We had some coverage of the protest last night. Full clip below: 🎥: @futboliandotv https://t.co/hoi0YnY4Qd pic.twitter.com/AtQ7SwEm5Y— Jose Duran (@joseduransports) March 19, 2023 Hmmm.....someone might want to tell Phil that the LA Galaxy aren't his Club........
If MLS is doing it to Montreal they can definitely do it to others. It benefits no one having a home game when there are freezing temperatures outside as much as some want to see their team play at home within 2 weeks of the season starting.
Just because they can doesn't mean they should. There are real impacts to having a team on the road and out of market to start the season. On the field it puts you at a disadvantage that even though home/away balances out over the course of the season the team is always playing catch up instead of playing from a position of strength. Off the field you lose the PR bonus of opening day until later, when the team might appear (or actually be) bad, so there's less interest. Plus ticket sales for long homestands (regardless of market) are difficult still. You can get people to give up one or two Saturday nights in a row, but 3 or more is a harder sell. Fans like to wave their hands and say "play games in warm weather climates" without addressing these problems, or realizing that there aren't enough warm weather teams, especially when the idea is used to justify a winter schedule.
It should still be an advantage for the home team when they host a cold weather game early on especially from a team that comes from a warmer climate. However, this is an attendance thread and understand why fans may choose to stay home. I will say however, despite those on BS that mock fans from the NFL and the sport in general, there is never an issue with those fans attending cold weather games. So maybe the problem is MLS fans.
You'd think, but then teams (the Rapids) do things like spend all preseason in warm weather climates (Mexico/Orlando) and leave early for road games (Rapids travelled to San Jose on Wednesday and will travel to Austin tomorrow) so they don't have to train in cold weather. Of course that has the added complication that new players playing in an unusual environment (altitude) don't get acclimated until way into the season. NFL fans, realistically, do it 1-2 games a season, plus any playoff games. And I'd bet for the regular season games there are just as many NFL fans who nope out due to weather as MLS fans. The difference is that the NFL teams have a big enough fan base that they can resell their tickets when they nope out and still have a full house.
There's a reason why a team that's been as historically bad as the Detroit Lions has played in a domed stadium for decades. Green Bay and Buffalo have large crowds in freezing cold because they're really good. Detroit has sucked for 4 decades so they have to make it more palatable for people to attend live.
I'm not sure that's the reason. The Packers were mostly terrible between Lombardi and Favre, and the Bills had the league's longest playoff drought before their current coach. Those just aren't places that are going to bring in the kind of year-round events, conventions, Final Fours, etc., that make a big dome make financial sense.
As a lifelong Bills fan.....this is wrong. The Bills had the longest playoff drought in the NFL until 2018. They had a nice 8ish year run in the late 80's and early 90's but up until 2020 they've been crap, and were crap prior to that earlier run. Bills fans are just different. Buffalo has the Bills, Sabres, Chicken Wings, Beef on Weck and Snow......that's it.
Imagine saying the bolded to someone 10 years ago. Though I'll say that the Bills having big attendance numbers is more a byproduct of just how ********ing popular football is. Even when they were in the middle of their near-two-decade postseason drought, they were still drawing 60,000+.
That’s probably the actual real reason. I didn’t mention it in my post but should have. The NFL has a bigger fan base and can make up the difference. So I guess there is no practical solution. Just keep things as it is I guess and maybe one day it no longer will be an issue.
Vegas has been terrible. The rest of the XFL has been pretty solid with San Antonio, DC, and especially St. Louis doing well. The first link only has week 1-4. https://sportsnaut.com/xfl-tv-ratings-2023/ https://xflnewshub.com/calendar/xfl-2023-attendance-tv-ratings-list/
The "small" HS stadium in Lubbock is 6176 capacity and opened in 2010. That's the Lubbock-Cooper school district which is currently the second fastest growing district in the state and is opening a second HS this fall and intends to expand the stadium seating soon. The current school is 5A (second largest designation in Texas) and the expectation is both schools will be 5A schools within 3 years. Lubbock City has a field for 4 schools that holds 8471 and was renovated in 2013. Not only does that place usually fill up for football, the Lubbock Matadors pulled in over 4000 on a few occasions last year for NPSL soccer. You can actually buy "season tickets" for all the games for the 3 city HS teams that are 5A size on the district website. There's a 4A school that doesn't do pre-sales. The "Frenship" district (that's the correct spelling) has a stadium for their 6A team that holds 9963. They're also opening a 2nd HS in the district and considering expanding seating. The current school actually has Reserved Seating tickets for football as well as an elevator to the press box. The low end for the city HS teams is about 5500. The Cooper team sells out and adds some standing room only most weeks. The Frenship team has pulled in over 10000 during their good years when a name team like Odessa Permian (yes the Friday Night Lights school is in their district) comes to town. That's 6 schools in a metro area of about 325k that all average well over 5000 tickets sold per home game. Now imagine how it is in places like the DFW region and Houston. Here's the 20 biggest HS stadiums in Texas at the start of last season. Here's the Bucket List of 12 stadiums to see in Texas updated in April 2020. To bring this back to the XFL/USFL, I really think this current version of the USFL has a chance to stick. They've got a really good financial plan, keep finding new investors, are paying more as well as offering a CBA and some minor benefits, and are taking their time to get things established before trying to force things in every city. I think they'll finally get a foothold established and eventually swallow up a couple of the XFL teams (St. Louis, San Antonio, DC) when it inevitably folds again. Football will remain king for a while, but that doesn't mean that 2nd and 3rd division US soccer can't work out really well also.
Week 5 MLS Attendances: Portland (vs. Los Angeles Galaxy) 24,077 Charlotte (vs. New York Red Bulls) 32,540 Columbus (vs. Atlanta) 19,249 DC United (vs. New England) 16.509 Miami (vs. Chicago) 17,699 Philadelphia (vs. Orlando) 18,725 Austin (vs. Colorado) 20,738 Houston (vs. New York City) 13,204 Kansas City (vs. Seattle) 18,629 Minnesota (vs. Vancouver) 19,609 Nashville (vs. Cincinnati) 28,453 Salt Lake City (vs. St. Louis) 19,508 Los Angeles FC (vs. Dallas) 22,163 San Jose (vs. Toronto) 12,434 Total--283,537 Average--20,253
XFL average was 14,329 average as of last week. I wonder what would happen if they put teams in non-NFL cities with mid-sized stadiums like Louisville, Portland, Sacramento and Albuquerque, in other words at soccer stadiums. It would cut their costs while being a money maker for USL (and the Timbers).
The XFL has teams in San Antonio, St. Louis, and Orlando. All non-NFL cities. Those teams could play in USL or MLS stadiums but they are playing in big stadiums with few other tenants so their rent is probably not high. Of the other XFL teams in NFL markets, Houston plays in a college football stadium. Arlington plays in an old baseball stadium in the Dallas Metro area retrofitted with a rectangular field that they share with a rugby team and an MLS Next Pro team. Las Vegas plays in a USL stadium. The DC team plays in Audi Field. Seattle is the only XFL team playing in an active NFL stadium. The XFL is a TV league. They want to be in big markets for TV.
I was curious about Houston's low numbers since they moved into their new home. The Dynamo don't seem to draw as well as it did when the team played at the University of Houston's Robertson Stadium. Is the location of the new stadium more difficult to get to? Is it in a rough neighborhood or something? Is the team owner a semi-disinterested party, like in San Jose or Colorado? When San Jose was playing at Spartan Stadium, the team consistently drew 20-25,000 fans (I could be wrong; I'm going off my memory). Now, the team rarely sells out its 18,000 seat stadium. For Houston, the team seemed to sell out Robertson for every other match, which correlated to 22-25,000 per home contest.
The team sucks shit and has for a decade. Their attendance was great when they moved into the new stadium - Houston's 5 best attended seasons were their first 5 in this stadium.