To ProfZodiac : When I said: Your response to my statement above is RUDE and and MALICIOUS. In Contrast , what I said was light hearted. You need to respect other people views, and stop spewing personal insults to others.
12,000+ in San Jose!!! Keep San Jose! At least they've been on the upward curve. That must be 3 or 4 five digit attendance numbers in a row IIRC.
Impossible, and yet intriguing. I would love to see Levar Arrington ear-hole joey franchino from the blind side.
"Time to move NE to Rochester " My statement above is original .........no one before has mentioned to move NE to Rochester. By the way, attendance of 8,000 for a Sunday game is pathetic for NE, and you know that is a fact. Attendance at NE has been going down this year for all soccer games; MLS, USMNT, Gold Cup,WWC,,and even for Juv vs Barcelona game only 30K showed up. Don't ask me what it is, but the trend for NE is downwards. ( There is a problem in NE !)
Ditto that. Whenever NE come to Naperville/Chicago, I ask the ticket attendant for $1 back since I only get to watch 21 soccer players instead of the normal 22.
Let's hope so, but it's also probably fair to say that San Jose may also have a tradition of finishing out the season relatively stronger (even before the WUSA), so maybe this bump isn't related. And, interestingly, the Quakes are ahead of where they were last year after 13 games and the Cyberrays managed to increase their attendance too. I'm certain there's some negative effect on Quakes attendance, but there's obviously much more wrong over there than that.
      No, not really.       While there might be some connection to WUSA (or to its current lack), the increase in attendance the last several games is mainly due to the relatively-new front office (in place since January, although they've been on the job only a little less than each of the previous few SJ front-offices ) finally realizing that they're not going to raise the attendance to a long-time damaged market by sitting on their butts doing practically nothing (like in the first half of this season) - although the advertising/marketing has only increased a bit lately, at least the front-office has recently hustled to bring in the youth players and their parents for the first time in a long time. There also seems to be a few more Earthquakes player appearances promoting the team and the games on local radio shows lately.       More needs to be done, of course, but at least they seem to be on their way to bringing the SJ attendance back up to the decent numbers of the earlier years (back in the days of a much worse SJ team but a much better economy and league "newness" factor, so it kinda evens out I guess ). -G
OK, Goodsport, but from a SJ fan perspective, would it be fair to say that SJ's historical troubles have been much bigger than the WUSA?
      Historical troubles? You mean regarding attendance?       I hate to drag another team into this discussion (and no disrespect is intended toward it), but why doesn't anyone ever mention Kansas City's historical attendance when people here rag on San Jose's? It was only since 2001 that they've drawn higher than SJ, and unlike SJ, the Wizards have only had one bad year on the field (1999), long after it established a relatively-solid foothold in the KC sports market. Big props to the KC front-office the last few years, though, in hustling to raise its attendance!       In regards to the Earthquakes-CyberRays comparison: It's hard to say, but I heard somewhere that the Rays did somewhat take away much of the youth market from the Quakes the last few years (and it certainly didn't help that the Quakes had a virtual revolving-door of front-offices the last few years, thus not being able to keep up). This may be one of the reasons why the Quakes' attendance lowered quite a bit once WUSA started up.       In any case, I'm happy that the attendance has finally started picking up again and that we SJ fans have had a good team the last three years (including this year)... which was definitely not the case beforehand. -G
K.C. is a proven soccer town with thousandsof people going to see their indoor team. I remember an opening night a few years ago where the indoor team outdrew the Wizards and that meant well over 20,000 people had gone out to see live soccer that night. In some ways I would compare K.C. attendance to what would happen if they put a second team in Rochester.
      So all those indoor soccer fans didn't start watching the Wizards until about 2001 or so?       Again, I'm not ragging on KC... I'm just saying that along those lines, the "There's so many other things to do in the Bay Area" reason could apply here too (although that's truly nowhere near the top of the list of reasons for the SJ attendance woes the last few years).       I really hope that the current SJ front-office really starts emulating the KC front-office's recent advertising/marketing push... which may actually happen if the same front-office remains open and active during this coming off-season (which would be the first time in years that that would happen in SJ)! -G
Most definitely. Don't get the wrong idea-- I'm not an SJ basher at all. But yeah, the attendance numbers haven't been pretty and I think they look even worse because the alleged padding oif the Metaparel (sp?) era deprived the Quakes of what former attendance laggards like KC can point to: improvement. You had a sh!t team until 01, no owner (or less than committed owners), constant front office change, no marketing budget and worst of all Khoadad Azzizi. Of course your numbers are going to hurt. And it looks worse because people compare them to Metaparel psuedo-numbers. Yeah, I think SJ has had "historical troubles". I also think they don't need to show a ton of improvement either. It's a tough year and, you should all remember, the league went through a couple of years of stagnation where we learned what worked and what didn't. In hindsight, slowing the losses and figuring out what the real base was for MLS constituted progress, even if it would've been hard to recognize at the time. I'm hopeful that SJ's going through that process right now, albeit a couple of years later than most of the league.
Yeah, but Quakes' attendance lowered quite a bit before WUSA started up too. From 1999 to 2000, you lost 2500 fans a game. There's no WUSA there. From 2000 to 2001, you lost 2800 fans a game. I'm certain WUSA had some effect; but attendance was already in freefall because team had sucked and management was poor. Once SJ won the cup, the next year attendance did improve-- at the same time the Rays attendance was improving.
What about the overcounting that supposedly occured in San Jose in the past? Was that just something done by the Kraft organization, or were the Clash reporting phantom attendance numbers during the earliest days of the league as well?
Wasn't one of these years the year when they started counted actual tickets as opposed to just making up a number? Hence the decrease (in one of the years) wasn't really a decrease at all, just more accurate.
Yeah, I think (as I mentioned) that it was in 2000 that freebie counting stopped (Goodsport?) So, possibly, you could say that the "decline" in 2000 was due entirely to made-up counts in 1999 and that the decline in 2001 was due entirely to the WUSA. But I always come back to 2002-- they had a good product coming off a great year with a marketable star and their attendance improved at a time when cyberray attendance was improving as well. To me, that shows that, whatever the effect the WUSA has, you can still suceed despite it.
      Kpaulson, thanks for understanding the various reasons why SJ attendance has suffered the past few years. If it was just a single reason, then it may have made it a bit easier for one of the many SJ front-offices to concentrate on and fix.       What each of the other MLS teams has had was a stable front-office that cemented a strong relationship with its fanbase from the word go, which was particularly important to do during the economic boom of the mid-late 90's so that the teams could weather the storm of the current recession ... this didn't happen in SJ until much later for the reasons you've correctly mentioned. -G
      The Bridgwater regime (1996-1998) reported the attendance pretty accurately, or at least didn't inflate the numbers any more than any other MLS team did (and oftentimes still do).       The Meterparel regime (1999-2000), on the other hand, tended to really inflate the numbers. It was also pretty easy to eyeball the discrepancy at the games - the attendance in 1999 was pretty comprable to the previous two seasons until the final quarter of the season, when the attendance became visibly lower despite it still being announced at similar numbers to the early part of the season.       In 2000, the first home game or two drew very well (due to the team's strong finish the year before, no doubt), but then dropped again as the team really sucked that year (among the other reasons kpaulson mentioned). Again, the announced crowd numbers were more than the actual crowd numbers.       It was when SVS&E took over in 2001 that the attendance numbers were announced pretty accurately (which is still being done with AEG to this day). So in truth, the 1999 official average was probably lower than the 1998 official average (but not by much), while the 2000 official average was probably somewhat lower still... there was still a dropoff between 2000 and 2001, but not as much as the official numbers would indicate.       In any case, Kansas City did have lower attendance than San Jose for most of MLS' existance, yet they've turned it around quite nicely in the last few years. Hopefully San Jose will continue to do the same well into the offseason and into next season! -G