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::mls attendance analysis 1996-2005

Drawing Conclusions About Drawing Crowds

Well, that's a kick in the pants, ain't it?

Mark Ziegler of the San Diego Union-Tribune has done some serious digging over the last several months and found some interesting things about Major League Soccer attendance (you can read the results of his work here and here).

The short version is this: the numbers MLS announces for attendance not only don't have a strong relationship to the number of people actually in the stadium, they don't have a particularly strong relationship to the number of tickets actually sold. The numbers you see throughout this analysis are apparently too high, in some cases by as much as 50%.

So why continue to keep track of the numbers, as I have been since May of 2001? Good question.

It would be a perfectly valid point for someone to say that this is now a colossal waste of time, if the numbers don't hold up to scrutiny and if they're not realistic.

At this moment, since I've been doing this for more than five years now, I'm inclined to keep doing it, at least through the end of the 2006 season. Then I'll re-evaluate.

To those of you who've used this analysis over the last few years and enjoyed it - thank you. I appreciate that you appreciate the work, even if the work is less meaningful now than it once was.

Well, even with that, here's what you can find in this analysis: