2017-18 MASL Attendance Thread

When they have 4,000 they say 1,000 and when they have 1,000 they say 4,000.

 

Your rough guess: how many of these times will still be playing in three years?

 

Great point. I think we are witnessing the end. I just don't think there is enough people in this country to support a pro game.

 

There's over 320 million people in this country. The number of people isn't the problem. More people wouldn't suddenly revive the game. It's that no one cares or knows about it and the game isn't actively sold to people.

 

America has a fascination with odd/fringe sports, such as MMA, X-games (skateboarding, snowboarding, etc), airplane racing, drone racing, billiards, televised video game competitions, etc. Indoor soccer has somehow been so poorly managed and marketed that it can't even get broadcasted as much as battle robots or professional darts. How many people are even watching the YouTube game feeds right now? What national sponsorships does the MASL even have right now?

 

When I look, usually there are a few hundred people watching a given feed. I would imagine the less popular teams may not even do that well (when on the road).

And outside of Mitre and whatever the Sport Resource Group is (looks like they provide dasherboards), I am not seeing league sponsors.

The problem is largely the same problem as 10 years ago: no stability, no really compelling players, teams or storylines, very few teams have had a chance to establish any history or traction (outside of the Blast and Wave, obviously, the longest tenured team in the MASL is the Sockers, right? Since 2009?*), they aren't financed sufficiently to be able to devote resources to sales, marketing and staffing and few people in most metro areas in the league have either no idea they have a team or don't care or those teams don't matter to sufficient people.

Look around here: the most active members of the community are (largely) the same people as 10-15 years ago. Any new people are not like us, who remember what it was like back in the day. (And, to be fair, we tend to romanticize what it was like back in the day, though it was light years ahead of what it is today.)

This sport can't be killed, apparently (despite some really robust attempts), but neither is it going to be raised off the carpet and become truly viable again. Those of us who really just think it's a great, exciting sport and worthy thing to pay some attention to are really in the minority. By a large margin.





*No matter WTF Wikipedia tries to say about the RGV Barracudas.

 

the times where a Wave-Cleveland Crunch Title game would sell out the Bradley center(capacity 19000) are over forever, it was a time , place and teams convergence that wont be repeated.

 

They never actually sold it out, but I get your point.

 

They only even played in the finals the once.

4/22/00 Cleveland 20, MILWAUKEE 18 (8,131)
4/25/00 MILWAUKEE 18, Cleveland 12 (5,329)
4/27/00 CLEVELAND 27, Milwaukee 15 (6,245)
4/29/00 Milwaukee 14, CLEVELAND 8 (10,510)
5/05/00 MILWAUKEE 19, Cleveland 6 (15,469)

 

(Sighs wistfully...)

 

Attendances looked great on TV in RGV and Syracuse. Holiday bump? CR will have potentially their largest crowd of the year for their annual New Year's Eve game.

 

UPDATE: 1,820 in Cedar Rapids on NYE.

Which was the coldest New Year's Eve on record here, BTW.

 

Turlock has got to go, never saw the benefit for the league to keep them around. M2 would be much better suited for them. With that I do believe Stockton should be targeted once more and the express used as a feeder club . with the mls sounders minor club moving to Tacoma what would be awesome is to see the stars team up and do some sort of cross promotion with the S2 club .

With all that said , if indoor lacrosse can still be up and running from the late 80s then so can the masl. As a league they need to sit down and open dialogue with NLL and start picking there brains.