after last weeks discussion i have made a change and decided to not cap the %CAP at 100% and just use the full number. i have also decided that using the full 58,500 for the past two Montreal games isn't really fair. just like any other team in a large not SSS they are only going to use that full capacity on a few special occasions like the opener and the LAG game. so i have decided to use the generic non-SSS "placeholder" capacity of 22,000 that i have used in previous years for other teams not in SSS (before they started reporting more exact limited capacities like they have this season). this took their 2nd and 3rd games from below 50% %CAP to 105% and 87.4% which i think is a more accurate representation of those two crowds on the "good" and "bad" %CAP scales which we are trying to capture ... i would hardly consider those two games as "abysmal" attendance as the original %CAP suggested. again feel free to comment or discuss this decision and i will take it into consideration. 2011 Games Played: 306 Total Attnd: 5,467,880 Average Attnd: 17,869 Median Attnd: 17,639 Median-33%: 11,765 Median+33%: 23,530 <MED-33%: 56 / 18.3% >MED+33%: 36 / 11.8% Average %CAP: 81.0% Median %CAP: 85.7% Games <70%: 86 / 28.1% Games >90%: 139 / 45.4% 2012 Games Played: 73 Total Attnd: 1,340,890 Average Attnd: 18,368 Median Attnd: 18,075 Median-33%: 12,056 Median+33%: 24,112 <MED-33%: 13 / 17.8% >MED+33%: 6 / 8.2% Average %CAP: 81.1% Median %CAP: 83.7% Games <70%: 20 / 27.4% Games >90%: 30 / 41.1% NOTES 1. For information regarding 2011 stadium capacities go HERE. 2. Per 2012 MLS Team Media Guides the following are the standard capacities for each team's regular home stadium: CHI (20,000); CHV (18,800); COL (18,086); CLB (20,145); DCU (19,647); FCD (20,500); HOU (22,000); LAG (27,000); MTL (20,341); NER (20,000); NYR (25,000); PHI (18,500); POR (20,438); RSL (20,213); SJE (10,525); SEA (38,500); SKC (18,467); TFC (21,140); VAN (21,000) 3. The following are capacity exceptions to the norms above: MON 3/17 (58,500); SJE 3/17 (41,915); MTL 4/7 (22,000); MTL 4/28 (22,000) 4. Some listed capacities are "seated only" and teams may have sold/had SRO attendance over this amount, thus putting the %CAP over 100% for certain games. For calculating the average and median %CAP for all games these 100%+ numbers were used as is.
Came back to this place just to answer this question because I doubt anyone else will take the time or find this info. http://www.realsaltlake.com/club/ownership Looks like Dell Loy Hansen owns other sports clubs in UT and ID, but I doubt they're professional or major in any way. He also owns a golf course. So yeah, RSL's the only professional/major league sports team he's involved in. You should read about him, though. The guy owns a lot, seems to be into everything, including government. Very interesting.
19,223 is a good number for Montreal. Hopefully they can stick around there once they get Stade Saputo expanded and back open.
NY's attendance concerns will almost certainly continue, as we have a schedule that gives us 1 weekend home game in all of May and June, and 1 Saturday home game between now and September 15th.... Is this the case with other teams as well or did we really just get the shit end of the stick on this one?
I didn't mentioned Revs because that's a lost cause and as long as they're at Gillette Stadium , they're doomed and that's a dead end street. DCU once the crown jewel of the league is reduced to 10k plus fans. I can blame the weather , losing record and few other excuses. A few teams at the bottom need to reinvent themselfs and learn from others like SKC.
don't you guys have a midweek game at 1:00PM or something incredibly stupid like that this season? i'd say you got the poopiest end of the whole tree
Yes, a time slot that has been tried before and has his failed miserably each time. First our marketing director tried to play it off like it was MLS's idea, then he tried to justify it by saying the Yankee's often play during midweek afternoons, and now they're turning it into "Camp Day", so really I don't know who is truly responsible for dropping the ball on this one but I'd be blown away if more than 5k show up.
One of the challenges Colorado faces in attendance is stadium accessibility due to its location in Commerce City. You pretty much have to drive to get there, which limits the typical non-car-using population, such as high school and college students-- and there's a huge population of college students in Denver. Without a car, your public transit options to Dick's Sporting Goods Park stink. Unless you live along Quebec, you will have to transfer at least once to take public transit, and then still have to walk almost a mile and a half from the nearest bus stop to the stadium itself. My best option, for example, involves 3 buses, plus the walk, and I live downtown. I've never done it, but according to the RTD, it would take an hour and a half, including the walk, which is better than I expected, honestly, but if you don't live centrally, I'm sure it just gets worse. The supporters groups run buses, which are probably the best option for people without cars IF a supporters bar is convenient to you AND you're willing to pay the membership fee, or the $15 non-member ride fee, etc. Every stadium situation is influenced slightly differently by various factors and the FO marketing needs to work with them. In our case, accessibility is a big factor. I understand FCD has a similarly situated suburban location for their stadium, and probably similar access issues. Reading the earlier parts of the thread, many of the teams with the best attendance, that "top tier," have downtown locations with great public transit access, making it much easier for urban populations to travel to the games, and much easier for the FO's to market their games and get people to them. Talking about other MLS teams, are there any who have consistently good attendance and also have a suburban stadium location without good public transit access? If so, whatever those teams are doing right in terms of marketing and moving people to the games should be studied and used in markets like Colorado. This isn't limited to MLS stadiums only, perhaps there's a good model out there in an NHL, NBA, or other market to copy.
This is a really neat post and imma let you finish, but I just wanted to say that use of public transportation in D/FW is really low, so low that numerous cities in the area, including the one that is home to the two largest stadiums in the area and the one that is home to FCD, don't even bother having any sort of public transportation. [/Kanye]
I've done some fiddling with the predictor, using the forecast function in Excel. Apologies to those who don't care. But to those who wondered, I may have saved you 30 minutes. Excluding the first few years of MLS doesn't change the negative forecast. This probably happens because of the linear nature of the forecast. I'm not sure why a linear forecast is best for this exercise in the first place*. Why not just average the %diff over the preceeding years and use that? Isn't that closer to what's being asked? "How much does attendance change after this period in an MLS season?" Using that method, and all the previous years, attendance increases 0.87% from now until the end of the season. Excluding the first two years, growth is 3.5%. Excluding all years prior to the expansion era (that is, just using 2005-present), attendance grows 4.99%. Using those, you could forecast a final average somewhere between 18,528 and 19,284. *Statistical appendix: The reason I'm wary of the linear forecast is that it assumes a functional linear relationship between current attendance and final attendance. This means that the %-age increase in attendance will be predicted to be smaller for large initial attendance numbers, simply because the large increases represented in the data occurred with small initial attendance numbers. Meaning that the forecast will probably always predict a decrease in final attendance if current attendance is more than 17,500 or so, even if you exclude the first seasons as outliers. To see this, plot the final season attendance average against the current averages along with a 45-degree line (the black line below). The trendline (the blue line below) will almost always (depending on data) have a slope less than 45 degrees because of the big decreases in the past *as well as* the big increase in 2007 from a small inital value. tl;dr: I personally think it would be easier and "better" to just average the %diff from the previous years, and then apply that average change to the current attendance to predict this years final attendance average.
If this post pointed to some correlation between ownership and attendance ... I totally missed that correlation. Seems like a bunch of opinions guised as statistics.
I saw this on the Revs board. It is an interesting analysis of stadium location and attendance within MLS http://www.soccernewsday.com/usa/a/131/mls-stadium-locations-attendance-comparison
It's a crappy BigSoccer post dressed up with a higher word count and some very flimsy statistical "analysis."
Livestrong Sporting Park is located on the western fringe of the Greater Kansas City area near the intersection of I-70 & I-435 - that puts it 16 miles west of downtown KC, MO; 15-25 miles NW of the swath of affluent Johnson County, KS suburbs; 27 miles NW of the originally-proposed stadium location in SE KC, MO; and 30 miles west of the eastern suburbs of Independence & Blue Springs. But it IS in the midst of Village West, an entertainment & shopping destination considered the number one tourist destination in the state of KS - the Legends Outlets, outdoor shopping mall, across the street has nearly 100 stores & restaurants and estimates it gets 10 million visitors annually. Across the other way is NASCAR's Kansas Speedway and beyond it the new Hollywood Casino. For info on the area: http://www.legendsshopping.com/plan-a-visit/area-attractions/ Mass transit is very limited, a single bus line through the heart of KC, KS to DT KC, MO - with no service during Saturday evenings, SKC's preferred game time. I believe that the KCATA is planning to convert the Village West line to a bus rapid transit line in the future, but even then will provide practical service to a tiny fraction of the SKC fanbase. While it would be nice for KC to have good mass transit, the city is so spread out and therefore so automobile-oriented for almost everything - that the lack of it is no obstacle to SKC's growth in attendance.
Everyone wants to find that one perfect ingredient that makes for good attendance. Attendance is made up of many different factors including stadium location, public transportation, ownership involvement, quality of team, "big name players", marketing, local competition from other sports, size of ticket sales staff, and many many other items. The relative importance of each variable is different for every city and every team. This is why I feel a yellow card should be given for anyone who ever says "just learn from KC and fix the situation". It is abundantly ignorant of just how complex a problem this is.
So why did you bother posting a link that basically reduces that complexity down to one single variable?
Because I had never seen the data for stadium location all in one place for all the stadiums and found it interesting and thought others might like to see the data as well. One can know the difference between the large amount of variables to a problem and still be interested in seeing the data that makes up one of the variables. I figured most could understand the difference and ignore it if they were not interested.
Attendance just hasn't looked better. It amazing in fact. Hell, even the bottom dwellers in terms of attendance are doing just fine. Few have been "WOW" bad yet. Also, OleGunners original post has an unreal wrong keystroke.
I mentioned this same point last year, and said I'd do something about it during the offseason, but got caught up in school work and did no such thing. There are, as you pointed out, major flaws with that predictive model. The thing is, Edwardgr already has a lot of work to do every week just to post what he does, and that information is probably the most informative summary of data. So, if you want some additional statistic to show up every week, you'll probably have to do it yourself (like Ole Gunnar), or possibly wait til the offseason and THEN make a coherent argument to Edwardgr about why your method is better and just as easy to calculate. Sadly, this post is no harbinger of future postings of the sort that I had hoped to make at the end of last season.
Your metrics are arbitrary. The standard by which you've declared these teams to be "awful," even though they're generally outperforming last year's pace, is a comparison to a bunch of new teams that draw in the 19K range and a few relatively new teams that draw in the 17K range. Those teams had the advantage of launching their product in an environment where soccer is a more well-recognized and accepted sport, while the others have had to contend with the baggage of being an MLS original. If these new teams had never entered the league, would you declare a 14.5K average awful? It would not be an "underclass," after all, it would be the solid middle class, with only LA and New York, two teams who have invested massive sums in globally-recognizable stars and play in the biggest markets in the country, in the elite category. Barring a seminal event like a new stadium or Beckhamesque signing, it's unrealistic to expect these teams suddenly to draw 5K more per game overnight. What we want from them is steady progress, while accounting for the usual fluctuations that are attendant to the ups and downs of on-field play. Whether the early season returns are the harbinger of such progress will be borne out in time, but your aimless bloviating about how they compare to the Seattles, Portlands, Vancouvers, and Montreals of the world is idiotic and tiresome.
I don't think those four were correctly selected to help your argument. Those four had a combined 70 years as an organization prior to entering MLS (this isn't including NASL). They may not have MLS "baggage" but they have been mainstays in soccer as a product before it gained greater recognition. Houston's relocation was an win. LAG has been atop the heap from day 1. NY has decent crowds and above their historical average. And of course SKC. Four original teams doing well. 4/8 aint bad. That said, your criticisms do have merit in my eyes.
On the subject of Montreal's Olympic stadium capacity, it may be worth noting that only lower bowl tickets are initially available for sale. Only when the lower seats are near sold out is the upper bowl made available, this was the case for the opener and is for LA as well. I don't know the exact capacity of the lower bowl, but it may be valid to use it as a "total capacity" value. I would estimate it visually at around 30,000 based on pictures.(keeping in mind total capacity of 59,000) https://www.impactmontreal.com/sites/montreal/files/Olympic%20Stadium.jpg http://www.2tickets.ca/uploads/seatingcharts/stade_olympique_impact.gif
I don't agree that DC has no positive sign of turning around. First, United has their first half decent team in 5 years. Believe me United's teams over the last couple of years have been close to historically bad. I think in 2010 we only scored 19 goals through most of the season with few of those goals at home. There is a glimmer of hope on the stadium front for something to be built at Buzzard Point. Its all being kept quiet because everyone has been disappointed in the past and DC government keeps dropping the ball when the discussion become substantial. Still, they are a actively engaged, so they is some hope this can be done.