On Monday, the Stars-Coyotes NHL game in Dallas officially drew under 6500 fans, and the actual attendance was much lower. Now this is no suprise, with a unsexy opponent, odd start time (5pm on a workday? Really?), and a baseball playoff game in the same area. What sporting events have you seen either on TV or in person that drew a really bad audience?
Some county games in England literally have three men and a dog watching.
I’ve attended Florida Marlins games that had an attendance of less that 1000 people.
I was at a game in the early 90s I believe at Cleveland County Stadium where about 3,000 of the 75,000 seats were sold.
And the ushers (who pretty much outnumbered the fans) wouldn’t let you move down for closer seats.
8k not so bad… but the stadium’s capacity was 112,000 at the time.
Towards the end of the ABA there were games where the attendence was less than 100.
Thus was born the “334 Club.”
I once attended a Denver Zephyrs minor league game, on a cold night in April, in the last year before the Colorado Rockies came to town, that had 500 people “crammed into” Mile High Stadium (which seated 80,000). There was a single concession stand open, for a while, and no vendors.
The game lasted more than three hours, and by the end most of the 500 people had left. I tried counting the remainder but they were so widely scattered it was hard to do and I lost count somewhere between 50 and 100.
At that point I was sticking around the sole reason that I was convinced it would finally be my opportunity to get a foul ball at a baseball game. But although balls rained down all over the stadium, I never got one. Some bastard twenty rows in front of me (with nobody else between us) made a one-handed catch of a line drive, and my last best chance went a-glimmering.
I was at an indoor soccer game in Milwaukee on a Sunday afternoon last January. Normally, I think attendance of 5k would be about right (the arena holds probably 10-12k), with lots and lots of kids who are there with their soccer teams making up the majority of the crowd. But this particular game was at the same time as the Packers-Eagles wild card game, and I doubt there were more than a few hundred people.
Not just county cricket games. Earlier this year, the first Sri Lanka / England test match the attendance was a little thin.
.
I’ve seen a 7 PM game for the Florida Panthers that wasn’t much better. Normal start time and no competing events. That’s normal for them.
Earlier this year the Marlins played a game before an audience of about 350 people.
Horrible attendance used to be a much more common thing in sports. Professional sports attendance is much, much higher than it used to be; sports interest in general is way up, which is why athlete salaries are so high.
To give you some idea of scale, this year the average Major League Baseball team drew 30,500 fans per game. The worst attended team, Oakland, drew 18,232 per game. (Highest was Philadelphia, who drew 45,440 and then only because there aren’t any more seats to sell tickets for.)
In 1975, in what was allegedly a golden era for baseball, only 3 teams in all of baseball could best Oakland’s 2011 numbers. San Francisco could draw but 6,400 fans a game. That was the AVERAGE, so you know there were a lot of slim nights.
I was at some of those sparsely attended Indians’ games at ol’ Cleveland Municipal Stadium too. The trick to sneaking into better seats was to not come up the ramp nearest to the seats where you wanted to sit, but to enter at the top of the lower deck and come down to the seats, and then to sit far enough away from the ushers that they wouldn’t want to come bother with you. 
I attended a university soccer game back in the early 90s where there were more players in attendence than fans, so that was pretty sparce. Not that most Canadian university sports are particularly well attended or anything.
I wasn’t there (and couldn’t have been), but there were several Siena College basketball games in 1989 – including the conference championship – that had an attendance of 0.
There was a measles outbreak, so thegames were quarantined.
When I was a kid,Pittsburgh had an ABA team called the Pittsburgh Condors. Pittsburgh was never a basketball city, and the Condors sucked, leading to horrible attendance.
My cub-scout troop got free tickets to a weekday game. We thought there was some sort of mistake, because we were practically the only ones there. The combination of a lousy season, fan apathy, other competing events, etc; it was amazing!
But…but…what about the Pittsburgh Pisces? 
Heh. I was at Station Square during some of the filming. I’ve never watched the movie, though.
I attended a number of SF Giants games back in the Candlestick days that couldn’t have had more than a few thousand fans.
1996 second to last game of the year. Wrigley field. Cubs (4th in NL Central) vs. Pittsburg (5th in NL Central). ~45˚F and pouring rain and when it wasn’t, it was drizzling. It was miserable. There were absolutely fewer than 1000 people there. We moved to right behind the Pittsburg dugout (no ushers ventured further ou and the guys on deck,etc. were just talking to us. Everyone was miserable and pitchers and everyone was trying everything possible to speed the game along.
But still, there were less than 200 people after the top of the 9th.
When I lived in Pittsburgh, I would attend all of the Mets-Pirates games at PNC Park. The emptiest I have ever seen the stadium was in June of 2009 when the Penguins were in the Stanley Cup playoffs. It was game 3 and the Penguins were down 2-0 to the Red Wings. It seemed like everyone was at Mellon Arena and PNC Park was completely blue and orange. That game felt like I was back at Shea because I was completely surrounded by Mets fans. Sometime around the 3rd or 4th inning everyone moved down to the bottom sections and we were not even close to filling the seats. Mets lost but it was a lot of fun.