The 2008 season is over for the Wizards following their loss to Columbus on Saturday. With that done, it's now time to start looking at some of the end of season stats for the Wizards. The first stat this offseason to look at, is the Wizards attendance for the 2008 season compared to the rest of the league and to last season. First here is the average attendance for each team.
LA - 26,009
Toronto - 20,108
DC - 19,835
New England - 17,580
Chicago - 17,034
Houston - 16,939
Salt Lake - 16,179
New York - 15,928
Chivas - 15,114
Columbus - 14,622
San Jose - 13,713
Colorado - 13,659
Dallas - 13,024
KC - 10,686
The Wizards finish at the bottom of the league in attendance. Before shots to move KC come up, remember that the Wizards played 14 of their 15 games at Community America Ballpark, which has a capacity of 10,385. The sad part of it, though, is the fact that only 5 of the Wizards' regular season games at CAB this year were sellouts. The attendance was supported by 26,113 showing up at Arrowhead for the game against the LA Galaxy.
Kenn.com has a great breakdown of the average attendance compared to last year. Overall, attendance for MLS was down 1.9% compared to last year. A lot of that can fall on both KC and San Jose playing most of their games at small temporary stadiums (3 of San Jose's games were played at McAfee Coliseum home of the A's). The other big culprit for the drop in attendance was Dallas, which experienced a 14% drop in attendance from last year to this year. KC's 7.8% drop is down mainly due to their move to CAB.
Not 'selling out' CAB is no mark against the Wizards, in my opinion - would you want to sit behind home plate and watch the game? Even though capacity is small, some of those seats are just terrible seats - far from the field, behind a screen. If all 10K seats were decent quality seats, they'd sell them all no problem.
ReplyDeleteMove this team, for Chrissakes.
ReplyDeleteThey're not moving, get over it.
ReplyDelete