I know that I put up a thread on this before, but that must have been before the ‘reorganization.’ Here are the Spirit figures from both years... Don 2001 Season Game Date Opp Attend Day Time 1 4/22/01 Phi 6,155 Sun 7pm 2 5/5/01 Was 6,155 Sat 7pm 3 5/20/01 NY 5,529 Sun 4pm 4 6/2/01 BA 5,311 Sat 4pm 5 6/9/01 Bos 5,436 Sat 4pm 6 6/24/01 BA 5,554 Sun 3pm 7 6/30/01 NY 4,506 Sat 4pm 8 7/8/01 Bos 5,739 Sun 7pm 9 7/29/01 Atl 6,155 Sun 3pm 10 8/1/01 Was 6,155 Wed 7pm 11 8/12/01 Car 6,155 Sun 4pm Total 62,850 Ave 5,714 The five capacity crowds of 6,155 during the first year were for the first and last games, the two ‘Mia’ games, and the game against the Beat. 2002 Season 1 4/13/02 Car 5,166 Sat 3pm 2 4/20/02 NY 5,216 Sat 1pm 3 5/5/02 Was 6,311 Sun 5pm 4 5/19/02 Phi 5,779 Sun 5pm 5 6/1/02 Atl 5,815 Sat 3pm 6 6/23/02 Phi 5,545 Sun 5pm 7 7/6/02 Bos 6,149 Sat 1pm 8 7/14/02 SJ 6,103 Sun 5pm 9 7/31/02 Atl 6,392 Wed 7pm 10 8/11/02 Car Sun 5pm Total 52,476 Ave 5,830 The Spirit had 56,695 fans through 10 games last year. The last home game on August 11 only needs to generate a crowd of 4,219 to keep pace with the 2001 attendance for 10 games. Not bad for a team with no 'Mia' games, and with a team that has been losing consistently. That average of 5,830 is 83 percent of capacity. I think that the first two games had low attendance because they were on early on Saturdays - lots of girls teams would have been playing their own games at the same time. The average for the other seven games is 6,013 - which is 85.5 percent of capacity.
This is a good point that you make Tsunami. The scheduling at the beginning of this season was very unfortunate and this most definitely had a negative impact on the attendance of those first two home matches. Hopefully there will be more late afternoon and evening matches scheduled for next season.
Good analysis Tsunami. The fans have stood by the Spirit this year despite some less than stellar play (to put it politely). San Diego remains hungry for a winner. My only disappointment is we didn't sell out once this year in the increased-capacity stadium. You'd think we could have filled it to the brim just one time but alas....
I, too, would have liked to have seen at least one capacity crowd. It's too bad that Mia wasn't able to come out for that one Washington game... As it was, the game yesterday came within 643 of making a sellout. As to Saturdays, I'm sure that we will see at least one game with a 1pm start because of the deal with PAX.
With this afternoon's crowd of 6,358 the final attendance figure is 58,832. So the average turned out to be 5,883. If the first two games attendance is thrown out the average for the last 8 games is 6,056. Now bad for a team that didn't have a home game with Mia to drive the attendance up...
Don: how does our attendance match up against the rest of the league? Where did we end up this year? I'm still VERY disappointed we didn't sell out at least once this year. Considering our capacity, that - at least - is a poor showing, and I wonder about the "limits" of our "casual" base of fans, i.e, our core base is strong, our casual base is weak.
Flashman - We ended up 6th in attendance, above the Power and Courage. Here is the link to a big thread in the WUSA forum on league wide attendance... https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=579