MLS 2011 Attendance Statistics Game Week 17

Copa America or not, MLS must continue. Now with most of their players in hand, the league continues to see strong attendance, especially over the holiday weekend with sold out venues from LA to Dallas and San Jose to Colorado. Kansas City's form stretches not only through its impressive unbeaten run but also to its shining new home at Livestrong Sporting Park. San Jose's numbers may seem inflated but this is because it chose to play at a larger venue for the New York match.

Most interesting from the 2011-2010 plot is the fact that 8 teams are in the positive and 8 in the negative (Portland and Vancouver don't count as this is their first year in the league). Of the 8 teams in the negative only 3 are more negative than -1000. However, all 8 teams in the positive are above 1000.

The numbers:

Team	Average	Relative	Median
DC	15696	64	14105
KC	18017	98	18467
NE	12675	63	12337
COL	10483	51	10306
TOR	19876	86	20086
CHI	14026	70	13156
NYRB	17878	71	18081
PHI	18177	98	18372
HOU	16411	61	15176
LA	22739	84	23719
CHV	15111	56	14058
DAL	13278	65	11138
SJ	13367	127	10276
CRD	14735	81	14185
RSL	16066	80	15513
SEA	37265	104	36255
POR	18627	100	18627
VAN	20019	95	20518

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 17

The Becks parade continues to rage on in the Eastern conference, bringing numbers much higher than in the beginning of the season. Although the New York-LA game may not have been as high in attendance as it was last year, it was large enough to bring NYRB's season average above that of last year's (see the 07-08 plot difference). Because I know a lot of you out there in bigsoccerland like to see other aspects of statistics, I'm including median plots for the east and the west in high definition (just click for full page). Note that NY's median is still higher than 15,000 even though they had two games below 10,000 this season. Their relative attendance currently sits at 69%, much better than NE, RSL, CHV, DAL.

New England's meager attendance shows its ugly face in the median analysis (KC not included do to a smaller stadium). Even so, NE's attendance is not much differend than it was a year ago for the entire season (see difference plot). I've also read that KC's game with LA will be held at Arrowhead. This should put another inflationary figure into the Eastern conference and effectively raise KC's average to make it look more like San Jose's out west (>120% relative attendance). Therein lies the Achilles heel of relative analysis and this has prompted me to come up with a relative median that I will introduce in the coming weeks. Such a number will, hopefully, do away with the inflationary effects of switching venues. This isn't the same problem with DC, NE or NY since their inherent MLS capacity is already twice that of SJ and KC.
Just wanted to remind everyone and to alert new visitors to the site: all numbers are based on official public MLS numbers and all plots are on the right column.