CPL 2022 Season Attendance

[JamboAl]

1 hour ago, m-g-williams said:

 

Interesting that only 3,900 was reported for the Atletico Ottawa game.  The team announced it was 4,566.  In fact, it seemed closer to 5,000 or more to me.

[shermanator]

3006 for last week's Cavalry / Wanderers game in Calgary.

[Kingston]

A quick assessment at roughly the half way point of the season.

Edmonton and York are terrible.  Edmonton I get with the ownership issues.  I'm not sure what York needs to do to turn things around.  Perhaps not be in an MLS market?

Halifax is great.  In fact, their six home games are the six highest attendances in the league this season.  I visited Halifax a couple of weeks ago (sadly no home game during my visit) and I can say there is good awareness of and buzz about the team in the city.  Imagine if they could also start winning!

Winnipeg is a concern for me.  They are averaging only 2854 and their trend is not positive.

Pacific seems to have settled in at around 3000.  That's actually a respectable draw for a city of their size.  I do hope they can improve long term because it isn't really enough to survive without ownership help.

Ottawa and Calgary are both just below 4000.  They both feel like things are starting to catch on in terms of attendance.  I'd love to see them keep progressing and start getting crowds above the 5000 mark.  The Fury used to often go over 6000 so the market is there for Ottawa.

Forge is an enigma.  They're averaging about 3500, which feels low for them.  (Their first year was 5700 without counting the huge league-opening match.)  But they also drew over 13 000 for the Voyageur's Cup game against TFC.  Hopefully they can rebound a bit.

[phil03]

Ottawa is my favourite CPL team (mostly due to living there and appreciating that they are making a real effort for bilingualism) and Id argue the location is an issue. A large part of the city function without cars and making it to Landsdowne in bus is a pain.

It wont happen this year but should Landsdowne get connected to the tramway it could very well be a game changer for attendance.

[Aird25]

2 hours ago, phil03 said:

Ottawa is my favourite CPL team (mostly due to living there and appreciating that they are making a real effort for bilingualism) and Id argue the location is an issue. A large part of the city function without cars and making it to Landsdowne in bus is a pain.

It wont happen this year but should Landsdowne get connected to the tramway it could very well be a game changer for attendance.

It’s the same for Pacific. The stadium is built right next to the existing railway but the federal and provincial governments seem to be too daft to get it running again and connect a growing population of close to a million living along a linear route. They’re going to give the existing route away, and they’ll never be able to afford to get it back 

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

12 hours ago, Kingston said:

...Forge is an enigma.  They're averaging about 3500, which feels low for them...

Think some of their year one numbers should be treated with a healthy degree of skepticism and not much has probably really changed there on tickets scanned as opposed to distributed counts. 3500 still looks somewhat higher than actual to me based on what we see in the highlights.

Edited July 20, 2022 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[Kingston]

5 hours ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

3500 still looks somewhat higher than actual to me based on what we see in the highlights.

I'm not really directing this comment specifically to you, just quoting this as an example.

I don't think "it looked like more/less to me on TV" analysis is useful.  Yes, maybe it did, but that's pretty subjective.  I think we're collectively better off using the official numbers.  They may be skewed if teams announce tickets distributed versus sold versus turnstile, but they should at least be consistently skewed.  On at least one other board I participate in, this is an agreed upon "rule" and it's pretty useful is avoiding TV debates.

Back to Forge, I also wonder if there is some fatigue with all the CONCACAF and other games they've been able to enjoy.

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

10 minutes ago, Kingston said:

I'm not really directing this comment specifically to you, just quoting this as an example.

I don't think "it looked like more/less to me on TV" analysis is useful...

If you can see all or most of the seated areas, it's objective reality rather than PR spin.

[Kingston]

40 minutes ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

If you can see all or most of the seated areas, it's objective reality rather than PR spin.

Unless people make arguments like "It was raining so everyone was actually standing under the concourse" or "Everyone from that section actually spends most of the game in the beer garden".  People can obviously make whatever comments and observations they want but I'll stick to published numbers over impressions and work from there.

[Ftduck]

The problem with comparing current Forge attendance to 2019 is there was seating on both sides. I was on the other side for the first season and I remember the east side(what you see on tv) being at least as full as it is now. At times there was definitely more. West side never seemed as full but had a decent amount of people. Conclusion for me, not including covid setbacks, is that for the casual fan the honeymoon is definitely over. Is what it is, so I should probably stop obsessing over it lol. I know it's easy to look up 2019 footage but I wont because I'm too busy, and if I'm not to busy I'm too lazy. 

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

In year one, York 9 claimed an average of 2668 and a season high of 4260. Last season Angus McNab told us that 1800 was an all-time record paid attendance. The official announced numbers sometimes bear no correlation with reality.

[shermanator]

Buy a ticket already or shut the fuck up, Ozzie. 

[gator]

The crowd was enthusiastic at the Forge match last night which was great after not scoring and losing their previous home matches, 3500 seems about right and isn't a bad number considering it was a midweek match with a 6:45 ko! I don't know why the match kicked off at 6;45 but I personally know a bunch of regulars who weren't able to make it, I expect we will see a larger crowd Saturday!

[Kingston]

31 minutes ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

The official announced numbers sometimes bear no correlation with reality.

Sometimes they don't, which is not a problem unique to the CPL.  So we take them with a bit of a grain of salt.  That's still more reproducible and discussable than "it looked like more on TV".

[Kingston]

15 minutes ago, gator said:

The crowd was enthusiastic at the Forge match last night which was great after not scoring and losing their previous home matches, 3500 seems about right and isn't a bad number considering it was a midweek match with a 6:45 ko! I don't know why the match kicked off at 6;45 but I personally know a bunch of regulars who weren't able to make it, I expect we will see a larger crowd Saturday!

There's no doubt that weekend games are better for attendance.

[JamboAl]

The highlights are not always an accurate reflection of what the attendance is, especially in a large stadium like in Winnipeg, Hamilton or Ottawa.  

[Aird25]

If other CPL stadiums are anything like Pacific games there's usually a whack of kids running around and playing throughout the game. There never seems to be a time where even close to everyone at the game is in their seats. 

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

1 hour ago, Kingston said:

...That's still more reproducible and discussable than "it looked like more on TV".

The latter is based on the objective reality that we can actually see. Halifax is usually very obviously at near capacity, so if 3500 were announced there it would be very easy to tell that there was a severe undercount happening for whatever reason. Quite substantial reverse York 9 manoeuvres on crowd stats used to happen in Scotland sometimes when cash was paid at the gate as a way to avoid additional sales tax on whatever number was officially declared so that can happen as well.

In a similar sort of way if 3500 were to be announced for the Forge vs FCE game last night it would imply that around half the seats in the active sections were sold. Even allowing for season ticket no shows, people on the concourse buying a beer, kids running about etc that would look off quite significantly in the opposite direction compared to what we can directly observe is happening courtesy of Onesoccer. Certain camera angles make it easy to gauge what percentage of seats are actually being used just as it is in a Halifax context.

 

[RS]

3 hours ago, gator said:

I don't know why the match kicked off at 6;45

That made no sense to me. 

The Cavalry-York game didn't start until 9:30, so Forge could've easily kicked off at 7:30. The silly kickoff time surely hindered attendance.

[Aird25]

56 minutes ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

The latter is based on the objective reality that we can actually see. Halifax is usually very obviously at near capacity, so if 3500 were announced there it would be very easy to tell that there was a severe undercount happening for whatever reason. Quite substantial reverse York 9 manoeuvres on crowd stats used to happen in Scotland sometimes when cash was paid at the gate as a way to avoid additional sales tax on whatever number was officially declared so that can happen as well.

In a similar sort of way if 3500 were to be announced for the Forge vs FCE game last night it would imply that around half the seats in the active sections were sold. Even allowing for season ticket no shows, people on the concourse buying a beer, kids running about etc that would look off quite significantly in the opposite direction compared to what we can directly observe is happening courtesy of Onesoccer. Certain camera angles make it easy to gauge what percentage of seats are actually being used just as it is in a Halifax context.

 

In my experience CPL still tags on the ticketmaster service charge when paying cash at the gate. It’s comical to think that the people selling tickets are pulling off some sort of deception or tax fraud. They’re mostly kids trying to figure out how the system works and wishing they weren’t there. Do you go to games?

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

Maybe try reading posts more carefully before hitting reply. The phrase "used to happen in Scotland" should have made it clear that the undercount angle related to tax fraud that I was referring to had nothing to do with CanPL in the present day.

Edited July 20, 2022 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[narduch]

In North America teams tend to over count yo give the impression things are better than they are.

A number of MLS teams do this for sure

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

Inter Miami's crowds are horrific at the moment if you check out the youtube highlights but they still announce low five figures because of the optics of being more honest in PR terms. Definitely nothing unique to what certain CanPL teams did at times on this back in 2019.

They have been keeping it reasonably real since last season possibly because they need to be able to plead poverty to a certain extent where the would be Players Union is concerned. Waiting a week to drop the numbers is a sensible approach to avoid what is happening on this with York and FCE being a major talking point in media reports of games. 

Edited July 20, 2022 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[ted]

16 hours ago, Aird25 said:

It’s the same for Pacific. The stadium is built right next to the existing railway but the federal and provincial governments seem to be too daft to get it running again and connect a growing population of close to a million living along a linear route. They’re going to give the existing route away, and they’ll never be able to afford to get it back 

<digression for local politics>

Rail IS coming back and commuter trains WILL be running along those lines within the next 5-10 years. There is a need for an alternative to the Malahat for passengers and freight and no matter the cost of rebuilding and equipping the rail line, it will be less (by a factor of 2-3 minimum) than building an entirely new highway inland or via two bridges to Saltspring Island.

</digression>

[CDNFootballer]

Just to put some reality and context into the parrots statement "official announced numbers sometimes bear no correlation with reality", this is of course the case not only in CPL but in MLS and most/all the other pro league's in North America. As an example :

 

Edited July 20, 2022 by CDNFootballer