I am just curious as to what the average attendance is for a soccer match in Europe. Like for a international game or a club match between some top sides.
I'm not THAT curious, can't someone just post some numbers? I was just reading the MLS threads about 'predict the attendance' and it's usually always less than 20,000, and I'm like "that's pathetic", but then again this is the USA where soccer is not considered one of the 'major sports'... even the USA vs Mexico game a few months ago only had like 45,000 people at it. So I was just wondering what kind of crowds fill the stadiums for European games where soccer is your biggest sport? We have several teams who average over 100,000 fans for football here (Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, and surely some teams down south and out west as well) so I was wondering if you guys get anywhere near these kinds of crowds. Even at Michigan State we manage draw in 72,000 fans for each football game (and I imagine it would be more if our stadium could hold more than 72k) so I was just wondering if you guys have these types of crowds in Europe that we have for football, or if our MLS attendance isn't THAT bad and soccer just generally does not draw huge crowds like football does?
They do all right. If they wanted to, Europe could collect 30 to 40 teams from all the different countries and put a league together with attendance that would rival the NFL. The average in the big 4 (England, Germany, Spain, and Italy) is around 30,000 a game, but it drops violently from there in other countries. But you have to remember these teams play around 20 home games a year, unlike 10 in the NFL and 6 in College. Except for the mega teams ticket prices seem to be a bit lower then the NFL, but still more than I could afford for my family to buy season tickets. Here's a good link: Soccer Attendance
From my vast knowledge of supporter patterns that I've learned living here on the west coast of Canada, I think it pretty much depends on the stadium and the game you're talking about. There aren't too many stadia that hold 100,000 plus in Europe. The Nou Camp and Bernabeu in Spain push that number, and they are full for big matches, but not always for lesser ones. Italy has a few 80,000 seaters, that also fill up for bigger matches. Old Trafford is the biggest club stadium in England, that holds 65,000 give or take a few thousand. It is filled for pretty much every game (don't know about Carling Cup). Same can be said for St. James' Park (about 50,000), Highbury (38,000) and some others. You go elsewhere you get different results. In Holland there are many stadia that only hold 15,000 or so, and I don't think they're full every match. So there you go, it really varies, and is a hard question to answer.
the average attendance is highest in germany. the second is england, then italy and spain. club----------------------------average 1. BV 09 Borussia Dortmund-------79.233 2. FC Barcelona------------------73.624 3. Real Madrid-------------------70.231 4. Manchester United-------------67.642 5. AC Milan 1899-----------------63.473 6. Galatasaray SK Istanbul-------62.752 7. FC Schalke 04-----------------61.041 8. Celtic------------------------58.495 9. Inter Milan-----------------56.052 10.FC Bayern München-------------55.118 11.Newcastle United--------------51.440 12.Ajax Amsterdam----------------50.578 13.Olympique Marseille-----------50.052
Wow that drops off. I take it back; they couldn't find 30 teams in Europe to rival the attendance of the NFL. But it's still not bad, and I think many of those teams have their attendance capped by stadium capacity.
I only bring this up because Zeek was using American footbal numbers as a comparison. Here is a link to the 2003 attendance figures of the NFL 2003 NFL Attendance I mention this to compare it with Totoman's list. I believe most of the teams in the NFL top ten have huge season ticket waiting lists. I'm sure most of the soccer teams on Totoman's list do to, I know Manu does.
Stilger, they could if the teams make some sort of champions league champioship you could expect almost all stadiums to be filled, there many great teams with millions of supporters that heve lousy attendances because they have few importan matches, for example here in portugal the big 3 (FC Porto, Benfica and Sporting) always have their stadiums filled when they play each other so we have 65 000 in Benfica, 52 000 in FC Porto, and 52 000 in Sporting but obviously they can´t fill the stadiums against all the other teams in our championship, and this example explains what happens in many other leagues in europe even in the big leagues.
Yes college and the NFL play so few games that people feel they have very few chances to see their teams. Anytime I see a game on TV it looks like a sellout. On the otehr hand, any time I see a game in Old Trafford, it also seems like a sellout. Also, can't forget that the United States is a huge country, and thus a major market. The MLS is a low level sport and still average over 16,000.
For more extensive information, you could look here: http://www.european-football-statistics.co.uk/attn.htm Man Utd's total attendance was about 1.7 million last season, not counting their share of two games played at the Millenium Stadium. Total attendances at professional football in the UK are something like 40 million per annum, or two for every three people. I once did some rough calculations of total paying attendance at paid sports events in different countries. I reckoned that, the UK and the US came out joint second at one and a bit per person, well ahead of Continental Europe, but well behind Australia. I supplied all the breakdowns of all my estimates at the time, but no-one commented on them, and I don't have them any more.
Well, yes AND no. The top 30 teams in Europe don't rival NFL teams in attendance as it is. HOWEVER, if there were only 30 teams in Europe (a much fairer comparison) they would most certainly rival NFL attendance figures. Imagine if New York had 25 NFL teams what the average attendance would be.
The problem in Germany are the small (but very modern - by FIFA secure resized) stadiums. Leverkusen only 22.500 places (always selled out, Freiburg the same) and some teams like Schalke (cap 61.266 places) are selled out the whole season - one game not, Wolfsburg, they`ve a right to buy 6.000 cards for for their road fans but only 4.000 came so they give the not selled cards too late back and they can't selled - but the average is 61.000+. Or Dortmund, they begin the season with a 72.000 and end with a 83.500 stadium but the average is 80.000+. Frankfurt, Cologne, Hannover was are all renewed and during the season they've only a amount of 20,000 or less in some games. And when the security without FIFA ******** measured with the USA, the stadiums, for example like Schalke has an amout of 80.000+ and Dortmund 120.000+ and where selled out.
I agree with you %100 And an NFL team averages 17 games a season where a team in Spain for example averages 38 games not counting The Copa Del Ray and CL or Uefa cup......and the Super cup...etc So it would add up to 50-60 games a season!!!!!!
Better you can't I write it. The Ruhrarea has more than 8.500.000 people, also a little bit more than New York. But have an attendance, only 1st Bundesliga, of more 170.000 average every matchday (Schalke, Dortmund and Bochum). Giant stadium has 67.000+ or so.
Hate to seem to be chipping in for the 'wrong' side, but there are over 100 American college teams that draw 40,000+. Even high school teams can pull absurd crowds, and there are literally hundreds of them. I'd say american fans are more mad about gridiron than european fans are about football. The short season is probably a factor in that, as I think college teams play even less games than NFL teams, but attendence there is astounding. The european statistics page listed earlier is the best bet for comparing attendence stats, but looking for a "European average" is rather misleading as the game here isn't franchised and there can be several hundred teams in any one country - and the countries vary a lot is size. The league of Latvia isn't really comparible to Italy.
hahahahahahahaaaaaaaa. where did you get this funny information. hahahahahaaaa. galatasaray's average is about 10000-15000. and Fenerbahçe's average attendance is about 45000-50000
That`s a phenomen that`s in europe no one understand. A school team here get's (in special moments) an att. of 400. But when the great Clubs play vs. in BuLi they can sell 300.000 or more cards (how the table standing is, up to 500.000 or more) in a middle season game. But the stadiums are too small. I only knew an old Mexican stadium with an amount of 250.000+ who could be filled - Azteka or so - but it is old and I don`t know how much people are allowed today.
Firstly, NCAA Football and NFL combined draw in ~50M in the USA per season. Not ban but nothing special either. There's only a small number of teams as you rightly point out. 100-odd NCAA Div 1A and 30 or so NFL teams. As you correctly point out the average crowds are very much higher than in Europe. http://www.ncaa.com/stats/football/attendance/2003/2003footballattendance.pdf However, one must take 15-20% off American crowds in order to compare them to European ones because of the bizarre habit of counting tickets that are given away or tickets that are sold yet their owners fail to show up rather than actual attendance as is the case in Europe. So we're looking at about 40-42M in total. Out of 300M people this is very, very poor in comparison to Europe as a whole. Since I'm from the UK I know we have 92 teams in England and in all matches (League, Cups, Europeans game and internationals) we see 40M spectators a year. That's out of 50M people. Simply, England and much of Europe has a sporting culture wheras the US doesn't. While there are some very large US college stadiums they're mostly very tatty and very old. Having been to Ann Arbour (110,000) I don't think it'd hold more than 60,000 in England. It's certainly not as big as Old Trafford. That being said there are some tatty old stadiums in Europe too. Look at the 'Strahov' - 250,000 seats and as ugly a building as you could hope to find. Oh, and Highbury
Again it feels weird to be arguing for the other side, but while the limited number of games boosts the average, it also has a very limiting effect on the overall total attendance. While it's perhaps unlikely that a college team that currently pulls in 60,000 for its 4 home games would maintain that average if it played about 20 home matches, it's far less likely that the overall attendence would drop to 11999, which would be the figure it'd need to drop to to make the overall attendance lower if they played 20 home games. To put it another way, even if the clubs in England had unlimited capacity, do you think there's any way in the world that those 92 pro clubs could still total 40 million if only playing 4 or 5 home games a year? You'd need to see Div 1 teams averaging 60,000 and premiership teams averaging 140,000 to maintain the same total crowd figures. The truly amazing sport, support-wise is baseball. How even big cities can pull 35,000+ per game when they play over 80 home games a year is beyond me. sadly, for the sake of the argument, even knocking off 20% doesn't make it that comparible. On the contrary, I'd say you'd have to go back to the boom era of the late 1940s to get to a point where sport was as important as it is over there currently. Sport is growing in importance, and in crowd numbers, over here, but there's no guarantee it'll keep rising. Strahov (the big one) isn't, and never was, a football ground and is mainly terracing (or these days mainly weeds to be accurate). The football ground next door only holds 20,000 and is reasonably tidied up. Having watched football in 14 countries, and sneaked into grounds in a few others, I'll certainly agree that there are great deal of top division european grounds that are a tad shabby compared to English grounds, but things are improving. When a team like Viktoria Zizkov, who have a ground so small you could fit it into your pocket, can go all-seater, then anything is possible.
Code: 1 GER Borussia Dortmund 79,223 2 ESP Real Madrid CF 70,304 3 ENG Manchester United 67,643 4 ESP FC Barcelona 67,336 5 ITA AC Milan 61,376 6 GER FC Schalke 04 61,122 7 SCO Glasgow Celtic 58,498 8 ITA FC Internazionale 57,927 9 ITA AS Roma 54,447 10 GER FC Bayern Munich 53,143 11 FRA Olympique de Marseille 51,846 12 ENG Newcastle United 51,405 13 SCO Glasgow Rangers 49,165 14 ITA SS Lazio 49,019 15 NED Ajax 48,949 16 GER Hamburger SV 47,336 17 ENG Manchester City 46,834 18 ESP Valencia CF 45,558 19 ESP Athletico de Madrid 44,294 20 ENG Liverpool 42,677 21 GER VfB Stuttgart 42,639 22 NED Feyenoord 41,696 [B]23 TUR Fenerbahçe SK 41,636[/B] 24 ENG Chelsea 41,323 25 GER 1.FC Koln 39,360 26 ENG Everton 38,762 27 FRA Paris Saint-Germain 38,217 28 GER Hertha BSC Berlin 38,166 29 ENG Arsenal 38,060 30 GER 1.FC Kaiserslauten 37,429 31 GER SV Werder Bremen 36,828 32 ENG Leeds United 36,537 33 ENG Aston Villa 36,291 34 FRA Olympique de Lyonnais 35,338 35 FRA RC de Lens 35,073 36 ENG Tottenham Hotspur 34,830 37 ITA Juventus FC 37,743 38 ESP Sevilla FC 34,688 39 ESP Real Betis Balompié 34,915 40 POR FC Porto 32,563 41 ESP Athletic Club de Bilbao 32,250 42 GER Borussia Monchengladbach 31,864 43 NED PSV Eindhoven 31,781 44 ENG Southampton 31,672 45 FRA FC Nantes Atlantique 31,199 46 ENG Leicester City 30,952 47 ENG Middlesbrough 30,178 48 POR Sporting Lisboa CP 30,063 49 ESP Real Zaragoza 29,625 50 ENG Birmingham City 29,047