Playoff Attendance: Round 1 Might as well get this started. Maybe the title of this thread should say: "Round 1" (instead of just "Week 1) and the Mod should change it if s/he wants to. I imagine the Wed/Thurs games will be pretty bad. NE will get an extra day to sell tix and they are riding high and Dallas has had since Friday night for their Wed. game. Maybe there'll be a spillover from the 26,000 in SJ who'll try to make it back for Wed and the Galaxy have known as well they'd be at home on Wed. for a while too, though they never draw well during midweek. Expect a lot of naysayers to come in here and promote doom and gloom by the end of the week. Hopefully the weekend matches will have strong crowds, but despite it being playoff season, it's no guarantee. (How about another sellout in Naperville?)
Safe to say that the only team we can count on for decent playoffs attendance numbers will be Columbus, and they are only guranteed one playoff game. I'd say the rest of the teams are wild cards but I'd venture to say Chicago will have 13-15k range crowds and San jose will have at least over 10,000. I worry about LA, Colorado and KC....but like I said seems like the playoffs are always a wild card when it comes to attendance.
I am pretty sure that Chicago will sell out again. San Jose and New England will do decent. Same with Columbus. LA will really disappoint. Hopefully the LA fans will prove me wrong.
!3,000 on a wednesday would be sweet for the Quakes but it hasn't been the best attendance-wise for us or anyone else for that matter. Anything over 13,000 for the club at this point would be gravy.
Yeah, i read the attendance article on MLSnet last night, and saw that last season the average playoff attendance was 3,100 LESS than the average regular season attendance. Could anyone explain to me how this is possible and why this happened? The regular season drew 14,900, and the playoffs 11,800...
1. Season tix aren't included with playoffs (I don't think). 2. Very short time to promote games. 3. Very short time to promote games. 4. In this "very short time", they don't promote much.
Playoff attendence is usually lower cause there isn't as much time for the team to promote a certain game. Hence mostly on the people that fanatically follow their team know when the playoff games are.
Sorry Flashman, didn't see your post until I was done with mine. Got a little side tracked with work.
another big reason is that half the games are midweek games... which have a historically horrible attendance avg compared to the weekends
Mid-week games are more prevalent. Compare approximately 10% of MLS games in regular season being played on a weeknight vs. 12 out of a maximum of 18 (66%) during the playoffs.
Us Galaxy season ticket fans get up to 3 free playoff games, if we have to play a 4th at home we have to buy that. I think 7734 in LA.
There were eight midweek playoff games last season and nine weekend games. Anyway... Los Angeles vs. Kansas City: 13,080 Dallas vs. Colorado: 9,012 New England vs. Chicago: 11,624 San Jose vs. Columbus: 7,657 Average: 10,343
I agree with both the "mid-week" and "short promotion time" explanations for low playoff attendance, but I think there's an additional factor. For many people, attending an MLS game is family (or local youth soccer) entertainment. Look around the stands, and that's primarily what you see. These folks are not really MLS fans - yet. They like going to games, its fun, inexpensive, yadda yadda yadda, but they are not emotionally attached to the league and the local team. Fire GM Peter Wilt says that this is the #1 challenge that MLS currently faces. Due to this lack of attachment, most "fans" simply tune out when the regular season is over. They turn their attention to the NFL, school, etc... The importance of the post-season and winning MLS Cup has simply not registered with the masses - yet. I am hopeful that this will change over time, and the attendance in the past few weeks is very encouraging ie people must have been aware of the playoff race, given the great turnouts. But until I see strong evidence otherwise (eg good numbers during the upcoming playoffs), I think it will be quite some time until the MLS postseason really means enough to people that they line up for tickets and show up in significant numbers.
In Colorado, season ticket holders have tickets already for the first two home playoff games. After that, they're doing a "Pay As We Play" thing where you provide approval for them to use your credit card and they charge you for only the tickets to games that are actually played. Here's hoping we get that far! -- jeff
Wednesday's games at Dallas 7,456 at San Jose 7,544 at Los Angeles 7,666 Thursday's game at New England 12,456 That's an 8,781 Average for midweek games Saturday's games at Kansas City 9,145 at Colorado 10,117 at Columbus 17,776 Sunday's game at Chicago 14,779 That's 12,955 Average for weekend games Then the return games on Wednesday if there are any. at New England 15,887 at Los Angeles 12,713 at San Jose 11,119 at Dallas 11,097 That's 12,704 Average for midweek games That makes it an 11,480 Average for the first round.
This is the first season that the Burn has included playoff games in their season ticket package. It will be interesting to see if that has much of an impact on attendance.
Given the amazing last weekend, you gotta believe that: 1) Perhaps MLS clubs are promoting important games is short time spans. 2) Attendees know about the playoff situation. Has MLS ever seen such a boost on the last weekend before for pure (non-double headers/concerts/etc.) MLS games ?
I think there is a good chance we get a decent crowd here in Colorado, since our last game of the season got 25,000, that crowd seemed really into the game and i think we might see some of that crowd in Saturdays Playoff game, im guessing 15,000 for Colorado.