Thread for Questioning CPL Attendance Numbers 2024

[Watchmen]

I'll be interested to see if 2700 is the new fake floor for VFC (up from 2200 last year). Because really, there wasn't close 2700 there on Thursday. Which is fine - it's a Thursday night, a bad night to have a game. That's just not remotely the actual attendance.

[jonovision]

12 hours ago, Watchmen said:

I'll be interested to see if 2700 is the new fake floor for VFC (up from 2200 last year). Because really, there wasn't close 2700 there on Thursday. Which is fine - it's a Thursday night, a bad night to have a game. That's just not remotely the actual attendance.

Possibly a signal that the season ticket base is up.

[Watchmen]

1 hour ago, jonovision said:

Possibly a signal that the season ticket base is up.

Maybe, though I know a few people who had the $100 ticket last year and then didn't renew.

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

On 4/14/2024 at 8:20 PM, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

If you want to discuss the announced numbers as if they always correspond perfectly to exactly how many people are actually in the stadium there is another thread for that. Have fun with that if you only accept the announced number as being the topic worthy of discussion that's the place for you. I am starting this thread to discuss quirks in what we actually see happening on Onesoccer webstreams and with all those blue dots on Ticketmaster in a search for explanations more than anything else.

The Forge crowd yesterday looked a lot better than usual to me but there is something I find very puzzling. When I look at the Ticketmaster seat plan there are seven active blocks of seats opposite the camera with the back five rows tarped off during regular season games and not available for sale as far as I can tell. That means there appear to me to be 20 rows actually in use. Five of those sections are about 30 seats wide on average while the two outer ones (corresponding to where the supporters section is at one end and its mirror image at the other end) are about 25 seats wide on average. 5x30x20=3000 and 2x25x20=1000 so there appear to me to be around 4000 seats actually in use on that side. On the camera side only the mezzanine tier appears to be in use in terms of tickets that are generally available on Ticketmaster. That has 7 rows across eight subsections that are good for about 140 seats on average so that can provide around another 1000. Possibly another 150 or so if the other three subsections actually do get used.

There appears to me to be somewhere in the 5000-5200 range in terms of capacity they are selling tickets for in other words.  They sometimes announce significantly higher than that though including yesterday apparently. Setting aside for now that even yesterday the active sections did not appear to be full am I missing something on where more than 5200 spectators could be issued with tickets within this stadium in the configuration that the Forge are using for regular season games? There is also a luxury sponsors suite level on the camera side so I guess that might be part of it. The idea with that is to have a few high rollers that want to avoid the common herd rather than packing people in like sardines, so I doubt that's enough to explain it if my other assumptions are correct. 

 

On 4/15/2024 at 11:41 AM, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

^^^would normally just ignore this guy but for the record in the hope that this pathetic jibe doesn't keep getting repeated ad nauseam this season, the reason that I don't go to Forge games is because I don't live and work anywhere near Hamilton, Ontario. Ditto other CanPL teams as well so that's why I have a Onesoccer subscription instead. Was hoping to get to a Forge game in June when I will be in southern Ontario for a few days for work related reasons but they are playing away the weekend I could have gone.  

Back to the attendance numbers though. No takers for how the announced Forge attendance can be around 2000 higher than the number of seats in the sections of the stadium they are issuing tickets for on Ticketmaster where regular season games are concerned? You don't need to carefully count blue dots to know that the capacity of the stadium when all sections are in use for Ticats games is 24000 and that the Forge are only using around a quarter of that (if you ignored the tarps at the top of the sections opposite the cameras anyway, which actually lower it down quite a bit from there).

I am sure I am not the only person who looked at an announced number that is significantly greater than a quarter of the THF stadium capacity and had a bit of a WTF moment. If I am correct with all my assumptions and haven't missed something, it's a bit like Halifax announcing 8000+ as their season opener crowd when the stated capacity of the Wanderers Grounds is only 6500.

 

On 4/16/2024 at 9:47 AM, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

Was there any indication that the standing room space at the end with the big scoreboard was actually in use on Saturday?

 

On 4/16/2024 at 2:54 PM, Cicero said:

No, it wasn't. I'd estimate the crowd was ~5200. A good crowd, and if none of it was giveaways, I think a good sign that attendance is going to continue moving up at a 5-10% rate. Cross our fingers. Rather than constantly debating it, probably better to just accept that they inflate by 20-25% at Forge. More at the lower attended teams. Why do they do this at Forge? I have no idea. Maybe significantly more are sold than show, but not 2k. It's obvious with the struggling teams it's to give an impression that things are better than they are. Problem is that no one in the community even knows they're playing, that's really what they should focus on. Local media aren't broadcasting York's attendance numbers, but maybe it's for the benefit of future investors who might look at these numbers. That raises questions, they better do their due diligence.

If they are consistent in the way they report, it still gives an idea of trends. There's really no point in discussing it every week. We're not going to be able to figure out an accurate revenue number from these published attendances. Some on this board seem to be in denial about it for whatever reason. The published data combined with observations indicates a gradual, consistent increase since Covid at Cavalry, Forge and Ottawa, continued strength at Halifax, probably a holding pattern at Pacific and Valour (but who can blame them), continued low numbers at York and a weaker start at Vancouver than we would have hoped, but trends still unclear.

 

On 4/16/2024 at 3:25 PM, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

I could provide a detailed rationale for why I think that's not the case with Vancouver FC but I'm not going to go there. I neglected to do the screenshots that would be needed to back up part of the argument. Agree with most of what Cicero wrote above but think 4500 (or around 90%) might be more like it on the actual crowd if my assumptions on how many seats are in use this season are accurate. The sections opposite the camera were a lot fuller than they usually are but still weren't what you would expect for a complete sellout. Also think it's not as safe to look at trends as he is maybe suggesting. Think there was a big change on how the Forge were arriving at their announced attendance numbers on moving from 2019 to 2022 and then again from 2022 to 2023. 

 

On 4/16/2024 at 6:19 PM, Cicero said:

If there were actually 7200 people paying for seats on Saturday, then that's great. There's just no way there were 7200 people in the stands. Ozzie is right on this one, it's simply not possible. There are a total of about 5900 seats made available for sale and only two extra rows in the centre section were opened, so 50 extra seats. I don't know what the logic of this is, but it's been pretty consistent over the team's existence.

 

On 4/16/2024 at 8:05 PM, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

It's very much standard practice across all pro sports in North America in contexts where sellouts are not the norm to distribute outright freebies or heavily discounted tickets as a way to expose potential fans to the entertainment product. Those usually also count as part of an announced attendance number regardless of whether they actually wind up being used or not because tickets distributed is usually what the announced number corresponds to rather than the number of tickets scanned upon entry.

It is not safe to assume that announced attendance figures give you a clear picture of revenues because there is no guarantee that all the distributed tickets have been paid for. They also don't necessarily provide a clear picture of how many fans actually wound up in the stadium driving game day concessions related type revenue streams. What makes what happened with this Forge home opener more than a little bizarre is that it's not at all clear how they could have distributed 7000+ tickets without opening up extra sections to accomodate all the extra fans that could potentially have shown up.

 

On 4/17/2024 at 1:16 PM, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

May have misinterpreted this. The 1154 was probably already accounted for in the original post on this topic:

I had what I referred to as the mezzanine tier on the camera side as being good for up to 1150 (so only out by 4 if 1154 is the official number) with around 1000 definitely in use in terms of the what's usually available for ticketing on Ticketmaster, so that's already part of the 5000-5200 I mentioned. It's only the 30 suites and 480 associated seats that I was referring to with this bit:

If that's 480 capacity (seems a lot more reasonable than 1500 did) that brings things up to 5500-5700 as the actively used capacity from what I can tell. I'm skeptical that they would be selling all 30 of those luxury sponsors suites for Forge games only without some ransom packaging with Ticats games but would be happy to be wrong about that.

To make it clearer what is being referred to:

The club deck (the mezzanine tier in my initial terminology) is comprised of 1154 seats immediately above the main concourse for the lower bowl, while the 30 luxury sponsor suites are immediately above that and apparently provides scope for an extra 480. Neither the lower bowl nor the upper tier are in use for regular season Forge games on the side with the cameras during Onesoccer webstreams.

Still a bit irked by how this has all unfolded but that's some posts that should have stayed in the thread I started.

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

Better angle on York's crowd but not sure when it was taken:

This is what's on the other side this season in Victoria:

 

[chalms04]

Big treat for the V's Cup today as the Cavs are using the virtual venue for ticketing rather than the standard TM dots.

https://am.ticketmaster.com/cavalry/virtual-venue/MjRDVjA0MjM=

Not shown is the scissor lift camera position on the west side.

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

Found this snippet on the Cavalry's reddit interesting a few days back:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CavalryFC/comments/1c8b4uw/no_big_rock_fan_zone_this_year/

Does anyone know what's going on with the upper level seating at ATCO Field?

The upper rows of Section 104/105/106 used to be the $35 "Big Rock Fan Zone" tickets. These seats are all greyed out / unavailable for every single game this year.

Cheap tickets with an included beer were an easy sale for me and friends. But now it's $60+ to get any seat near centre field.

Would love to know if these tickets will be available any time soon, or if it's a thing of the past.

Had wondered how they were getting more people into the centre sections of the main stand at ATCO Field last season because back in 2019 it was very noticeable that the crowd was primarily in the cheaper end sections of the main stand or behind the goals and most fans were very much avoiding the $60+ pricing.

[Bison44]

Ooooohhhh, juicy stuff.  Big Rock fanzone axed because of a change in sponsorship to Carlsberg????   I'm not sure where this is going but I cant wait to find out......whats the endgame...aliens..illumiati....goverment coverups...nanobot trackers in the flouride???  

[shermanator]

If only there were some kind of news release indicating what was going on....

Quote

Carlsberg Canada will also offer their exceptional beers, non-alcoholic beers, and ciders during all of Cavalry FC’s home games at ATCO Field, on the grounds of Spruce Meadows, where the newly christened Carlsberg Fan Zone kicks off on Sunday, April 28 for Cavalry’s home opener against Pacific FC.

https://cavalryfc.canpl.ca/article/cavalry-fc-and-spruce-meadows-announce-new-partnership-with-carlsberg-canada

[Cheeta]

^. Not my go-to but some fancy it.  Great to see world brands attaching to, or in Carlsberg's case expanding their attachment to, the CPL.  At any level.  Score.

[RichV]

Darn, I liked having a cold Grasshopper while watching the game. Not a fan of Carlsberg

[Bison44]

Aww shit.  Perfectly normal explanation to a burgeoning tin foil hat conspiracy theory.  Its like when all the best parts of the movie are in the trailer, then the movie sucks ass.  

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

^^^normally just ignore this guy but how does highlighting that cheaper ticket prices with a beer factored in were being used to fill what would otherwise likely have been empty seats represent a "burgeoning tin foil hat conspiracy theory"? You have to laugh sometimes.

That sensible marketing strategy helped to solve one of the issues that was holding them back from attracting larger crowds in 2019 when all the cheap seats would be close to sold out but fans were clearly baulking at paying the very high prices for the centre sections of the main stand.

The Cavalry vs Vancouver game definitely looked a bit sparse on attendance* but that could just be the cup game on a weeknight angle. Not sure if it was part of the season ticket package.

* Edit: 1946 was the official number apparently. People can judge for themselves from the highlights to what extent they think that was inflated, if any. Doubt there's a huge contingent in the Officer's Mess or whatever it is called on the camera side so what you see midway through each half with a Cavalry crowd is likely to be a good way to gauge that.

https://canadasoccer.com/events/championship-match/?matchId=4799

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acts0j7b-ZY

 

Edited April 24 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[shermanator]

Had a couple of these last night. Very drinkable and no hangover. W.

[Obinna]

On 4/18/2024 at 11:03 PM, RJB said:

Couldn't make the Vancouver v Halifax Cavalry game tonight last night.  What wasn't the attendance?

 

[chalms04]

7 hours ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

cup game on a weeknight angle.

Yes

7 hours ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

Not sure if it was part of the season ticket package.

No

[DoyleG]

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

^^^doesn't appear to be aware that accentuating the positive on announced attendance numbers is standard industry practice in pro sports across North America. Anyone think TFC's 11430 announced number for the Simcoe Rovers game is a tickets scanned count based on what we can see in the highlights?

https://canadasoccer.com/events/championship-match/?matchId=4790

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm5mA4SDcg4

 

[kacbru]

18 hours ago, shermanator said:

Had a couple of these last night. Very drinkable and no hangover. W.

Just wondering if I'm doing this correctly.  I see four seats around that table, but only 1 person - only 25% capacity.  Therefore total attendance at the game couldn't have been more than 1500.

[JamboAl]

4 hours ago, Ozzie_the_parrot said:

^^^doesn't appear to be aware that accentuating the positive on announced attendance numbers is standard industry practice in pro sports across North America. Anyone think TFC's 11430 announced number for the Simcoe Rovers game is a tickets scanned count based on what we can see in the highlights?

https://canadasoccer.com/events/championship-match/?matchId=4790

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm5mA4SDcg4

 

Of course it wasn’t 11430.  But I was one of the folks who went (and I came from Ottawa and was in the Simcoe County Rovers section).  Were there 2,000 Rovers fans in the stadium?  Maybe not.  But those who wanted to be there showed up on a night when the Leafs were playing and when it got a bit chilly at the end.  
All I care about are the people who paid their money and went. 

[Bison44]

WHoaahhhh!!!!  DId he just admit MLS teams treat their attendance numbers exactly like CPL teams do??   And this is standard practice and not some CPL fueled conspiracy??   This is a big step for him.

  

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

Not sure what to make of York announcing 843 on the league website:

https://canpl.ca/matchcentre/9sr2pqlk2baktvtfas477q6fo/highlights

Previous management practice under Angus McNab definitely appeared to be to keep it in four figures even when it quite clearly wasn't.

Edited April 27 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[RS]

On 4/25/2024 at 2:02 PM, Bison44 said:

WHoaahhhh!!!!  DId he just admit MLS teams treat their attendance numbers exactly like CPL teams do??   And this is standard practice and not some CPL fueled conspiracy??   This is a big step for him.

  

Nah, he's always done it.

He just harps on CPL constantly.

[Ozzie_the_parrot]

No official number for Forge vs Valour so far AFAIA. There are around 4000 seats in use opposite the cameras and around 1000 on the mezzanine on the camera side plus up to another 480 depending on however many luxury suites are in use (I seriously doubt it's all thirty). 25% full or 1000 spectators looked to be approximately what was happening on the far side from the cameras. If something similar was happening in the mezzanine,* I doubt the tickets scanned number could have been much higher than 1500 or so. Odds on they will still be claiming an average attendance that is not far short of Halifax by the end of the season though.

* Edit: this clip from the Forge shows that the mezzanine and luxury suites were far from packed.

 

Edited April 29 by Ozzie_the_parrot

[RichV]

OK, I'm taking the comment about Carlsberg back. I had one at the game today and enjoyed it. 🙂