I think they have a shot of averaging over 5k. I could see them drawing some nice crowds later on -- maybe not huge crowds of 14,000, but 8-9k maybe when Portland comes to town late in the season, for example. In 2011, the Flash had crowds of 14k and 1,200, which turned out okay for the average. This year it'll moderate with Wambach on the team, which in reality is much healthier for the franchise in the long term. It does sound like the Flash will begin engaging the youth soccer community, and when they do that, crowds will increase significantly. Hey, they started with 2,100 I believe in 2011 in the WPS, so I'll consider this progress!
=edit= DC's attendance posted below Attendances this week: Code: KC - 4064 DC - 3201 WNY - 4065 CHI - 2855 avg - 3547 Totals by team: Code: team_GH__total___avg___med BOS__1____2634__2634 CHI__2____4110__2055 KC___2___10848__5424 POR__1___16479_16479 SEA__0_______0_____0 NJ___1____2611__2611 DC___2____7770__3885 WNY__1____4065__4065 net_10___48517__4852__3633 Not including POR, the average is 3560 and the median is 3201.
It is the best opener so far, beating 2011 and 2012. I amazed myself - I estimated 4,000 - pretty darn close. It is going to take a while for folks to understand the WNT stars are coming to town every game - actually Syd and HAO got the biggest applause during introductions. So WNY @ 4065 is the third best out of 10 games. The two that had more were Portland at home and Portland at KC.
The match report on nwslsoccer.com lists it as 4569, but that sounds like the attendance for the opener.
I was there. It definitely felt like there were more people there. I think they low balled the attendance number.
Yeah, that's the opener number. The report the Spirit put out overnight also quotes the 3201. Seems very odd, and somewhat disappointing. Like fhrocks2005, I was there, and it certainly felt and looked like at least 4k. Oh well. At least the Spirit are still well over their target 3k/game average.
I'd really like to see a bit higher number than that but realistically it's not bad. With the new structure and lower budgets, those numbers can sustain the league for quite a while. Also, of course, some stadiums don't hold more than that. It would be nice for Boston and Chicago , with such small stadiums, to have frequent sellouts - that would induce more people to buy season tickets to guarantee they can see the must-see games on their list. Washington, I noticed, is within sight at least of creating , if not sellouts, then some measures of scarcity. For their upcoming match against Portland for example all the home stand seats are sold out, leaving only seats on the away side and general admission .
The reason to include the overall median is that it is fairly easy to calculate, and gives a good idea of what the average would be without large statistical outliers (like Portland's attendance, or a one-off game in another city in a large stadium with good attendance). Also: thanks for keeping track of all of this! I'm fascinated by attendance stats, but am usually too lazy to compile them myself.
It definitely felt as if there were well more than 2/3 of the fans there as for the opener. But the GM's a real stickler for an accurate count, so I think there's reason to be confident in the numbers. Meanwhile, they've already sold over 3,500 tickets to next week's match against Portland. So attendance is looking great so far.
If you do the per game math ( attendance / home game) its either undefined or infinite, depending what math you want to throw at it. It's not zero.
You can list attendance figures all you want, but the REAL question is.....what is the PAID attendance for each game? How many fans are actually buying a ticket? How many COMPS does a team give out per game? Go find this out and report back.
Most teams won't disclose this amount, and there is no requirement for them to do so. Trying to discuss only what the PAID attendance is for games is going to be futile. We can only discuss what is "readily" available, and that is the number of tickets distributed. It isn't a perfect indicator of the health of the league, but it is better than nothing.
It's a pretty good indicator. If you can't get people to show up if you give tickets away you have a problem.
Teams usually count tickets distributed, not turnstile numbers. So if they gave out 1000 free tickets, sold 500, and 750 people showed up, the attendance would be reported at 1500.
Do you think Portland over reported actual attendance? The place looked pretty full to me. The 7,000 folks who paid for season tickets are going to be pissed when they find out everyone else got in free and the Torns gave away 14,000 tickets.
I wasn't discussing the Portland attendance above. That was mostly for the concern that some of these lower attended teams may be padding their numbers with free tickets. I'm pretty sure the Portland FO learned a long time ago that giving away tickets doesn't build the brand or convince people to attend. I'm sure they do still hand them out to local soccer clubs/academies, and to some charities, but I'd wager the number of free tickets handed out is on the order of a couple hundred per game. There were definitely around 16,000 people there for the opener. The numbers were similar to the first and last of the Timbers preseason games this year, where they reported turnstile numbers of about 16k, and definitely more than the middle game, where they reported 14k.
....how the F did that suddenly become a Portland discussion? That comment seems way out of left field, and completely misguided to boot.... Anyway, to the original question: in addition to it being completely futile to track paid attendance, that's completely missing the point of this thread, which is not meant to be a detailed finances thread. I haven't seen any league that (publicly at least) tracks paid attendance - it's all an image thing, teams wanting to show how many people they can reach (tix distributed) or can get into the stadium (butts in the seats). Those are the numbers potential sponsors, broadcasters, and (most) other fans care about anyway.
Sorry. I'll try to stick to totally fact based reporting, like the stats that say that a team that reports 1500 buts in the seats actually sold 500 tickets and gave away 1000, and actually only750 showed up. Where the hell is the evidence for that?
Nowhere in the post was the suggestion that those numbers were based on real numbers, it was just an example of the process of how teams come up with reported attendance. Instead of 1000-500-750-1500, it could've read 500-2000-1800-2500 and it wouldn't have changed the meaning. And of course there are teams like the Spirit who are real sticklers about reporting butts in the seats instead (the 500-2000-1800-2500 would be 500-2000-1800-1800) but tickets distributed - free or paid - is the common method of counting. It happened all the time in WPS, where the reported attendance was obviously higher than the number of people who actually showed up. I haven't seen it in the NWSL yet, but that's because it's usually much more obvious midseason when butts-in-the-seats wane. I'm just surprised how you jumped down Portland's throat when there wasn't a suggestion for it at all. Portland is the LAST team I would think that would need to resort to giving away tickets.
Huh? It seemed relevant to bring up Portland. Even if no one specifically singled them out, as the largest reported attendance (by far) it doesn't hurt to put suspicions to rest. As far as discounted tickets, I think we would've heard about that if there was a lot of that going on. It happened with the Sol and that was reported on here at BigSoccer. You heard grumblings from the season ticketholders back then. With 7000 season ticketholders though, it makes no sense to alienate them with massive discounting of single game tickets. Portland had a great crowd and let's hope they can keep it up and average 10,000+ over the season. That would be terrific.
Then make it clear you are making stuff up. The numbers you made up for Portland are under 2% of tickets given away.