MLS 2009 Attendance stats weeks 16, 17 & 18

Stats are back! Another quick one, but I wanted to get everyone updated. Now that Becks is about to return to at least 7 different venues, attendance numbers are sure to go up. Will he stay around for another season or is MLS's Beckham experiment over with already? I'm getting word that Goldenballs may be on the verge of inking a program that would allow him to play for AC Milan part of the year and with the LA Galaxy for the other part.

As far as some high def attendance analysis, please look at the plot included here. We can see how certain events like pairing up Gold Cup games and/or high profile friendlies can cause spikes in attendance (New England, blue line). The same can be expected once Beckham comes around town.

MLS Attendance stats week 16

Week 16 update. For this week I decided to change the "MLS capacity" for the Houston Dynamo from 32,000 to 27,000 per the suggestion of a reader. I had been wondering about this for a while since Houston's numbers were lower in relative terms when compared to the other teams out west even though their average attendance was second only to the Galaxy. This change added 10 points to Houston's relative attendance pushing it up to 62%. It may have changed the overall numbers but only for the relative plots and only when Houston had a home game. As a highlight this week I'm including a relative vs average attendance plot for the western conference, similar to what I did for the east last week. You'll notice that the numbers tend to cluster around 15K for averages with varying levels of relative attendance (lowest for Chivas and highest for Colorado). Still, notice that the difference plots show that Chivas is one of only 3 teams exceeding the 2008 numbers. These numbers, as you know, are transient and we can expect important changes in the next few weeks. LA-NY on Saturday should shift a lot of numbers for New York and in general terms as well. I expect Chivas to remain strong for the rest of the season, keeping in mind that they still must "host" Beckham and the LA circus.