Last season was an unmitigated disaster for Toronto FC.
An expansion team, Toronto had the fewest points in the league (25), allowed the most goals (49), scored the fewest (25) and set a league record for a scoring drought (824 minutes).
Not surprisingly, Toronto saw a change in the number of its season tickets.
The numbers increased.
After having 14,000 season tickets for 2007, Toronto quit selling them for the upcoming season when it reached 16,000.
“They could sell out the whole place just with season tickets last year and this year again,” said Bob Gansler, a former Wizards coach who was a Toronto FC assistant coach last season. “It’s a hot ticket. They certainly are in a great position in terms of their support.”
Ditto for Major League Soccer. Just seven years after folding two teams, the league is on solid ground. While Toronto hasn’t played at home, average attendance this year is 14,716. The league’s average attendance was 16,770 last year, the best since its inaugural season of 1996.
Critics may sneer that it pales in comparison with the NFL’s average of 67,738, but every league’s does. Major-league baseball’s average a year ago was 32,785. MLS fits right in with the NBA (17,757 in 2006-’07) and the NHL (16,486 in ’06-’07).
MLS officials, however, don’t care to compare the league to the Big Four.
“We don’t judge ourselves against those leagues,” MLS deputy commissioner Ivan Gazidis said. “We’re focused on our own silo and our own space. Much in the same way as NASCAR has really been off to the side developing its own fan base and focusing on what it needs to do very successfully, we believe we’re in our own space focusing on soccer fans, developing those fans and over time giving them reasons to affiliate themselves and become fans of Major League Soccer.”
MLS also compares favorably with top-flight soccer leagues around the world, ranking 11th. The top three are Germany’s Bundesliga (37,644), the English Premier League (34,459) and Spain’s LaLiga (28,838).
“For an American, you say top 11 and it’s not very impressive, but if you’re objective about it, it’s not bad,” said Jeff L’Hote, who founded a soccer-focused consulting firm based in New York. “MLS has been around about a dozen years, whereas you take the leagues that are ahead of them around the world, they’ve been around for 100 years in at least a couple of cases, and decades in every other case.
“There’s certainly room for improvement. But I think the trends are promising. Not just last year’s league attendance, but also the continuing development of stadia.”
Stadiums are a league priority. When MLS kicked off in 1996, most teams played in cavernous NFL stadiums. By last season, seven of the league’s 13 teams were in their own stadiums, all of them with fewer than 30,000 seats.
That creates an intimate setting for the sport, sort of like you’d find in a soccer-mad country like England. Half of the teams currently in the English Premier League play in stadiums that hold 36,000 fans or fewer.
While the attendance numbers are well and good, L’Hote looks at how close each team is to reaching its capacity. Percentage of capacity divides the number of fans by the stadium capacity.
Most MLS teams in NFL stadiums only sell tickets in the lower bowl. Even so, six of the top seven teams in percentage of capacity last season played in their own stadiums.
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