Resorting to a bad meme effort, nice. Tickets "scanned" and tickets "sold" are all anagrams for tickets distributed. They aren't mutually exclusive. If Phoenix Rising announced a sell out and you see a few empty seats, that doesn't mean they came up with an arbitrary attendance number.
You make a really good point but it sounds familiar. Oh, it’s because I already said exactly that. Huh.
What was the entirely point of your meme though? You conflated tickets sold with tickets scanned as if they were mutually exclusive.
Late to the party, but I was in Chattanooga in June and actually went to a game against Greenville. Warm and pleasant evening. Crowd looked about the same, maybe a little more than that video posted a few threads back on press box side. We moved around and sat in a couple different sections to view different angles. I was speaking to a "team person". They were still finishing the boxes and press section and the parking lots mostly unpaved. I was surprised to see only 2 sides of stadium having seats, although the grass berm I guess counts. The unfinished side is on the freeway side- while good for visuals or advertising to passing cars, makes for kind of noisy environment. So this owner must have some money as he has a women's team, a team down the road in Dalton, GA (USL-2) and another in Park City, Utah (USL-2?) I was told. So I would imagine tickets sales on the other 3 teams are less than his primary team and if that team is not setting the world on fire, he must really love soccer and have lots of money.
He does have lots of money. He’s a real estate developer from Utah. No connection to Chattanooga at all, so it’s not really clear why he chose to buy a franchise here, but he has definitely spent a ton of money on it. They just opened the boxes two weeks ago or so.
-------------- That took a while to finish the main grandstand ! Actually not much make sense about this franchise. CFC, while in a different league had a head start in Chattanooga. I guess Dalton makes sense for your PDL team as only 30 minutes down the road. Park City? Even less sense, unless that where he lives (?) I could have thought of a whole bunch more places to go with a USL-1 team. I think the Red Wolves will have a much better soccer stadium once it is all truly built out than CFC's home, except for the dam plastic field. Maybe what Chattanooga needs is have the 2 teams merge and be Chattanooga United !
Rust Built: Fueled By Fans, Detroit City FC Is Thriving https://www.si.com/soccer/2021/10/04/hidden-gems-detroit-city-fc-keyworth-stadium
I thought the whole Detroit City thing was really cool until I learned about the “F MLS” aspect of the club’s supporters. So ended any interest on my part.
----------------- Have they said publicly or privately "F-USL"? If USL doesn't have the same single-entity set up as MLS, and the league lets the team operate locally the way they do, would this work? Would seem to be a fit in USL-2 or maybe USL-1. USL-C might be too much of a step financially.
PRESS RELEASE: New Amsterdam FC Issues Equity to Every Professional Player, Likely Becoming the Only Professional Sports Club in the World to Issue Ownership to All Players https://t.co/7XigV1s5nw— NEW AMSTERDAM FC (@nafcnyc) October 6, 2021 Owner who has a conflict of interest with his wife owning another NISA team, wants those same conflict of interests to be bestowed on their players if they get traded or waived.
Updated NISA Fall Season Attendance as of 10/6/2021: 50 matches played Detroit City: 6,076/4,664/3,894/3,969/3,689/3,817 Chattanooga FC: 2,916/2,008/2,158/1,946/1,960 Michigan Stars: 1,628/1,857/0*/0*/0* Chicago House: 1,183/1,013/863 California United: 653/525/0*/685/1,738/345/415 New Amsterdam: 278/333/404/319/422 Maryland Bobcats: 305/362/292/312 1904 FC: 237/182/393/342/245 Stumptown: 167/189/164/245/399 Los Angeles Force: 0/0/175/0/0*
I think that was a reaction to the talk of an MLS franchise coming to Detroit. There's a good Copa90 feature on them on YouTube. You have to admire what they've accomplished though. Not to flog the bloodstain on the ground that was a dead horse on attendance numbers, I came across this: Why ‘sold-out’ matches still have empty seats - News - AFC Wimbledon
Nice In short: 70% season ticket attendance, 90% single match ticket attendance and "debenture" holders seats not used and not resold. Ignoring the latter, an official attendance of 5,000, with 1,500 season ticket holders, becomes a 4,200 "sell out". An Atlanta United "sell out" of 42,500, with 35,000 STH could be as low as 31,250.
This is really fascinating and it's really great to see this sort of transparency about the process from the head of a club. That said, this is describing something a different than the bunfight we were having: the teams we were talking about were not anywhere remotely close to selling out; there's a distinction between "if it's sold out, how come there are empty seats" and "why are there half as many people there as you're saying"?
Per a Red Bulls fan, unused free tickets can also be counted as "tickets distributed", though I doubt there are many of those being given to school kids in times of Covid.
I would assume that free tickets are included in that number, yeah, which is exactly the problem. If the Friday before game day has only seen 20% of your seats sold, the team loses nothing by giving away another 50% or whatever.
except what they do "lose" in that instance is the integrity of ticket pricing. you'll never be able to sell enough tickets going forward if it becomes obvious you are giving away scads of tickets. you destroy the incentive by basically setting the value of the only thing you have to sell at 0. sure, it will *look* better, if you are into appearances. but the facade cannot cover up what happens to the underlying health of the entity trying to sell tickets. no business can survive giving away a good percent of what they are trying to sell. now, anyone who has only sold 20% of their tickets in the leadup to a game has issues that probably preclude their success anyway, but just giving a bunch of people a good time on your dime doesn't make any sense, either. in that case, you are either in the wrong business or have the wrong leadership or you have seriously misjudged your market. if your owner is a rich person who is steadfast and committed to weathering losses, fine. but those people realize - perhaps better than most, and certainly better than some here - that you simply cannot operate and grow a business that way long term.
I'm absolutely not disputing any of that, although there is an argument to be made that if these comps show up you can at least get them to spend on parking and concessions, which otherwise would have not happened at all. But, yes, it's still either a short sighted strategy or wallpapering over serious cracks. At the same time, there's not a whole lot of other explanations between the enormous delta between reported and actual attendance for the team we're talking about.