I'm not saying baseball wasn't the biggest sport, but college football was able to draw crowds in excess of 70,000 before World War I.
College Football was nowhere near "paltry" in the first half of the 20th Century - it was HUGE. In fact, during the early days of the NFL - the biggest reason it had little success, was that the millions of college fans looked down on the games professionals. The pro players and teams were thought of as hackish barnstormers - while college teams like ND, Army and Navy had a real mystique. And any comparison to MLS is silly. The NFL only had to campaign on selling the pro version of a sport that was already widely accepted. The MLS has to sell both the game and the league.
Average attendance, 1934-1953: Year--MLB------NFL 1934--5,694----8,211 1935--5,982---12,041 1936--6,529---15,111 1937--7,216---17,510 1938--7,364---17,040 1939--7,293---19,476 1940--7,948---19,328 1941--7,789---20,157 1942--6,988---16,144 1943--6,031---24,228 1944--7,063---20,393 1945--8,814---25,408 1946-14,914---31,493 1947-15,989---30,624 1948-16,913---25,421 1949-16,303---23,196 1950-14,106---25,356 1951-13,016---26,570 1952-11,810---28,502 1953-11,600---30,064 The NCAA attendance records only go back to 1948, and they don't include a per-game average until 1957. Even when it does, it includes all divisions, which explains why it was only 7,073. NCAA Football wasn't as clearly defined in terms of divisions as it is today. But college football was more popular than the pro game in its early years, and professional football was not seen as a particulary noble profession for a college-educated man. Baseball was the most popular sport in this country for a long while, but it didn't take long for football to take hold. Television helped, obviously. But to suggest that football was basically a non-factor before television (the first NFL game was televised in 1939, but TV wasn't prevalent in the league until the Rams and Redskins televised all of their games in 1950, and football really came of age on TV in 1958 in the Colts/Giants game) doesn't appear to be very well-supported, at least by this one indicator of interest (attendance being just one indicator, then as now).
Not true. When the Patriots won the Super Bowl, Boston sports talk radio was replete with questions like, "How does this make the Red Sox look?" In Boston, it always comes back to the Red Sox. Anyway, saying football is more popular than baseball is the quintessential case of apples and oranges. Look at it this way. The Patriots averaged 60,292 in 2001, the Red Sox 32,600. The Patriots drew 543,628, the Red Sox 2,600,000+. The Super Bowl got a rating of 42, each game of the World Series got at least a 12. For seven games that's 84. And how many of that 42 do you think were watching it for the game? 6? People in New England and Eastern Missouri. And some in Southern California (pathetic). Everyone else was watching the commercials and the halftime show. Try this one. Excluding your team, think of how many football players you'd recognize if you saw them on the street. Now eliminate the quarterbacks. Compare that to the number of baseball players you'd recognize.
To be honest, those baseball/football average attendance figures are not a fair comparison, and I apologize to ne for making it look as if I was skewering him with them. Until night baseball became widespread, the majority of major league baseball games were played at or around 3pm during the week, rendering them inaccessible to a great many people. As football has, mostly, been played on weekends, when more people could get to games (shrewd planning on their part, huh?) they have an inherently unfair advantage in that time period. I don't have the figures for weekdays vs. weekends for MLB in that time period, but in 2000, the difference between a weekday afternoon game and a weekend night game was 31,621 - 34,444. Still, it's not a completely valid comparison, and I apologize again.
That's true. In Boston, everything does come back to the Red Sox. That's not necessarily indicative of the nation as a whole. By nearly every measure that you can think of, football is the most popular sport in this country, and has been for a while. Does that mean that no one went to more than one Red Sox game last year? Does that mean the Red Sox are 4.78 times more popular than the Patriots (you know, they actually might be, but I have a hard time believing you could say that baseball is 5 times as popular as football)? Talk about apples and oranges. You think no one watched more than one game of the Series? Vastly underestimated. It just wouldn't be an attendance thread without "pathetic". Thank you. It has become chic in this country to dutifully intone "The commercials are the best part of the Super Bowl" and "I only watch it for the commercials" and yadda yadda yadda. The NFC and AFC championship games get between a 23-27 rating. You think anybody's watching them for the commercials and the halftime shows? You think the people who watch the NFC and AFC championships "for the game" don't watch the Super Bowl "for the game"? There's a big jump between the championship games and the Super Bowl, obviously. But the percentage of people who watch the Super Bowl for the game has to be higher than you give it credit for. Ohhhhhkay. I'm not sure that the fact that baseball players, who are on TV without helmets ten times as often as football players are with helmets, are more recognizable than football players is a clear indicator of baseball's relative popularity vs. football, but it's an interesting theory. Who gets higher TV ratings? Who gets more TV money? Who sells more merchandise? Who dominates water cooler conversation on Mondays? Whose draft is televised? Who has more fantasy players? You make some valid points, though.
Kenn Tomasch already reduced this post to rubble. (To his credit, he's more gracious than i am.) I just want to say that Boston is as good a proxy for nationwide interest in baseball as Berkeley is a good proxy for national political trends.
That wasn't my intention----I've already been bashed for being an "outsider" when it comes to the Revs, but I know enough to know that the Red Sox are king in New England. I still think the Cardinals are king in St.Louis, but I also know that the Broncos are king in Denver. Just pointing out that what is true in New England isn't necessarily true everywhere.
Baseball had weekend games to make up for the midweek afternoon games. The 72-game home schedule never really wavered, however. For the longest time, the NFL had a regular season schedule with 6 home games. I eat more apples than oranges, but I drink more orange juice than apple juice. Baseball was merely born in New York. Pro football seems to have a large midwestern base. College football may still draw 80,000 a game at 20 schools, but TV ratings have been stagnant (if that) for them for a long time. Then there's hockey. I think we're establishing here that every region of America seems to have a somewhat distinct sports tendency.
Well said. What I was driving at with those numbers about the Red Sox and Patriots is that you can't compare baseball and football. Football may average 65,600 per game, but only over 8 home dates, baseball 26,000 over 81. It's just the nature of the two sports for baseball to have smaller numbers on more days. Would the Super Bowl get a 42 every game if it were a best of three series? Incidentally, I'm sure that many of those 12 (it could've been 20+ for Games 6 and 7) watched every World Series game, but the vast majority (up to 90%) of attendees at NFL games are season ticket holders. So in reality, maybe 70,000 people attended Patriots games last year. Whatever the numbers bear out, it's basically useless to compare baseball and football. I just don't know how easy it is to say football is more popular than baseball. Thomas Boswell said it best, "162 games are 10.125 times better than 16."
In fact, what that data seems to support is that the NFL began to make 'the leap' at the end of WWII. In fairness, though, television also became prevalent in a critical mass of American homes during that same period, as used radar screens made the product much cheaper. So maybe TV was part of the equation, but as no NFL team had it games broadcast on a season long schedule until 1950, it doesn't appear the predominant part.
Actually, it was 77 (154 games, 8 teams in a league, you played everybody 22 times, 11 home and 11 away), but there were some years where the schedule was shortened just a touch (in World War I, for instance). And since I didn't have the weekend vs. weekday numbers, I was hesitant to make a big sweeping comparison. But given that a baseball season was about 160 days or so, and that you can assume that 5/7th of all games were played during the week (71%), it would be very, very, unlikely for the other 29% of the games to pull the average up of the first 71%. I mean, the Yankees, who led the league in attendance and were baseball's top drawing card with Ruth et al, never averaged as much as 16,000 fans a game until 1946. Given that more people seem to be able to find the time today than in the Olden Days to go to weekday baseball games (day or night), I'd imagine the effect might have been slightly more pronounced than it is today (when the weekend nights are about 9% higher than weekday day games). If that's the case, I can't see where weekend major league games of that time period would have drawn as many as 12,000 a game on average. Maybe that much. But without having the boxscores (maybe that's a project for another time), I'd just be guessing. And if you look, baseball made a quantum leap as well, as did the entire country. Once the War ended, everything boomed. That had an effect on the NFL, I'm sure. As did the opening up of new markets in the AAFC (like Cleveland and San Francisco, for two). Television did make a big difference in the NFL, there's no question about that. But it was a very, very popular sport before then. I have no doubt that baseball was, as it is today, our national pastime, and it may have, in fact, challenged for our national sport (today the NFL is our national sport, no question). The major things that sportswriters covered back in those days were baseball, college football, boxing, and horse racing. I'd love to see one of those polls like Harris does on the most popular sports in America from back in those days. Would be interesting to see how things have changed and how some things (I'm guessing) have remained the same.
MLS Demographic Information Does anybody have any demographic information on who attends actually attends MLS games?
Somewhere. Though we got into a big screaming match about it over the interpretation of the numbers last time out. And I haven't seen a new update recently, the numbers were from several years ago.
Add in some smaller leagues and MLS looks a lot better MLL - 3,716 (in 2002) AFL - 9,958 (in 2002) WUSA - 6,969 (in 2002) WNBA - 9,344 (in 2002)
This is a recording. Click. It is not average attendance. Click. It is revenue in versus revenue out. Click. This is a recording. Click. It is not average attendance. Click. It is revenue in versus revenue out. Click.
1) If you want to get one man's well-researched insight into the whole college football v. nfl v. baseball v. basketball v. hockey v. pro soccer in the States thing, get a copy of Andrei Markovits (sp?) "Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism" I am constantly pimping this guy's book because it explains a whole lot about why we are where we are relative to other sports. It is not a light read, however, as he wrote it as a historical and sociological study, not a Tom Clancy thriller. 2) Whoever made the point about free tickets skewing NBA/NHL/NFL/MLB attendence numbers was right on. Every once in a while -- when they are in a particularly sullen mood -- the afternoon sports talk guys here in Atlanta will ask each caller "When is the last time you paid for a ticket to a major sporting event with your own money." The answers ("never", "maybe once last season", "did what?") are illuminating. Just as MLS and soccer in general are not part of SportsCenter's consciousness, they are not part of the "sports as mass entertainment and culture" culture that those other sports benefit from. What we really could use is a big ol' four month MLB strike sometime in the next couple years. That way, people would find MLS - and maybe the Nats - by default, and some would stick with it. A boy can dream
right now MLS averages just above 14 k per game for this season mostly due to smaller stadiums some teams play in. Attendance averages won't go up much higher in the upcoming years especialy as more teams move into 20 k stadia. One thing you might see is ticket prices going up if there is a high demand.
Duh. But just tracking announced attendance without (a) the corresponding revenue figures and (b) the expense numbers doesn't really help what you're trying to do, which is get a handle on the financial well-being of the league, now does it? The attendance numbers are not going to be what determines whether this league (or any other) folds or prospers. It's revenue versus expense. How far into the negative that equation can go is for the owners to decide.
Mr. Stats, Golf had low ratings for a long time before the Tiger Woods phenomenon arrived on our TV screens, yet practically all but 3 or 4 tournaments were televised over the air. Ever wonder why? The issue with the networks was WHICH 2% they were attracting... the people with money, people who could afford to advertise on their networks were evidentally watching golf. That should signal a loud clue as to why the attendance numbers only exist in context. The 16-to-1 revenue ratio must be understood. When a significant part of the fan base is attracted to a sport because it is inexpensive, THAT is what causes sponsors to think twice. Only overwhelming numbers in the stands and on TV can override that. Otherwise, the 23K or so the XFL averaged in their year of glory might have meant something. An alternate source to check is a lesser-known David Halberstam book, "The Breaks of the Game." This highlights the NBA during their late-70s down years.
They had set a goal of selling a million tickets (25k for 8 teams) and nearly got there. That wasn't so much their problem as (a) public perception, which was tainted by the grossly overrated hype, the bravado of McMahon, the (should have been expected in that time slot) low ratings, which caused the critics to stomp with both feet on the bandwagon, and the bad football, and (b) the startup costs. Way too much to overcome. If you're going to start a new league, you don't try professional football. I doubt anyone will try again anytime soon.