MLS Attendance Analysis: Weeks 14&15

My pal Murphy has a theory about this!

 

Except, they are watching teams other than USA in record numbers, too.

 

Patrick Murphy ‏@_Pat_Murphy_ 11m
#Crew96 announce 2 attendance numbers. Last night's would have been standing room only 20,617, but today's reschedule falls to 4,680.

 

San Jose won the last 2 times they played to large crowds at Stanford. Or is it 3?

 

so either a huge bump in attendance or a major dip due to incredibly unusual circumstances. which will you stat heads be counting?

forgetting fairness it would be downright non-indicative of reality for this lower number to take the place of the ACTUAL slated attendance. If that number lowered their average enough it could make it seem like the team is doing more poorly than it actually is.

Though I guess if theres already a protocol for this kind of thing it should just follow whats been done in the past for consistencies sake. All I'm saying is that one of the points of tracking these numbers is to gauge how well a team is doing in its market, and there were ALOT more people ready to take their seats to watch some MLS action in columbus that night than the 4,680 number would suggest.

 

That is a very good question. I don't know that we've ever had a team actually announce what an attendance for a game would be if it hadn't been rescheduled. I will quote this rather important information from the Columbus Crew twitter account before I state my opinion:

I would assume that many of the people who originally had tickets, but were unable to go today, will get replacements. I feel that it would be disingenuous to double count those people. That is a personal choice though. The 4680 people seems low for it to be a count of all the people who hadn't exchanged tickets, so my guess is that is a tickets scanned number, and the rest have a free voucher, and will be counted for the future games' attendances. This means that using the ~5k number could lowball the number of tickets they would have been able to claim had there not been inclement weather. However, I would rather take the number released by the team for the actual game than to take a number which could essentially include the same ticket twice.

I will also note that the numbers we calculate are attendance numbers only. They have in the past been relatively good measures for the health of a team, or even the league as a whole, but that does not necessarily follow. The Miami Fusion's last season in 2001 had their highest ever average attendance, and yet they still folded. If Portland, KC, or Toronto's stadium situations were different this year, they would probably be drawing more people. San Jose would almost assuredly be drawing more than their 10525 per small-stadium game they've gotten. We don't calculate the health of teams or the league, we calculate attendance metrics.

Long story short, I suggest using the lower number. Even if it paints a bad picture short term, it will probably even out (or close to it) by the end of the season.

 

Soccer gods are not looking down at the Crew ...

 

I say go with whatever is on the game report.

 

Columbus game *
DCU doubleheader *

 

16752 in Montreal

 

I don't think we can be certain that it would be double counting, because... we don't know how many of these ~15K fans getting replacement tickets for a future game would have already planned to go to that future game anyway.

In other words, let's say about ~6k fans got replacements for the Sep 27th match. Should we expect an increase of 6K on top of what the normal attendance would have been on that day? What if, say, ~4k of these ~6K replacements were already part of the normal attendance of that upcoming Sep 27th game?


Imo, since we know what happened and understand why the Sunday number is 4,680, and also we happened to have an official number of 20,617 for Saturday, I see no problem using the ~20k (but with an asterisk).

Or, just get an average of previous Saturday games in this season and use that (again with an asterisk).

 

move columbus

 

As I see it, 20k+ tickets were sold for the game. Since we count tickets sold, the 20k should be used.

 

save me searching....why was the match moved from Saturday to Sunday?

 

That becomes a promotion, that's all. Teams run all kinds of promotions, package deals, discounts, etc. We still count those as "tickets sold."

 

Lightening. A fan was stuck by lightning.

 

thanks.....hope the fan is ok?

 

i think you have to go with whatever the official number is on the game report and on the mls stats, we can't go making up our own caveats and exceptions ... it sucks but it is what it is ... plus a pr/fo guy saying they would have had "x" attendance isn't the same thing as that actually happening.

the official game that counts in the records was on sunday and so the attendance (whatever the official number is) for that game is what we should use ... not some "but if" number from the abandoned saturday game.

just my 2 cents.

 

This is definitely not the first time a game was rescheduled with short notice. In all other times that I'm aware of, no one mentioned any other attendance than what was in the official report. This has caused some bad attendances in the past as well. The only difference is that we have some idea of how much worse it is because of the unfortunate incident and the inclement weather.

 

There is a precedent for this. As an LAG STH I can trade in unused tickets for additional tickets to a game late in the season. Which ticket does LAG report in their attendance numbers? The one distributed and paid for even if I don't attend? Or the ones traded in and used ? If they report paid for but not attended I would do the same for the Crew.

 

the boxscore says 4680 ... think we've got to go with that:

http://matchcenter.mlssoccer.com/matchcenter/2014-06-29-columbus-crew-vs-fc-dallas/boxscore