Not to see no evil and hear no evil, but there are plausible explanations for all four of those markets: - Chicago: play in a stadium that by most accounts is not that easy for much of Chicagoland to get to. No real star power. - DC United: play in a dump of a stadium, had a terrible year last year and have had the sword of Damocles hanging over their head for the last few years. That's got to wear down a fanbase. - New England: is there any more to be said about New England? To me the shocking thing is that they can still get 12 or 13 thousand people to come out and watch such a depressing spectacle in the middle of nowhere with no public transportation. - Columbus: play in a glorified erector set stadium that is already obsolete 12 years after its inauguration. No star power, owner doesn't seem to care much. No reason why the approaches that make the expansion teams and NY/LA successful wouldn't also work in these four markets. They just aren't even being tried.
and, even more impressively, the median being nearly the same... the fact that all of this no longer relies on the 60K attendance for "double-headders" (which was all too common in the early days) is really remarkable...
It's true - I do think they are trying to manufacture sellouts as the GM has said they are very important, but I do think LA is a game that is a draw and could/has/will probably sell out legitimately or come close to it. I'm not claiming a huge hoax, (but I do think there may be some shenanigans if our last game of the season is declared a sellout and it's half full like our last sellout). But, I also think maybe they declared "individual tickets" sold out months ago with the intention of selling others through forced package purchases - they also advertised that tickets to this game could be had by purchasing other games - so it's not yet completely sold out. I really was just making the narrow point that while it has been declared a sellout, they are selling individual tickets on the website even if the number is small. Either way, the number will be at or close to maximum, which for the purpose of this thread, is what I think matters.
Yeah, i think there is a chance it's the highest number we've seen yet. It's unclear what the actual capacity is at this point.
Portland constrains capacity below its actual maximum, some of this has to do with the size of the concourses and the availability of restrooms, but the 1500 person increase we're seeing for the Houston game shows that they're willing to expand capacity when they see demand is there. I think their absolute maximum capacity is somewhere around 24,000, but I'm not sure we'll ever see that many. Vancouver also artificially constrains capacity at BC Place. They've got a whole upper deck that they could fill if they wanted to. They might decide to do that for special events, I guess we'll see.
My guess is that for expansion teams at least you're probably right -- why distribute tickets if you can sell them? I realize there is some evidence in older markets that it might also be the case, but with no data we can't be sure. But at the risk of hearing every "that crowd looked less to me" post, let's consider this: I've been talking up Craig Coenen's book "From Sandlots to the Super Bowl, The National Football League from 1920 - 1967". Now, this is obviously a different game, a different league and a different era, but I do think the DNA of the NFL is in MLS, and it provides an interesting way to talk about these issues with the added perspective of time. Like MLS fans like to do here, Coenen was trying to chart the rise of the NFL's popularity during this early period, and among other things he took paid attendance figures from the Official National Football League Record Book, 1970 edition and he compared them to attendance that was announced in the newspapers at the time. What he found was that the NFL distributed a lot of free tickets and simply padded the numbers in the early days. Here's his data (from page 102 of this book): Year -- Average Announced Attendance -- Average Paid Attendance 1932 11,063 6,997 1934 12,982 8,211 1938 20,897 17,040 1940 23,343 19,383 1945 28,482 25,408 And those are averages. Apparently, during the 1930s there are cases where two thirds of the crowd got in for nothing. Now, just imagine if the San Diego Union Tribune had gotten a hold of those numbers! (Just for fun and with apologies, here are those MLS numbers leaked to the Union Tribune again when the league was ten years old): 2005 15,118 10,746 Not so very different from the NFL in the 1930s really. If Coenen is correct, clearly the NFL was padding announced attendance for at least the first 25 years of its existence, even as it was growing very nicely. It probably wouldn't be a surprise to fans of the time either, as they too regarded some announced attendance figures as highly suspect. (Coenen gives examples for the curious). But look at the numbers again -- yes in 1934 4,681 of averaged announced attendance wasn't paid, just as 3,074 wasn't paid in 1945. Point being, the NFL didn't fabricate all of the improvement in attendance, indeed, even though the league consistently added 3,000 - 5,000 to the announced numbers during this period, the percentage of free tickets to total attendance steadily declined. But since most of the NFL teams were playing in big baseball stadiums, as long as they had empty seats they continued to give tickets away. Here's another critical point, as the league stabilized, it became less dependent on ticket revenue as its primary source of income -- Coenen says ticket revenue was down to 23% of total revenues by in 2002, shortly before his book was published in 2005. So if Big Football had existed in 1945 and people savaged the attendance thread as evidence of the league's impending doom, they not only would have missed the added people in the stands, but also the fact that a lot of money was just about to come in from other sources. And they could tell this in part by the simple fact that the media was starting to cover the league more. So Edward, whatever criticisms you read from the "I don't think that many people were there" crowd, I don't think your hard work is in vain. Just the opposite, I think it does tell us something informative. But just as Coenen did, I think if people want to take your data to make the case that MLS is becoming more popular, that argument has to be validated (to the extent that it can be) with some additional information. We need to look at some of these other factors too -- revenues, media coverage, ratings, social networking -- whatever gives us some indication that these communities value these teams and will invest their time and energy to support them. And I think while it's not perfect, if you look at the entire picture, including your helpful data, the league is growing. But I emphasize again, if you read Coenen's book, it becomes clear that building a fanbase takes time -- at least a generation, and the NFL has had three. Virtually every gimmick the league tried to boost the numbers failed. And despite the lore of Red Grange or the Colts/Giants game, there was no one moment that did it, but rather years of hard work. So if I had to guess, yes, teams are still inflating attendance, and yes, teams are selling more tickets, and yes revenues are up, and yes MLS still has some work to do, but yes . . . MLS is just fine. Thanks again for your hard work.
I agree with your last sentence, but this doesn't really explain why they're down so much against their own historical averages. The stadium situations in Columbus, New England, and DC have been the same forever, while Chicago's is an upgrade vs. what they had before. In the case of Chicago, DC, and NE, a partial explanation is simply that they simply haven't been competitive this year. Columbus has, which makes their case rather more puzzling. They haven't had much star power historically either, except for the handful of years GBS was with them.
Columbus' attendance hasn't been that great in several years. This year they jettisoned what few stars they had, and their stadium is no longer up to MLS standards, let alone U.S. professional sports standards. On top of that (I wanted to mention this in the original post but forgot), I'm pretty sure Ohio has been hit very hard by the weak economy. I'm pulling this out of my butt because I can't remember all of DC's attendance numbers over the years (and the wiki page doesn't seem to have them), but their attendance hasn't been all that solid over the past few years. I think the omnipresent threat that they'll move, combined with mediocre-to-poor teams and a dump of a stadium does explain why they're down so far below their historical average. (They're up again a bit this year, right? Which would make sense, as the team is better than last year.) Same applies to New England - their attendance has been terrible pretty much since they moved to Gillette. They're holding steady at what I would consider an impressive number for what they've had to put up with. Chicago has a nice stadium, but the new stadium smell has worn off, it's apparently not that easy to get to, and they no longer have Blanco. I think with a couple of bonafide stars like a Becks or an Henry they would definitely do better. Edit: I guess my general point is that any of those markets could see a KC/NYRB-type turnaround if they had engaged ownership. If they had everything in place, including perfect stadium situations and awesome ownership, and their attendance still sucked, then I'd worry about them.
I'm sure there are games where there is a lot more demand than the Houston game... Hopefully they'll find a way to increase capacity a little bit on a regular basis. Its absolutely fantastic to watch games there on TV despite the turf.
Sorry, I was unclear there. The demand has been high for the entire season, the season ticket waiting list is above 4000 now. The Timbers at the end of the season increased capacity from 18,627 to 20,323 as a test. Assuming there are no huge problems that will be the capacity for all games next year according to the owner (via Twitter). There are still tarped seats, if it's clear that demand will hold up, they may untarp additional seats, but only if they think it won't negatively affect the fan experience in the process. I suspect they won't go above 22k unless they build out stands on the south end. It's a good problem to have.
It has nothing to do with demand in Portland per say. The front office has been clear in stating they were not sure the facilities could handle a bigger crowd. As an experiment, they chose two games to add 1500 tickets for. In the off season they intend to evaluate how things went at the stadium in those two games. If they went well, I think we will see them open up those 1500 tickets for every game next year.
This would be my guess as well. The markets that dont draw well probably still give out lots of free tickets as they always have while the expansion teams dont for the most part dont.
You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to triplet1 again. Can anyone help me out on his informative post?
Triplet Thanks. I have ordered that book because it sounds like an interesting read. Unfortunately the Seattle Public library did not have it, so Amazon gets a chunk o change from me. I actually wouldn't mind the perceived attendance discussion if the message along with it was not that using the announced is wrong, when the announced are in fact all we are privy to. I cannot wave a magic wand and make the gate count, and sold v distributed numbers appear. So to say discussing the only numbers we have is wrong is what seems to irritate most of the crowd here. That really is the only reason to not allow that discussion in this thread.
I'm a season ticket holder and have been for three years now, I know this is what the FO has said, but I think the FO is also savvy enough to understand that sellouts sell season tickets, and that if there's enough capacity to guarantee day-of-game ticket availability then season tickets will decrease. Nothing about conditions in the stadium has allowed them to bump the capacity up 1,500 seats, so why wait until the last two games of the season to do so? I'd put dollars to donuts that all 1,500 of those extra seats end up being sold next year as season tickets. I wouldn't be very surprised if another 500-1500 seats were opened up in the north end in the next couple of years as well. I don't think we'll ever see all of the seats untarped without doing something to address the concourses, bathrooms. Maybe one day we'll see troughs in the bathrooms, or the top of 101 turned into some sort of concession area/washroom or something groovy like that. Until then only the FO knows what their true upper limit of the stadium is, but I bet 20,323 isn't it. For the purposes of this thread, I'm glad that Jeld-Wen will be able to add an additional 15 20k+ games to the total next year. I suspect next year will be a record setter in that category.
Keane and Donovan will be missing the NY game. Seems to be conflicting information on if the game is sold out or not but if not, this news won't help any.
They are selling tickets right now on their web site right this minute. Maybe these were tickets that were returned due to the game being moved? http://www.newyorkredbulls.com/content/individual-galaxy-tickets-sale-now
Maybe. However, when I try to purchase tickets, it gives me the message "There are no available seats for the selected event." Maybe it's just a website error.
I searched for best available seats and came up with this (pardon the cut and paste format). In any case if this was sold out a long long time ago, it does not appear to be anymore. Event Details 2011 MLS Regular Season Los Angeles Galaxy vs. Red Bulls 2011-10-04 8:00 PM Options Show Seats Remove Event Add More Seats Try Again Section Row Seat Price 225 7 3 $50.00