I always hear how soccer–or “FUTbol,” as the rest of the world calls it–is the most popular sport in the world, and that more people watch the World Cup than the Super Bowl, etc…
Via satellite, I get several channels that show soccer games from around the world. So, out of curiosity, I’ve watched a few. These include games from Italy, Spain, England, Argentina, and Mexico, plus a few other countries.
What do these games almost always have in common? Other than the players’ embarassing tendency to fall over at the slightest contact, I mean.
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.
By contrast, most American football games–both professional and NCAA–featured packed, sold-out houses.
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.
Could it be that soccer is not, after all, as popular a spectator sport as American football?
My WAG, which seems accurate to me at least: there are simply MORE people who like soccer, and more GAMES of soccer played. In the long run, if you play 2000 games with 50% attendance you’re likely to get more attendance than a quarter of that number of games with 100% attendance (numbers random). Ergo the total number of people who cheer for a futball squad as their favorite sports pasttime far outweight the number of people who cheer for American Football teams. I’d say it comes down to the worldwide popularity of soccer, not particular attendance %
ETA: Also, go over those caveats listed at the beginning of that article, they seem fairly significant as stated, and tend to weigh in with my argument that total fanbase (and probably total attendance) is in favor of soccer, where % per game is in favor of the NFL.
There are only 16 regular season NFL games, fewer for NCAA. With so few games it’s no wonder they’re sold out. I’ve never had a problem buying a ticket for a baseball game on game day.
Well sure – not in DC. In Boston it can be quite difficult, particularly if the Yankees are in town. The Cleveland Indians had 455 consecutive sellouts from 1995 to 2001. This is the major league record.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Again, it depends on how you define “popular,” something you have failed to do.
The rest of the English-speaking world calls it “football”, not “futbol”. “Futbol” is limited to speakers of Spanish and a few other languages. In France, for example, it’s “le foot”, traditionally, but more commonly (these days) football.
The World Cup is not those games you get on satellite. Those are club teams, representing cities, towns, villages, or even regions of a city. The World Cup is played among national teams, not club teams, and last I looked, total World Cup viewership was something like three billion.
Also, what everyone else said, paying particular attention to the part about an NFL team playing 16 games per year, while a top-flight soccer/association football team plays as many as 60.
Empty blocks of seats may also be a result of crowd control measures. Matches between some clubs might be deemed to be a higher risk for trouble, so leaving a gap between home and away fans might be deliberate. I guess it depends on the design of the stadium, how much the club has to spend, etc.
Moreover, not all fans who would like to go to a match can get tickets (assuming they could afford them). Tickets are allocated (corporate hospitality, home and away fans) not simply sold on demand to anyone who would like to go. Therefore actual attendence at matches would be a very crude indicator of popularity.
Lots of good and correct answers. Another one is that the seats you’re most likely to see on close TV shots are the first few rows behind the goals, which are rubbish and are among the last to be sold.
Regarding the presence of lower leagues (funny I should feel strongly about that one ), 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.
A big issue which does explain some poor Premiership attendance figures is ticket prices. There’s a reason for them being so high which goes back to the Hillsborough disaster, after which stadiums were converted to all-seated arrangements, drastically reducing capacity. So ticket prices went up to compensate.
Gradually stadiums have been rebuilt, but even now a random example of a half-redeveloped stadium is Everton’s Goodison Park, which has a current capacity of 40k but a record attendance of twice that. So there’s been no opportunity to reduce prices since, along with the 1990s surge in TV income and the cost of players making this certain.
Anyway, to look at the four lowest percentages for the Premiership: Wigan, Middlesbrough, Blackburn, Bolton. The first is a relatively new team in a town which has always been a rugby stronghold. To have the turnout it does is a success. Middlesbrough play in a dreadful new stadium with no athmosphere, about fifteen miles from the centre of town. Blackburn only has a population of 100k, so a quarter of a town going to each match isn’t bad, and as with both Wigan and Bolton it’s not able to draw on a larger catchment area because they’re in the part of the country with the highest density of clubs, both Premiership and lower leagues (London excepted). (Note that those three clubs are all within about fifty miles of each other.)
Could the broadcast of soccer games be intended more for those that play soccer, as opposed to just those who are soccer fans?
Watching curling draws on Canadian television, I’ve noticed that there are few people in the stands, but ratings are supposedly quite high. From what I understand, curling broadcasts in Canada are intended not so much for curling fans, but rather for curlers. There’s not really many curling fans that don’t play the sport.
Last year when I frequented Toronto-area pubs/grill quite frequently, I really started to appreciate curling being constantly shown on the tube. It’s quite captivating once you get drawn into it. No, I’m not a curler. I’m not being sarcastic. And I wasn’t always drunk.
The US, population 300 million, has 32 NFL teams which play 8 home games each each year.
England on the other hand, population 50 million, has I think 84 pro soccer teams in just the top 4 divisions, which play a minimum of 20 home games each, not counting the Scottish, Welsh and NI leagues, so I think its fair to say that soccers popularity is not overstated.
In the EPL, its the bottom five or so teams you see with half empty stadiums, same as with the really bad NFL teams. You may see a half empty stadium when Chlesea plays Wrexham on a Wednesday in an early round cup game as well, but that’s becasue fans are smart enough not to pay 80p or whatever to watch a meaningless game. Drop the ticket prices to a decent level, and even those would have big attendance.
Also note, for example, Wigan, an EPL team with “low” attendance, has a population of around 80,000- no NFL team has a metro area with a population less than half a million. This would be like Fargo North Dakota having an NFL team- would they sell out a 50,000 seat stadium? Of course not.
Wigan’s and Bolton’s stadiums are within walking distance of each other - I can stand on a hill near my house and see both of them. Combine this with the fact that both are in Greater Manchester and Wigan also borders Merseyside, then club density around here is extremely high.
Both the Reebok and JJB stadiums are also situated in awkward spots.
Also, it being bowl season, it might be fair to point to the many many NCAA football games played in the last week or two in virtually empty stadiums. Does that mean that football is not popular in the US?
Yeah, but Cheeseheads will travel to Green Bay - I have friends who regularly drive up from Madison and Milwaukee - so the Packers don’t have to rely on just the population of Green Bay to fill the stadium.
Not really sure what you’re getting at but in any case the answer’s no. In Britain, hundreds of thousands of people attend matches on any Saturday or Sunday, and millions of people watch football on TV. The number of players is far less.
The only fair comparison to the NFL in Europe is the Champions’ League - it was not listed in the table linked in the OP.
), 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.