And you base this statement on what? Do you know what their costs for the stadium were? I don't. (I'm willing to bet they didn't lose money, but "good profit"? I'm not sure.)
I know is a guesstimate but if it was 300k or 500k it was still worth it, let’s say 75k times 50 average = $ 3,750,000 , you could not see a success?
Part of that goes to the Broncos. Another portion goes to the ticket broker. Not sure if the Rapids got any cut of concessions and parking rev.
It's just a fun event for the fans who wouldn't have been able to go with an 18k capacity and subsequent price increase. Let it be.
Sunday, May 10 MLS Attendances New York City (vs. Columbus) Not Known Minnesota (vs. Austin) 18,744 Los Angeles FC (vs. Houston) 21,531 WEEKEND TOTAL: 335,327 AVERAGE: 23,952 (14 Matches)
MLS Attendances for Matchday 13 (May 13, 2026). Atlanta and Toronto had the night off. Charlotte (vs. New York City) 23,903 New England (vs. Nashville) 14,287 Montreal (vs. Portland) 12,251 New York Red Bulls (vs. Columbus) 13,874* DC United (vs. Chicago) 11,243 Orlando (vs. Philadelphia) 15,656 Cincinnati (vs. Miami) 25,513 St. Louis (vs. Los Angeles FC) 22,423 Minnesota (vs. Colorado) 18,458 Kansas City (vs. Los Angeles Galaxy) 14,188 Dallas (vs. Vancouver) 11,004 Real Salt Lake (vs. Houston) 20,429 San Diego (vs. Austin) 19,194 Seattle (vs. San Jose) 28,726 * If anyone remembers the British band, The Outfield from the late 80s-early 90s, the first line from their song, "Say It Isn't So" goes....'You got me all screwed up!'. Well, this was my first thought when tracking down some attendance figures. AI strikes again!! Initially, I found everything except New England, the Red Bulls, DC United, and Sporting KC. Doing the good ole Google search yielded results for New England and Kansas City that seemed accurate and plausible. Initially, the search for DC United said there were 20,000 souls at Audi Field. I was highly skeptical of that figure, but I did find one that looked more accurate, so I went with that. Now, for the Red Bulls, I found 4 different attendance figures for last night's match with Columbus, and they were all over the road! I went with the lowest figure I saw, based on what the TV screen showed for the match, so it will be interesting to see what the official figure gets posted to the MLS website! So, for now... TOTAL ATTENDANCE: 251,149 AVERAGE: 17,939 (14 Matches)
With the economy the way it is midweek games are gonna be a tough sell. Yes, MLS always had problems with midweek games, but until recently the gap between attendance on midweek and weekend had been narrowing. This is about the economy, and if the economy doesn’t right itself soon, it will harm weekend games too. But of course, this will hit all sports.
Red Bulls and New England always struggle midweek, Montreal fans are pissed, KC are terrible and Dallas haven't reopened their full stadium yet. Not sure exactly what KC are doing, their payroll is 30% down on last season. Sporting Kansas City (-29.8%) Portland Timbers (-17.6%) Orlando City (-14.7%) Seattle Sounders (-13.5%) Philadelphia Union (-12.7%)
NYC were marketing season tickets in 2015 on the basis that it would guarantee a seat in their new stadium.
Now, that's hilarious, because that figure was not one of the four I had seen through AI! Besides the 13,874, I also found 15,087, 17,358, and 18,312. How it comes up with these bogus numbers is beyond my comprehension. Thank God the numbers aren't reflective of some real important data! The MLS site did confirm the 14,116 figure, as well as the numbers listed previously for New England and Kansas City. The actual attendance for DC United vs. Chicago is still M.I.A. on the MLS site, as of this posting. So, the corrected, adjusted figure shows: TOTAL ATTENDANCE: 251,391 AVERAGE: 17,957 (14 Matches, with DC United possibly altering things again!)
Are you using chatGPT or Gemini? Those two hallucinate the most. AI comes up with the numbers in several possible ways: 1) That number is actually from a different game 2) It didn't find any numbers and looked at other recent attendances and made a guess 3) Some low quality blogs somewhere sited a fake number that it used. You can ask the model for the links it used. Most of the time it will show you. BTW I noticed that Claude is the only one that can answer with "I don't know". The rest make up BS.
I really don't know which AI feature is used. I just put into the Google search box the home team, attendance, and the date to see what I come up with. When I see a figure that looks accurate, I can generally trust it, because I can usually find it on multiple other sites where the attendance is listed if it's not from MLS directly. Sometimes, the Match Information from MLS may not have a game's attendance listed, but if you go into the home team's MLS account of the match, you can occasionally find the attendance figure there. Also, the DC United number I had previously listed (11,243) was confirmed on the MLS site as of Thursday afternoon.
May 16th MLS Attendances (Matchday 14) features a Mt. Rushmore of no-shows , as 4 teams have yet to post numbers as of early Sunday morning. Montreal (vs. Chicago) Not Listed New England (vs. Minnesota) 26,385 New York Red Bulls (vs. New York City) Not Listed Philadelphia (vs. Columbus) Not Listed DC United (vs. St. Louis) Not Listed Charlotte (vs. Toronto) 28,158 Orlando (vs. Atlanta) 20,074 Houston (vs. Vancouver) 20,114 Austin (vs. Kansas City) 20,738 Seattle (vs. Los Angeles Galaxy) 32,659 Salt Lake City (vs. Colorado) 21,424 San Diego (vs. Cincinnati) 24,984 San Jose (vs. Dallas) 18,000 TOTAL ATTENDANCE: 212,536 AVERAGE: 23,615 (9 Matches)