The Anorak: Analyzing WPS Attendance, Week 1

Apologies for the format, this is the best we can do I guess. Click fullscreen to view it, you know, fullscreen.

Put simply, I’ve compared this weekend’s attendances against attendances for the first match of the ’09 season for each home team. I’ve also included the percentage of attendance to stadium capacity and this week’s attendance to the team’s season average in 2009.

Since Philadelphia is an expansion side, it obviously doesn’t apply to many of the fields.

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Notes:

• Sky Blue FC’s attendance for their first home match of their inaugural season was much higher than their season average. They hosted the Los Angeles Sol (which resulted in a bump in attendance for each team the Sol visited) and almost every WPS team experienced abnormally high attendances for their first home games last season.
• Sky Blue FC also played their first few matches at TD Bank Park which could accomodate the 6,053 attendees that showed up to their inaugural match. They now play at Yurcak Field with a smaller capacity.
• Also, I calculated the Freedom’s home attendance a little differently. They had a doubleheader (?) at RFK for one match last season which resulted in a massive hike in attendance (16,089 was the exact number). To portray a more realistic view of their season attendance, I averaged out their season gate numbers for every game besides that and then subbed that number in for the  outlying figure. This resulted in a more accurate figure of 4,712 as opposed to 5,746 which would have included the larger figure. Confused? Sorry.
• Attendances for inaugural matches last season were almost always much higher than the attendances for the rest of the season for each team. That’s why I included 2009’s average attendance for the teams included. Perhaps it was just the novelty factor that explained these high numbers. Keep this in mind when observing the decline from ’09’s to ’10’s figures.

 

Summary:

• Let the numbers speak for themselves…attendances were down an average of 26.6% from last year’s first match figures for the three returning teams. Moreover, Saint Louis and Washington were down an average of 14.5%  from their season average total in 2009. However, Sky Blue experienced a pretty steep increase of 21% from their 2009 season average.
• Attendance to capacity figures were fairly solid with SBFC filling up an impressive 88% of available capacity. Yurcak did look pretty good on FSC last night. Washington also scored well with 76% capacity whereas Saint Louis filled slightly more than half.
• 6,028 fans came out to see Philadelphia’s first ever match which follows the precedent set by WPS clubs in their inaugural matches, as previously mentioned. We’ll see if those fans continue to come out. 80% of capacity is not too bad either. Can Atlanta do the same for their first home match?

Concerned? Disappointed? About what was expected? Can we read anything from this or is it too early? Want more data? I’d love to hear your thoughts.