[QUOTE=Chouan]
What do these games almost always have in common? Other than the players’ embarassing tendency to fall over at the slightest contact, I mean.
[/quote]
If you want people who watch soccer to answer you questions in a civil manner, it’s probably best not to embarrass yourself with childish comments that are likely to irritate fans of the game.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
The attendance is shockingly low. Most of the games I’ve seen take place in half-empty stadiums. You’ll see rows and rows of empty seats… then a small pocket of fans waving flags etc. … then more rows of empty seats … so on and so on.
[/quote]
I don’t know exactly what games you’ve been watching, but my experience watching Serie A (Italy), Bundesliga (Germany), La Liga (Italy) and Premier League (English) is precisely the opposite. In the majority of games, the stadiums always seem to have very healthy crowds. Obviously, as in most sports, some teams draw more people than others, and a game between two championship contenders is more likely to draw a full house than a game between two cellar-dwellers. Although even that is not always the case; the promotion/relegation system used by many soccer leagues means that teams near the bottom often play crucial games during the last few weeks of the season.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
By contrast, most American football games–both professional and NCAA–featured packed, sold-out houses.
[/quote]
As others have observed, the short schedule could be a factor here, with the NFL having only a 16-game regular season, and the NCAA an even shorter one.
Even more importantly, it’s also a question of available games compared to population, as well as geographic distance. America is a big country, with a larger population than of the key European soccer nations. This means that there are likely to be far more people interested in attending each game.
The smaller geographic area of countries like England also means that teams tend to be much closer together. London, a city roughly comparable in size and population to New York or Los Angeles, supports 5 Premier League clubs, as well as 8 other professional soccer clubs from the lower divisions.
The presence of these lower division clubs also helps explain the nature of soccer fandom. In England, it is very much a local phenomenon. A London soccer fan is not JUST a London soccer fan, but will be, very specifically, a fan of Tottenham, or Arsenal, or Chelsea, or whatever. And all through the country, many small and medium sized towns have their own soccer teams. Locals tend to be fiercely loyal to those teams, and to support them whether they are in the Premier League, or whether they get relegated to the lower leagues. While there might only be 20 teams in the Premier league, there are almost 100 teams in the four top divisions of English professional soccer. And the European countries also have multiple leagues. In prp football in America, there’s basically one pro league for 300 million people. Is it any wonder that they can fill bigger stadiums?
[QUOTE=Chouan]
Wikipedia seems to support my observation, namely that American football enjoys a much higher attendance rate than any soccer leagues in the world: List of attendance figures at domestic professional sports leagues - Wikipedia
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All that page supports is that the per-game attendance for NFL is higher in terms of absolute numbers of people per game.
Also, you have failed spectacularly to define what exactly constitutes a “higher attendance rate.”
Is it:
[ul]
[li] raw attendance per game?[/li][li] total attendance per season[/li][li] percentage of stadium capacity?[/li][li] television viewership?[/li][/ul]
Or some strange combination of these?
If it’s the first, then NFL clearly wins.
If it’s the second, then Major League Baseball kicks the ass of every other professional league.
But you also made clear that your thread was about soccer in total, so in order to compare baseball with soccer in terms of total attendance, you’d have to compare the total attendance for every pro baseball league with total attendance for every pro soccer league. And, in this competition, the NFL isn’t even close.
Are you taking TV audiences into account? After all, talking about sport as a “spectator sport” does not mean that people actually have to be at the ground watching. Hundreds of millions of people watch soccer on TV.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
So, why are the attendance rates so low at soccer games? This can’t be attributed to smaller stadiums, at least not in every case–I’ve seen games played in huge stadiums in Italy, stadiums that rival NFL stadiums in size and seat capacity, and even there the attendance is sparse.
[/quote]
Instead of assuming that “attendance rates” in soccer are low, based on watching “a few” games on TV, why don’t you actually take a look at some numbers and see what the attendance rates are? Why don’t you find out what actual stadium capacities are?
I’ve tracked down the figures for the English Premier League for the 2007-2008 season. Here’s the list, with teams, the capacity of their home stadiums, the average attendance at their home stadiums, and the percentage (rendered as a decimal).
Team Cap. Att. Percentage
Arsenal 60,432 60,054 0.993745036
Aston Villa 42,551 40,047 0.941152969
Birmingham City 30,016 26,111 0.869902719
Blackburn Rov. 31,367 23,316 0.743328976
Bolton 28,723 20,487 0.71326115
Chelsea 42,449 41,647 0.98110674
Derby County 33,597 32,184 0.957942673
Everton 40,569 36,922 0.910103774
Fulham 24,600 22,739 0.924349593
Liverpool 45,362 43,650 0.96225916
Manchester City 48,000 42,496 0.885333333
Manchester U. 76,100 75,580 0.993166886
Middlesbrough 35,100 26,421 0.752735043
Newcastle U. 52,327 50,869 0.972136755
Portsmouth 20,288 19,942 0.982945584
Reading 24,200 23,403 0.967066116
Sunderland 49,000 43,227 0.882183673
Tottenham 36,214 35,858 0.990169548
West Ham United 35,146 34,545 0.982899903
Wigan Athletic 25,023 18,484 0.738680414
Totals 781,064 717,982 0.919235812
Sources:
Attendance figures here
Stadium capacities here.
As you can see, overall attendance levels in the Premier League are at over 90% of capacity., with a few teams basically filling their stadium for every home game.
This article suggests that Italian Serie A attendances have declined recently, due to a number of factors, so Italy might well have lower attendance rates than England. I’m not sure if the other European professional leagues are better or worse, and if you want to find that out then maybe you can actually do some research of your own, rather than drawing silly conclusions based on minimal evidence and zero rational argument.
[QUOTE=Chouan]
Could it be that soccer is not, after all, as popular a spectator sport as American football? 
[/QUOTE]
Again, it depends on how you define “popular,” something you have failed to do.
), about half the Championship had 15k-25k at their last home match, and even lower down there’s Leeds and Notts Forest with similar attendance. And for any of these teams, the attendance would rise to around the 30k mark were they promoted to the Premiership, getting them into the figures quoted above and also with crowds 90%-plus of capacity.