Now that every professional (men’s and women’s) team in MLS, the NASL, USL Pro and the NWSL has had at least one home match, we can take a look at the attendance figures for each team in the various leagues through games of May 5. (As always, corrections are welcome.)

NOTES:

• MLS, which drew six million fans for the first time ever in 2012, is on pace to do slightly below that (if every team holds its average for the rest of the season), but at 17,272 and playing to about 83% capacity, its numbers are healthier than ever overall. There are still trouble spots (Chivas USA, obviously, but to a lesser extent, Colorado, Columbus and Chicago), but the bright spots are very, very bright.
• Starting the MLS season earlier than ever may be something they want to re-think (if it’s mathematically possible, given all the constraints). This year’s March average (17,803) was well off last year’s record 20,783 and below 2011 (19,225) and 2010 (17,992). The season began on March 2 this year, a week earlier than last year and almost two weeks earlier than the year before. I don’t know if there’s a strong correlation (I’d have to delve deeper into it) but those are the numbers. (Incidentally, the April numbers were right about in line with the last few years.)
• Things are looking up in the early going in the Division II North American Soccer League, with strong showings in Minnesota (though not quite as strong as they wanted), the newly-rebranded United FC is 25% ahead of the former Stars’ numbers from a year ago, when they opened at the Metrodome and then moved back outdoors. They’re playing all but one of their Spring Championship matches indoors this time around.
• In fact, every NASL team but Edmonton (where new stands are finally being constructed at Clarke Stadium) and San Antonio is up year-over-year and the league itself is up about 5%. (In the Scorpions’ case, they couldn’t match last year’s numbers no matter what, as their lovely new yard has a much smaller capacity than the high school football stadium the team played in last year.)
• Orlando continues to set the pace in USL Pro (though their MLS chances took a hit late last week). The Lions drew club regular-season records of 9,140 on April 19 and then 9,589 eight days later (and had bad weather kibosh what could have been a couple of other great crowds). While mainstays Charleston, Richmond and Wilmington will be fine, there are troubling signs in Los Angeles (as usual) and Tampa Bay, while Phoenix has lost half its audience (and its club president) in its first month of play.
• Incidentally, the league numbers you will see for USL Pro throughout this season will include the “crossover” games against MLS Reserve League teams. There have been three so far, with Salt Lake drawing a high of 8,263 for their game against Phoenix, Portland getting 1,803 for VSI Tampa Bay and Colorado getting 307 for Harrisburg’s visit. Without the MLS Reserves, the USL Pro average is 2,614 at the moment.
• The latest attempt at women’s pro soccer, the NWSL, is 14 games in and Portland, Washington and Kansas City have drawn healthy (in Portland’s case, super-healthy) crowds. Boston’s off its former league-leading pace, but the big disappointment was Seattle, which drew just 2,618 for its inaugural against Sky Blue FC Saturday night. The Sounders Women (a different club altogether) led the W-League in attendance last year thanks in part to a star-studded roster, but the Reign is finding the going a bit tougher so far. Saturday will be Western New York’s first Saturday home game with Abby Wambach in the lineup, so we’ll see what happens there.
• And, in case you’re wondering, the PDL season began over the weekend, with the Victoria Highlanders drawing 1,804 for their home opener, a 3-0 win over Kitsap. But LA Misioneros reported 100 for their match against Fresno and the awkwardly-named OC Blues Strikers FC (the former Pali Blues) drew 40 for its opener against Ventura County. The W-League season starts this weekend.

Several months back, I wondered what effect the NHL lockout was having on attendance at games in the American Hockey League, whose 30 teams are all affiliates of NHL clubs. Now that the AHL season has ended, we can look at how all 78 minor-league clubs fared at the gate from the time the lockout ended until this past weekend.

You’ll see four columns for each team in the table below. The first is each club’s average home announced attendance as of the last day of the lockout (through games of January 18, 2013). Next is the average home announced attendance for all games from that point until the end of each team’s season. Then there’s the team’s final average announced attendance for the entire season. Finally, the percentage in the fourth column is the difference between the average for games during the lockout and for games after the lockout. Teams are ranked here by how big a “hit” they took (how much their average dropped) when the NHL returned to play. A positive number, obviously, indicates an increase in attendance post-lockout.

Sixty-one of the seventy-eight minor-league hockey teams saw an increase in their average announced attendance once the NHL lockout was over, ranging from the negligible (Rapid City, two people per game) to the profound (Columbus, Greenville and Milwaukee, all up more than 50%). Every league was also up, from the seven percent of the Federal League to the 26 percent of the SPHL.

Some individual markets saw steep declines, including Hamilton (did the return of the Leafs, and their first trip to the playoffs in nine years, make an impact there?), San Francisco (with the Sharks in nearby San Jose), Elmira and Rochester (both near Buffalo) and Bridgeport (the closest minor-league market to New York) all off by 12 to 23 percent.

I wouldn’t attribute all of this to the return of the NHL, and different markets may react very differently. There could be any number of reasons above and beyond the idea that hockey fans felt better about the game once the lockout was over and wanted to consume it at whatever level was closest to them. But you can’t prove from these numbers that the absence of the NHL was better for the minor-league hockey business.

The indoor soccer season officially ended Saturday night with the Baltimore Blast’s 8-6 win over the Missouri Comets in the second game of the Major Indoor Soccer League finals. It’s Baltimore’s seventh championship (including one by the original Blast in 1984), second only to San Diego’s 10 among top-flight indoor leagues.

The 2012-2013 season saw the MISL average 4,329 fans per game, up about eight percent from last year, but the number would likely drop a bit had Chicago reported its last three attendance figures. Anyway, here are the numbers we have:

A few notes:

• For the first time since 2003-2004, Baltimore didn’t lead its league in average announced attendance (Monterrey was the last team to out-draw the Blast). Rochester did, thanks in part to a crowd of 10,320 on January 27 (a game that almost didn’t happen), a record for this iteration of the MISL. But the second-year Lancers were a fairly consistent draw throughout the season and raised their average by 12 percent over last year. They appear to be a franchise on solid footing.
• Their upstate New York rivals, however, are a puzzler. While Syracuse’s numbers were 15 percent above last year’s, their team president publicly stated the Silver Knights were “getting about 2,000 a game this year,” the same as last year (when they announced 2,951 per game). They’re going to need to show growth in year three for there to be a year four, it seems.
• Milwaukee made a big jump, boosting their average 28 percent year-over-year to their highest levels since they moved out of the Bradley Center in 2004. The Wave are the longest continuously-playing soccer team in the country, and would play their 30th season in 2013-2014.
• Missouri, in its third season, showed modest growth (<4 percent) but did a great job nearly packing its building on short notice for the first game of the finals (5,279). While they're not going to match the original Comets’ impact on the market, they appear to be a solid franchise. With Wichita just over 200 miles away and rumors of the St. Louis Ambush returning for next season, the league could have begun rebuilding critical mass in the Midwest.
• Speaking of Wichita, I can’t figure them out, can you? They have what appears to be a terrific building for this sport, the original Wings were beloved, yet these Wings can’t draw and saw their average drop 25 percent from last year. Obviously, they’ve not been a very good team (LeBaron Hollimon has to be on the hot seat going into next year), but they’ve only averaged 3,321 per game in two years since they were resurrected. Luckily, their owner owns the building, so they may be doing better financially than other teams that struggle at the gate. (EDIT: Wings owner Wink Hartman announced this morning that the team is for sale, so evidently they’re not doing better financially than other struggling teams. Unless Hartman cuts a new owner a break on the rent, new ownership is going to be even farther behind the 8-ball.)
• Then we have Chicago, about which perhaps the less said, the better. Their announced average of 2,366 per game (for 10 games, we’re missing the last three) is below that of the last Chicago team to play in the Sears Center (the Storm in its final season in the XSL four years ago). But most of their crowds looked like this, or this, or this (or, in the playoffs, this). That doesn’t bode well, especially given their optimism about filling the place. The next few months will be very interesting as we see whether or not the Soul joins the Riot, the Storm, the Sting, the Horizon, the Shoccers and the Vultures on the scrap heap of Chicago indoor soccer franchises.

Syracuse Silver Knights president Tommy Tanner, who famously said his MISL team would “sell out every game” before it played one, is perplexed about why they haven’t actually sold out every game. Or come close, even.

“We’re still not where we need to be,” said Tanner, who vowed there will be, at least, a third campaign for his bunch. “We got about 2,000 a game last year and we’re getting about 2,000 a game this year. It’s almost exactly the same. And I can’t explain that. I really can’t.”

Well, I can explain it: you seem to think tickets just sell themselves. You seem to have two people charged with selling group tickets, which is great, but you need a lot more people selling all sorts of tickets if you’re going to average more than the 3,424 announced that is ahead of only Wichita and Chicago in the seven-team MISL.

What’s really strange is Tanner’s assertion that they were getting “about 2,000 a game last year and… about 2,000 a game this year.” The Silver Knights announced an average of 2,951 per game (sixth out of seven teams) last year and have announced an average of 3,424 this year (an increase of 16 percent). So they appear to be growing.

Unless you’re going to tell me that indoor soccer teams aren’t entirely truthful about their attendance figures. Which, come on.

(All this said…I don’t know who he is, but Syracuse’s play-by-play announcer is really good. REALLY good. Great description of the game, just the right amount of enthusiasm, knows the terminology, keeps up with the action, good voice. I don’t know how he got good, but he’s good.)

Here’s the first look this season at attendance figures from the Major Indoor Soccer League, now in its second season under the United Soccer Leagues’ umbrella.

Right away, you’ll notice that the Baltimore Blast is in danger of not leading its league in average announced attendance for the first time since 2003-2004. With Rochester drawing a league-high 10,320 on Sunday against Missouri (the biggest indoor crowd in more than five years), the Lancers put a bit more space between themselves and the second-place Blast. How much space is up for debate, as Rochester’s January 1 game against Baltimore still doesn’t have an official attendance figure attached to it.

The Blast is down just under three percent in average announced attendance compared to the same number of home games as a year ago, but they and the Wichita Wings (whose Hartman Arena is pictured above) are the only clubs looking at a decline year-over-year. The Wings, who used to pack the Kansas Coliseum back in the original MISL days, struggle to get fans to come to their cozy, modern arena (they’re down 26 percent over the same number of home games as a year ago), but when they do come, they usually come in nice, round numbers. The Wings have announced crowds of 2,600, 2,500, 2,200, 4,200, 2,500, 2,800, 3,000, 3,100, 2,300, 2,475 and 2,500. Believe them at your own risk.

But that’s nothing compared to the latest group to try to make a go of it in Chicago, where the Soul is surprisingly winning games (they’re 8-12 with six games to play, even after Sunday’s loss in Milwaukee), but not surprisingly not drawing fans. Despite their owner’s prediction that they’d have three 4,000+ crowds in January, the Soul has stopped announcing crowd figures and by the looks of things, that’s just as well. The four games they have announced crowds for have averaged 2,418, a league low, and the actual numbers are surely south of that. (Though they’d be doing great if the people who estimate their goalkeeper’s saves estimated their crowds.)

Everybody else is up in average attendance year-over-year. Syracuse is up 17 percent, Missouri is up 19 percent and Milwaukee is up 20 percent and riding what is now the longest winning streak in the indoor game at 14. (In case you’re wondering, the longest winning streak by an indoor team actually playing against full-time professionals is 19 by the 1980-81 New York Arrows. The Wave can beat that on February 24 in Rochester if they keep winning.)

If nothing else, the MISL seems to have stabilized, which is a key to at least getting the indoor game some traction. Rochester looks like a great find as a market. Baltimore and Milwaukee are the only clubs that have been around for more than three seasons, but Missouri seems solid, Syracuse is improving and if they can figure out what’s going wrong in Wichita and reverse that trend, they’d have a good base. With St. Louis rumored (as they have been for years) to be potentially getting a new team, perhaps there’s hope.

With the NHL lockout cruising right along and no end in immediate sight, I wondered what – if anything – was happening to minor-league hockey attendance. Would NHL fans, desperate for a hockey fix, start filling minor-league arenas? Last night, almost 13,000 fans attended an ECHL game in San Jose between the San Francisco Bulls and Stockton Thunder (tickets were distributed for free by the San Jose Sharks), but are we seeing increased crowds across the board?

In the AHL, at least, it looks like. Nearly half of the second-tier league is enjoying a boost in average attendance of nine percent or more based on the latest figures from Hans Hornstein’s excellent database on minor league hockey attendance. Seven teams are off by seven percent or more, but, collectively, the 30 AHL teams are up just under nine percent compared to the same number of home games for each club a season ago.

I’m not as familiar with all these minor-league hockey situations as I would be with comparable soccer situations, but you can see that NHL markets (or quasi-NHL markets, like Rochester, Albany and Syracuse, near Buffalo) are seeing healthy increases. Whether it’s all attributable to the absence of the NHL would require more study, but the lockout appears, on the surface, to be beneficial to AHL teams, at least. Checking the other leagues would require more work than I want to do at the moment, but perhaps soon.

With the end of the second official season of the new North American Soccer League, we can (almost) close the book on the Division II and Division III attendance figures for the 2012 campaign. Here are the unofficial numbers as I have them*:

As you can no doubt see, I’m missing a few numbers from USL Pro. A handful of games didn’t have reported attendance figures. It happens.

A few other notes:

• San Antonio became only the fourth lower-level team to average 9,000 or more for a season (the others were Rochester, Montreal and Portland). The Scorpions did tail off a bit after the initial burst, as they averaged 8,541 for the second half of their home schedule after averaging 9,810 for the first half. Still, a tremendous showing.
• Even with San Antonio’s numbers coming in about 20% under those of Montreal (whose slot they took in the league this year), NASL attendance was steady, just under one percent higher than a year ago. Minnesota (helped largely by a big crowd for their Metrodome opener) was up 67%, with Atlanta up 57%. Carolina’s comeback from the dead continued as they were up 16% from a year ago, and drew a club-record (for a league match) 7,310 for their home finale. Tampa Bay was up just under 4%. Puerto Rico’s sixth consecutive year of average attendance decline was largely (but not exclusively) caused by its temporary home while Juan Ramon Loubriel Stadium was renovated, but they didn’t draw that well after moving back home (1,893 for four games). And Edmonton, which sorely needs an adequate facility, was off 18% from last year’s (already low) numbers.
• Coming off a stellar freshman campaign, Orlando City bettered its 2011 numbers by some 22%, breaking its own DIII record by averaging 6,604 per game. Rochester was also up 22% (or so they say), while Richmond was up 20%. Los Angeles was a big gainer as well (up 45% with a game missing), but going up to 666 a game…well, I’m sorry, that’s not nearly enough. I’d be surprised to see the Blues return, as I would to see Antigua return now that they’re out of World Cup qualifying and their government has no real impetus to continue to support them.
• USL Pro finished at 2,686 for an average (give or take…the four missing games surely would bring that average down) that is a Division III all-time high, better last year’s 2,261. Even if you zero out all four data points I don’t have, it’s still 2,604.
• Saturdays were the best days for attendance for both leagues, with the NASL getting 4,030 a game and USL Pro 3,364.
• Without their bellwether teams (San Antonio and Orlando, respectively), the NASL averaged 3,038 per game, USL Pro 2,280.

This is just about the last thing I’m going to have to say about soccer for a while. The game and I have decided to take a break (well, it’s been telling me to get out for a while now, I’m finally listening). So I wouldn’t expect to read much more from me on topics like this one for a while, if ever again.

*The NASL’s numbers disagree with mine slightly on Ft. Lauderdale and Edmonton. Anybody who wants to point out the discrepancies, please do so. I like being thorough. (EDIT: We’ve found the Ft. Lauderdale problem, but we’re still off a bit on Edmonton.)