch.
Keep in mind that the "amazing" attendance numbers are massive, massive outliers. You can get over 50k showing up for a single rivalry match in Spain or a playoff final in Mexico, but for both leagues the league-wide regular season average is still well below the averages that NWSL sees.
..... and I've read all the comments saying "the tickets were free!" ..... even for free, Juventus got 39,000 into Allianz Stadium vs. 390 or so at whereever they normally play. Don't let the facts obscure the emerging truth: Nations with soccer cultures will have women's games consistently outdrawing the NWSL (except Portland) within the next few years.
Sorry I was unclear. I should have said club teams in nations with soccer cultures .......I was not thinking of national teams.
Ok, but one of those nations is England, where the average women’s premier attendance was 973. According to UEFA, the average attendance at a first division women’s match in 2017 was 314. That’s friends and family territory. https://www.uefa.com/MultimediaFile...en'sfootball/02/43/13/56/2431356_DOWNLOAD.pdf (p.10)
Even with this clarification, I think there's still the distinction to be made between clubs that have strong cultures and clubs that don't. It's definitely fair and nothing to sniff at for Juve to draw nearly 40k, no matter what the price were, because clearly you had nearly 40k people decide that seeing a Juve women's team play was worth 3hrs of their weekend time. But what about the other Italian teams? What happens if the "shiny new team" factor wears off, like we saw in Orlando? (Nearly 24k in their inaugural match down to roughly 4k average in season 3.) What happens when Juve starts asking people to pay? One massively good data point, no matter how much promise it shows, isn't a sign of things to come. Right now, we don't know if it'll be sustained, and weren't definitely not seeing it across all "club teams in nations with soccer cultures". I would love it if these outliers are "exposure" enough to start a tide that lifts all boats around them. But there's no evidence of that happening yet, and some evidence to the contrary. I hope that changes soon.
You might want to include Utah as another exception, as they averaged above 9,000 fans per game in their first year. Indeed, they may be removing Portland from the "outlier" category by raising the possibility that attendance success is a product of locating a team in an area with good demographics for women's soccer support.
It looks like Phil Neville is beating the drum: https://www.ourgamemag.com/2019/04/...-their-stadiums-to-grow-domestic-attendances/ "...... Looking at the attendances in our league on Sunday, I would say that’s better than the one-off games in Italy or Spain,” said Neville. “There were over 1,500 at Solihull to watch Birmingham versus Arsenal, over 2,000 at Kingsmeadow, we’ve got a good foundation and I see games in Spain where there are 100 to 150 people watching. As a baseline, I think we’ve got a bit more sustainability. What I would say is now there are some teams, the big teams, who have got to open their big stadiums and fill them. Let’s blow the rest of Europe away because I think the game in this country is at a far better place than what it is in Spain or Italy.” ...... “If Man United or Arsenal win the league, throw open your stadium,” he said passionately. “Chelsea have a big Champions League game, why not play it at Stamford Bridge? I think now my players are at a level where our big clubs have got to open their stadiums and let’s blow away the rest of Europe.” Neville added, regarding giving away free tickets to games: “Why not? Man United let people in for free at Leigh so why can’t you let them in for free at Old Trafford? Why can’t you fill Stamford Bridge for the Lyon game? It would be incredible. ......
Opening Weekend Attendance WAS vs SBFC: 2,373 NCC vs CHI: 4,053 ORL vs POR: 7,189 HOU vs RFC: 4,335 Total: 17,950 Average: 4,487.5 (2018 opening weekend average was 5658.5)
Putting a bit more context into the 2018 comparison... three of the four teams hosting this past weekend also hosted opening weekend last year. No matter how you cut it, numbers are down. NCC had the least drop of any of the teams. FWIW, the ORL and HOU numbers are still noticeably better than their respective averages from last year, so if they can prevent a significant drop-off from the opener, they might be okay. In particular, ORL only cracked 5,100 once more over all of 2018, so that 9k was a big outlier. If this weekend's 7k isn't as much of an outlier for them, their average for 2019 should be okay. Really hoping for that late summer WWC boost at this point, nonetheless.
I expected those attendance numbers to be worse quite frankly given the lack of buzz to start the season.
Agree to an extent, though it definitely depends on your viewpoint. I think the individual teams have on the whole done as good or better about promoting themselves to their own markets, and that's ostensibly what would drive attendance. Of course, I guess most fans are on Twitter these days and will have also seen the lack of activity from the top, so that probably explains the bit of a drop-off, but I don't think I would've expected the drop-off to be much worse since local fans aren't as at the mercy of top-down stuff as out-of-market fans are.
Again, agree to an extent, though it definitely depends on your viewpoint. If you're talking about league-wide average, then of course - no one can match Thorns numbers. That drop isn't nearly as meaningful or as "real" as team-by-team drops (or gains), though - it will entirely wash out once the Thorns start having games. It is, though, a shame that the Thorns won't have those big numbers to prop up pre-WWC-league-average attendance since they're the team that least needs to see a WWC bump. Had it not been for their stadium issue, I think the league would have benefited the most attendance-wise by front-loading Thorns home games.
I think it a mistake to assume a big bump is automatic. How much of a bump attendance will get will largely depend on how well the USWNT does in France. If they do another crash and burn like the 2016 Olympics, the bump will be minimal, or at least smaller. I think fans might have wished to think the 2016 failure was a one-off. Failure this time could sour attendance nationwide. Going out in the quarters won’t sit well. Think uprising. While individual teams might celebrate any success of the other NT’s represented in the league, Great success by, say, Canada and Australia won’t lead to a big NWSL attendance bump.
Oh, I definitely agree it's not a given. As I said a few posts earlier, I hoped for it, not expected it. But were it not for other stadium factors, it still would have been smart for the league to best prepare itself in case the bump does get realized. I also agree that going out early will make the bump small, if it happens, but this is overstating things. The teams have their established fan bases already - even if the bases are much smaller than we might expect in places like ORL and HOU - and I don't see club teams losing fans over how badly a different team (the USWNT) performs in a given year.
That NJNY attendance doesn't look sustainable. On the other hand, the Utah attendance is fantastic. Although the two teams' relative strengths probably matters some, I suspect the reality is that Utah is women's soccer fan territory and New Jersey isn't.
The Reign’s opener in Tacoma against Orlando was 5,328 For comparison, last year’s opener in Seattle was 3,561
To be fair to Sky Blue, even in their god-awful on-field season last year, their home opener was the worst-attended game of last year - it more or less only went up from their despite all the losses. So history suggests they'll be going up from here. Granted, their home opener last year was ~600 more than what they just posted this year, so they're in a bit of a hole, but if their average is ~600 more than the opener (as it was last year) then it at least would still put them on pace to beat out 3 of their 6 seasons to date.
Utah’s attendance was down about 1,100 from last year’s opener. The rest of the year hovered around 8,500, still really good. What will be interesting there is whether the average for the rest of the season rises or not.
Considering they've only been over 2,500 twice, once by 113 and once by just 31, that's an "optimistic" benchmark in any year. Considering how bad last year was, I think 2,200 would be a reasonable guess, especially if they do better on-field this year.