Attendance Averages

Native

You're new and the boards have recently been wiped so I'll quickly summarise the differences for you as they have been posted in numerous threads (usually by one of the andy's).

1) MLS has far less games per season than NHL or NBA.
2) They charge a far higher ticket price.

3) They maintain this attendance through the week on weeknights wheras MLS's best attendance is on the weekend.

4) Their capacity is generally lower than MLS stadia as well.

Therefore not really a relevant comparison.

 

Yeah, what he said. But that doesn't mean we're getting better.

 

WNBA its coming down fast.
One thing expanded to fast.

We can improve on the 16,000+ but management got do there job.

 

One more item is that the NBA has 29 (?) teams, the NHL has 30 teams. And they play 80 games a year, not 30 games a year (or whatever MLS plays).

So although the per-game attendance is the same, when you look at TICKET REVENUE, then what you really have is:

For every $1 in MLS

If we compare to NBA/NHL you must first double this because of higher seating prices in NBA/NHL, so you get:

$2 for NBA/NHL

(Note: it may be a lot higher than double)

next multiply by 3 because you have three times as many teams:

$6 for NBA/NHL

finally, multiple by 8/3 because you have 80 games compared to 30 games so you get:

$16 for NBA/NHL

So, by my admittedly non-scientific comparison, the NBA/NHL take in $16 in gross ticket revenue for every $1 that MLS takes in.

Of course, this is just one way to look at the numbers. However, gross ticket revenue is not a mad measure of a league's overall standing.

 

The MLS/NHL comparison comes up often.

Lots of differences though. Many good ones have already been covered. Another difference I see is salaries. The Red Wings payroll is over $60 million/year... and the NY Rangers is even higher (but they cannot even make the playoffs hahaha). I could not imagine any one MLS team having that kind of payroll anytime in the immediate future.

It takes time to close gaps. I read an article in the Free Press this morning... Bobby Higginson (the MLB Tiger's marqee player.. but not a superstar in the league.. didn't even make the MLB all-star game) is scheduled to make $11.85 million next year. None of the Red Wings make that much.. and off-hand I can think of only one guy, Jaromir Jagr, in the entire NHL making that kind of money.

I kind of got off track.. but basically I'm saying that different leagues are sometimes tough to compare. I think MLS/Arena might be a better comparison (TV Deals, Salaries, Advertising, # of teams, etc..)

 

My thoughts?

1. As a reflection of popularity, I think these numbers do, in fact, demonstrate that MLS is underrated on SportsCenter.
2. Any attempts to read more into it than that are wrong, for reasons already listed on this thread.
3. One thing to keep in mind is that corporate accounts inflate the numbers for the big 4 leagues a bit, in terms of actual popularity. It varies from city to city, but alot of fans in those leagues are freebies for the fans, tho they still count as paid attendane.

 

If SC chose what to report based on popularity, you'd have an argument, though NASCAR would, too. But SC is not about fairness at all. And it's certainly not about journalism. It's about making the most money possible in a way that still fits the personal world views (biases) of the staff about what the "good sports" are.

 

I'm now going to hijack this thread to talk about what i want to talk about under the heading "Attendance Averages".







I've been running quick averages in my head for MLS weekends since the World Cup, and last week i came up with 17K average. To my knowledge this didn't include any special events like the July 4 fireworks. It included one of the absolute attendance dogs, San Jose (c'mon guys, if we got Real Madrid to be your home team there you think you could maybe break 13 thousand?); another site, NJ, which seems to be very sensitive to the level of opposition that was playing crummy opposition (NE); and yet still that 17 is higher than the pre-WC average.


Here's the raw data: http://www.mlsnet.com/schedules/




I know this is highly anecdotal and if i REALLY cared i'd do some regression analysis or something to see how the WC2002 effect is playing out. Nonetheless, intuitively i think it's helped the league by about one to two thousand per game. Is that going to make soccer the fourth major sport? Nope. But it'll help the league last the 30 or 40 years necessary for <TRAWLING>baseball to die off</TRAWLING>. Seriously, at this point it's about long term survival, and 17 looks a hella lot better than 14 a few years ago.







Can i get an amen?

 

How on earth did the NBA average 16K + per game? All I ever see on highlight shows are empty seats. Surely these less than half full arenas don't hold more than 32k?

 

I heard that Spike Lee pays $1,000 a game for his front row Metrostar tickets.

 

What about the NFL. Are they growing, staying stagnant, or shrinking?. Anyone know? They are way ahead of us in attendance right now. Unbelievable for all the stop-and-start. Does anyone see the day we compete with them?

 

They are growing, but slowly. The only thing holding the NFL back are consitently bad teams in some markets and lack of capacity in others.

We will never compete with the NFL.

Sachin

 

the NFL is light years ahead of everyone right now. i don't know if you can go to any NFL market and honesty say that if that market's NFL team won the super bowl, they would not be kings of the market's sporting landscape.

if the Lions ever won it, <snicker>, they would be on top. if you are near the detroit area, you know how big the wings are right now.. imagine if the lions had that kind of success.

for now MLS is best off defining their niche and then conquering it. there is definitely room for another summer sport in the USA!

 

Actually - I think the NFL is the league which does best in terms of upward mobility and parity (to a fault in my opinion). The Falcons went to the frickin Super Bowl a few years back! And where on earth did the Rams come from - they were atrocious a couple years ago? Cincinnati is a town that obsesses over the Bengals despite 15 years of horrid play - and built a beautiful new stadium for them. Non-guaranteed contracts and effective salary capping keep everyone interested.

 

Never compete with the NFL is a long time. At the moment I do believe it's upto MLS to keep the majority of its fans happy - something that's not really been achieved that well. Hopefully with the sucess of the World Cup, MLS soccer will achieve more than we believed possible, and turn things around in the next couple of years.

 

The problem with predictions like that, of course, is that they're impossible to evaluate, at least until they're categorically disproved.



For the record, i do think some soccer league (probably MLS) will "ever" compete with the NFL, but it won't be until at least the latter days of my lifespan. (This is precluding miracles of medical science, the second coming of Christ, and whatever else you can think of that would radically alter our existence beyond sports, like say a cataclysmic world war or the Northeastern US getting hit by an asteroid.) I think the next 20 or so years need to be aimed at survival and small growth, just as attendance seems to be up a few percent this year. At some point i do think soccer will hit a critical mass where it commands the media attention of other sports, and all of a sudden the vicious cycle of media coverage will be replaced by a virtuous cycle. But that won't happen until two or more "neutral" generations pass through the media, possessing none of the virulent anti-soccer bias one sees in people 45 and up but almost never in those 30 and younger.



It takes more than a neutral media, of course; a neutral media would presently look impartially and see MLS a step or two behind the NHL and way behind the big three. At some point several succeeding generations of kids need to be socialized into thinking soccer's important, into really caring about how Northern New Jersey does against DC in the way they might care about the Redskins versus the Cowboys. That will take time, many generations in fact, so i'm not saying we'll necessarily be here to see it. But it's equally foolish to say it will never happen as to say it will happen soon.

 

I guess those leagues took years to build the following they have now. Hopefully we can keep a league to build a following. I agree it's going to take years of development. When we win the World Cup I think this will help us along.

 

Yes, it is. But I think by this point, if anything was going to compete with the NFL, it would have done it by now. Our sports space is already crowded, and the forces that keep other sports out of the "inner circle" also tend to keep sports in the inner circle. I can't see soccer gaining enough intrinsic popularity, or football losing enough intrinsic popularity, for the gap to close too much anytime soon.

But dinosaurs were once the dominant life form on the planet, and I'm sure they thought that would last forever. So stranger things have happened. I just don't think it will, really.

 

As recently as 40 years ago, one would have said the same of the NFL. Such a slow, boring game, where nothing is happening 90% of the time, and you can't see most of what's happening when it does, could never compete with baseball.

Then tv came.

With it's close-ups, replays. Suddenly you could see what's going on.

It still seems agonizingly slow to me. Tell me again why they can only play 6-8 seconds before asking the coach for more advice. But tv took a sport that few paid any attention to and made it big-time. So never is truly a long time.

 

People didn't say that about the NFL. They were just too busy watching college football to pay attention to the NFL.

 

This is not a good comparison. Football was immensely popular in the USA long before television.

 

Right. College football. (Incidentally the World Cup final has been played in a college football stadium, but never in an NFL one, unless the Rams or Raiders also used it at some point i'm not aware of.)



But it's also accurate to say that soccer is immensely popular in the US. Just not spectator soccer. The point was that things can change over 40 years, and that statements about the sports heirarchy using the word "never" literally are usually pretty silly.

 

I stand by my statement. This was a baseball country, and football was a distant and paltry rival, till television. College, pro, pick-up, whatever.