Indoor Issues
March 9th, 2010Whether it’s the economy or a reaction to last year’s shakeup or just a sign of the end of the line, indoor soccer attendance is way down this winter.
Quick recap: from 2002 on, we had (basically) one main indoor soccer league (the second coming of the MISL). In the summer of 2008, some folks decided they couldn’t play nice together, so last winter we had two leagues, the National Indoor Soccer League (NISL) and the Xtreme Soccer League (XSL). Neither one was even as strong as the previous league had been. Then, this past summer, the XSL went belly-up, one of its teams (barely) survived (Milwaukee) and joined the NISL, which then re-took the name MISL two weeks before it began its 2009-2010 season.
Anyway, that season is coming to an end in two weeks, and attendance is down everywhere:
| Team | G | Total | Average | 2008-09 | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baltimore | 9 | 55,348 | 6,150 | 7,534 | -18.4% |
| Milwaukee | 9 | 33,253 | 3,695 | 4,151 | -11.0% |
| Monterrey | 9 | 25,153 | 2,795 | 3,491 | -19.9% |
| Philadelphia | 5 | 23,974 | 4,795 | 6,377 | -24.8% |
| Rockford | 10 | 11,120 | 1,112 | 1,242 | -10.5% |
| MISL TOTAL | 42 | 148,848 | 3,544 | 4,163 | -14.9% |
Notes:
- Rockford only had nine home games last year, they had 10 this year. The “2008-2009″ column is their full-season average from last year. Everybody else’s comparison column reflects the same number of home games as a year ago. Milwaukee’s numbers were in the XSL. And the “league total” comparison was for all 41 reported numbers in the NISL last year - four Massachusetts games were never reported (hint: they were crap crowds), so the NISL’s true average a year ago was well below the 4,163 that goes in the books. Therefore, the year-to-year drop is slightly less than 15%.
- Philadelphia moved from the (former) Spectrum to a smaller arena at Temple University, where they were unable to get 10 home dates (and one they did get was snowed out and rescheduled for Milwaukee, so the KiXX will only have seven home games this year).
- Rockford’s still a mess. My man Jeff Kraft is doing the best he can there, but it’s just tough.
- Baltimore, long a bastion of indoor soccer, is on pace to have its worst year, average attendance-wise, since 2004-2005.
- Milwaukee’s announced attendance figures are down (like everybody else’s), but, from what I understand, they’ve been able to maintain their ticket pricing integrity better and may actually be generating more ticket revenue than a year ago. The Wave (which was left for dead last summer) may finish first in the regular season and host the league title game on April 4.
I love indoor, but it’s not at all a well cat. I know we’re never going back to the glory days of the mid-1980s, but I didn’t think we’d be looking back at the early 1990s and thinking those were halcyon days, too.


