This is my favorite. You can see that, ignoring the Beckham bump and fade, the league has been on a very attractive increase in ave. attendance. I suppose it's fueled entirely (almost entirely) by expansion, but it's fun to ride while it lasts.
the chart helps show that the nadir seemed to be 2000, and since 2001 the trend has generally been upward. so i guess contraction helped.
the "effect" of the 2011 expansion isn't really all that much, though. Vancouver and Portland actually only aided the league average by ~120. (if you look at just what the other 16 teams did in 2011 relative to 2010, it's still a huge growth.) but yes, overall, "expansion" (and the huge numbers in Seattle specifically, but the strong numbers in places like Toronto, Philly, Vancouver and Portland) has helped to pull up the league average, relative to the first half of the '00's. (and of course new/appropriate stadiums coming on line during "the expansion years" have also been a helpful boost attendance averages in several markets.)
Any predictions on the Dallas home wild card game attendance? It has to be better than their last CCL game against Toronto.
Here are the numbers with the expansion clubs and without them. For the purpose of this chart, Chicago, Miami, and San Jose mkII are not considered expansion clubs and Houston is. The numbers also completely remove the expansion clubs, so they aren't included in the original clubs numbers in the without column at all. Code: Year Without With Diff 1996 17,410 17,410 0 1997 14,606 14,606 0 1998 14,312 14,312 0 1999 14,282 14,282 0 2000 13,756 13,756 0 2001 14,961 14,961 0 2002 15,821 15,821 0 2003 14,900 14,900 0 2004 15,549 15,549 0 2005 14,461 15,112 -651 2006 14,927 15,426 -499 2007 17,505 16,767 738 2008 16,833 16,460 373 2009 14,504 16,037 -1,533 2010 14,491 16,675 -2,184 2011 16,484 17,869 -1,386
http://www.sbnation.com/soccer/2011/10/24/2511576/mls-attendance-up-2011-major-league-soccer SBNation noticed. Or at least their soccer section did.
For fun I emailed the author to let him know the median was off in his article and this was his response "That's the median of the averages. I'm pretty confident that my number is accurate for all games." If anyone understands this, please enlighten me. If you want to email him, his address jeremiahoshan@gmail.com
He took the median number of all the MLS team averages. This number is supposed to say, the median MLS team had an average of ___. I am not sure why this number would be considered important though...
Ahh yes that makes sense based on the number he reported. I will let him know the better way to perform the median calculation.
This is what he meant to write. No? EDIT: whatever, he corrected it. With a link to this edwardgr's post!
Yeah we figured out over email what happened. He actually was doing the median from all 306 data points but his data got corrupted. He found the corruption. I gave him the link to Eds post for confirmation of his caculations.
Interesting little tidbit there. The original teams actually already topped the 1996 average in 2007! And the expansion teams pulled the average down!
First wanted to say thanks to Ed for doing this. One of my favorite threads on the whole site. Second, it's nice to know that we ended our time at the Rob by increasing attendance each. and. every. year. F'in amazing. Hopefully we can keep that up in our new home come May 12 (ish) next year.
Well.. Every year starting the 2nd year. There was a 3k drop between 2006 and 2007. Still respectable none the less.
According to wiki that gives MLS the 10th highest attendance of any domestic soccer league. Here are the top 20. 1. Bundesliga 42,673 2. EPL 35,283 3. La Liga 29,128 4. FMF 26,722 5. Seria A 24,031 6. Primere Arg 20,670 7. Ligue 1 19,650 8. Eredivisie 19,116 9. J. League 18,428 10.MLS 17,869 11.Eng. Champ. 17,388 12.Brazil A 14,839 13.China 14,581 14.Bund 2 14,539 15.Turkey 14,058 16.Scotish PR. 13,677 17.Indonesia 12,533 18.Iran 12,388 19.Russ Prem. 12,322 20.Algeria 12,088
The J League is down significantly -- currently averaging 15,375 with four rounds to go -- so MLS will probably pass them. http://www.worldfootball.net/zuschauer/jpn-j-league-2011/1/