I know you guys are probably sensitive about this, and I'm really not trying to troll, but why is attendance so low? Drawing 6K for a Sat. game is frightening. Is the sales office just on cruise control until the move to Frisco?
I reckon there are plenty of explanations in threads down a few pages. Look towards the start of the season.
We were playing the Revs.....and if that is not enough for you....we were playing an injury depleted Revs.
OK, but over five home games this year, the average attendance has been just a tick under 8K. Your largest crowd was 10,269. OK, the team has sucked for a while but so has DCU.
Short answer: Dragon Stadium is a case study in "it's much easier to drive customers away than win them back."
Winning cures many ills. GE and staff are trying and the advertising is out there. How can this town be so uninvolved with a professional sports team even if it is soccer. There's been more BS about college baseball than the Burn. I think we all need to write letters to our favorite sports editors and give them a kick in the ars.
Yes, you are right, winning cures many ills. Unfortunately, in MLS, it takes much more than winning, and winning historically has had very little correlation with attendance (ie - San Jose). Advertising alone may help brand the team long term, but it doesn't sell all the tickets that need to be sold short term. Selling a soccer ticket is very different than selling another sports ticket, imo. I'm sure GE and his staff are well aware of that and are not relying soley on advertising. But the dissapointment has really been the downward spiral of attendance. Instead of building from game one, we seem to be going backward. All this while the team is winning some games. El Jefe has some good rants about this subject. Maybe he'll chime in.
I'm all ranted out on this subject. As we've seen, merely being back at the Cotton Bowl won't bring the fans back. As we've seen with San Jose, merely winning won't bring the fans back. The only thing that'll bring the fans back is rebuilding the relationships between the front office and the fans that were slowly built over the first seven years of this team and that were destroyed with the move to Southlake. They've begun the process and the new stadium will help, but it'll take time. I'm afraid that there are no shortcuts, and Hunt Sports Group, to their credit, appears to recognize this. Like I said earlier in this thread, it's far easier to piss off customers than to bring them back.
I actually think that we'll be OK next year. We'll probably do 15,000 or 16,000 a game next year. It's 2006, once the novelty has worn off, that we'll have to worry about.
A man who would know better than anyone else told me on Saturday night after the game (paraphrased), "Hunt Sports Group doesn't have any egos. A lot of other owners and general managers in this league would never have moved the Burn back to the Cotton Bowl. They would've stuck with it even after it was obvious to everyone what a failure Southlake had been. John Wagner and Lamar Hunt aren't like that."
that is pretty much what i meant...the front office needs to put all their efforts into keeping the 15,000 to 16,000 a game that will come next year to keep coming back
I think it's been documented pretty well over on the MLS boards that the home games before and after Adu tend to show attendance dips. This just accounts for the drop to 6k, not the average of <8k. The latter issue is clearly sucklack.
Hopefully, too, for the 2006 season, Houston will have its own team - "instant rivalry" is a good thing, as Martha Stewart might say... I have to admit that the hardest part about talking to friends and coworkers about soccer is that (for now, anyway !) I am a Dallas Burn fan... *CLICK!* instant turnoff! Hopefully this pseudo-hatred can be used in the future to support the Burn's marketing efforts, and allow them to continue growing/recapturing the fan base.
I suggest that next year, along with the new stadium, rename the team to something better and new. I was thinking the Dallas Diamondbacks would be a good name and instead of a puking horse you could have a snake coiled and ready to strike. Just an idea, I know there is probably better, but I think the whole team needs a shakeup for next season and come at Dallas with a brand new product.
If you're going native wildlife here, go Mosquitoes. They're far more prevalent than diamondback rattlers are.
it's a retarded name, but i really hate cows and cowboys. nothing personal against the cowboys of the world, but i have a lot of people tell me that i don't sound like i'm from texas because i don't speak with a drawl. well, not everyone from texas rides a horse to work and wears cowboy hats and speaks with that drawl. we're so much more than that and it's so limiting to stick to this southwest/cowboy mould all the time.