MLS 2009 Attendance stats week 20

Beckham's arrival begins to show its face in attendance statistics, albeit at a more muted scale this time around. For example, his game this week was at Kansas City and it wasn't held at Arrowhead. Instead, the match was held at an expanded Community America Ballpark (about 1500 more seats than normal). Notice that using the 09-08 difference plot we see that RSL has recovered to about the same attendance average as last year. Colorado is also recovering. Further, these two teams have not had the Becks circus come to town.

No Becks in MLS this weekend. Instead it's a sold out Rose Bowl for Galaxy vs Barcelona. A quality match for sure. How come we can't get these huge numbers to turn out for MLS matches? The World Football Challenge with Inter, AC Milan, Chelsea and Club America drew no less than 50,000 each for the games played. If we could get a good 10-15% of these true football fans then MLS would surely get a boost.

Another area that MLS should be working on developing is the Concacaf Champions League. DCU managed no more than a tie against lowly Firpo from El Salvador. An early exit... again? More on that on a later post.

Finally, to round this week's MLS discussion is the current MLS schedule. Whilst I question the setup (spring to fall instead of fall to spring as is done in Europe and most regions of the world), we also have to keep in mind venues like Colorado, Chicago and Toronto. These are usually in deep freeze from December to February. Sepp Blatter, president of FIFA, recently discussed MLS's schedule and why it wasn't attracting better players. Interesting points except for the obvious points mentioned above (Chicago, Toronto). He advocates a fall to spring season. Then again, there are plenty of leagues in Scandinavia, Russia, among others, that have a sizable break during the winter. This is something worth considering. You can catch Blatter's discussion below.

MLS Attendance stats week 20

OK, enough with the Olympics and the latest Olympic failure. Back to MLS. It was a slow weekend all around as the total attendance stats show. Attendance was average even in relative terms (~75% for the east and ~65% for the west). Keep in mind that there was no Beckham circus this past week and that a good amount of players were missing due to Olympic call-ups. Most notable was the low attendance for the Colorado-TFC game although it should not come as a surprise. Pleasant surprises were the numbers at New England (19K+) and New York (15K+), with an exclamation point on New York since the fans saw their team win decisively.
You'll note that I have eliminated a couple of the ads on the right column and permanently added medians to the list. From several threads on BigSoccer.com, it became evident that an important way to show MLS attendance trends minus Becks was to take out the outliers that changed the means and relative attendance for teams like San Jose, DC, and New York.
Additionally, I thought it would be nice to look at the percentage of the total numbers that each team accounts for in a pie chart, this time for the western conference. You'll note that teams match up pretty evenly throughout and this also compares to the numbers seen in the average and median attendance plots. LA leads, of course.