A sudden loss of interest?

The lone business metric immediately known at the time of the announcement was a decline in Crew attendance for 2017. After growing steadily over Precourt’s ownership tenure, last season saw a surprising drop in attendance. What were the causes of this unexpected decline- did Crew fans suddenly stop supporting the club? Hardly. If a club and league wanted to purposefully, but quietly, reduce its attendance as a justification for eventual relocation, the 2017 Columbus Crew season would be a textbook example.

When beginning my analysis, I had a few personal flashbacks to the 2017 season. The first was of a Wednesday home match against the LA Galaxy. At one point during the match, I recalled looking around the less than capacity MAPFRE Stadium crowd and thinking to myself how it was unfortunate the Galaxy weren’t playing here on the weekend when they would’ve drawn a bigger crowd. It was a fleeting thought, immediately forgotten until I began gathering attendance data. This recollection made me wonder what the drivers of MLS attendance actually were and could the Crew’s home schedule itself have played a role in the attendance decline.

Using a dataset of MLS match data from the 2013 through 2016 seasons, I constructed a simple linear regression model to predict match attendance. The inputs to this model were data which would be known prior to the start of a season including…

Month of the match

Day of Match — Weekday (Mon-Thur) vs Weekend (Fri-Sun)

Time of Match — Day vs Evening

Stadium capacity of the match

Number of Designated Players of the home club that season

Average Home Attendance as a percentage of stadium capacity across years

Average Road Attendance of the visiting club as a percentage of stadium capacity across years

Prior season ranking of the home club in MLS standings

The model performed well, predicting ~70% of the variance in match attendance despite not including obvious influencers such as weather, current club performance, and match-specific promotions (i.e. things which are unknown at the time schedules are set pre-season by MLS). The model was then applied to the 2017 Crew schedule. The predicted total attendance was both disappointing and noteworthy. Because the model was based on factors known prior to the start of a season, it meant MLS assigned the Crew a home schedule they should have expected to result in about ~500 fewer fans in attendance per match, which accounted for nearly a third of the year-over-year decline in Crew attendance. This seemingly contradicts claims that MLS is a league looking to do what’s in the best interest of its clubs, especially if the Crew has been struggling financially for several years as Anthony Precourt now claims. While it could be argued such a pessimistic prediction of attendance is a mere statistical anomaly, closer examination of the most significant inputs to the model suggest this resulted from intentional decisions.

One significant input of interest was the day of week of the match (i.e. weekday vs weekend), as weekday matches league wide from 2013–2016 averaged ~8% less in terms of stadium capacities. The Crew were assigned three weekday matches in 2017, as were nine other clubs. The number of weekday matches was not necessarily an issue; however, the scheduled opponents for these specific matches were. Another significant input to the model was the fact that certain clubs clearly draw more fans when they play on the road. With players ranging from David Villa to Kaka to Clint Dempsey on their rosters, matches against such top road draw clubs on weekends typically average ~89% capacity. So who were the Crew’s three weekday opponents in 2017? Seattle, Toronto, and the aforementioned LA Galaxy- all among MLS’ top road draws in recent years. I wondered if this was an unfortunate fluke…..until I looked at other clubs’ schedules and learned no other club in the last five seasons had home weekday matches scheduled against three top road draws EXCEPT the 2017 Columbus Crew.

Intent- the fine line between incompetence and sabotage

Another personal research flashback to the 2017 season was craft beer. In 2016, the Crew held two Craft Beer Festivals as promotional events. I recalled being disappointed last season when I realized after April’s Craft Beer Festival that no others were scheduled at that time for the rest of the season. This too was a seemingly irrelevant observation until I began studying the impact of such promotions on attendance. Why are promotions important? Matches in recent years with ANY type of promotion (regardless of day of week, month, or opponent) have averaged over 2,300 more fans.

After being assigned such an attendance-challenging schedule by MLS for 2017, the Crew did the opposite of what most businesspeople would expect- it scheduled far FEWER promotional events. For the first time in recent years, over half of the club’s home matches featured no special promotion. Even worse, in 2017 the club didn’t hold its most popular promotion in recent years (Dollar Beer/Brat Night) which coincided with many of its largest crowds.

But the most perplexing aspect of the 2017 promotional schedule was early in the season. In August 2017, club President Andy Loughnane addressed the Crew’s lack of early season sell-outs, stating “I’m not sure if any other club holds that distinction, but it’s a challenge that both eats me alive and serves as motivation.” For a club that is “motivated” to address low early season attendance, it was odd that only one promotion was held during March and April (the Craft Beer Fest)….and even that wasn’t announced along with other 2017 promotions during the pre-season. The Crew inexplicably held no promotional events during its first FOUR home matches of 2017 when they were most needed, as the average attendance bump with promotions in these early months exceeds 2,700. Rhetorically, why would a club struggling with business metrics undertake fewer proven promotional activities in a season with an attendance-challenging schedule?

The questionable decision-making of Crew leadership also showed in its attitude towards renewing season ticket holders in 2017- yet another front office-induced driver of last season’s attendance. After reaching the MLS Cup championship match the prior year, the club slid to ninth place in 2016, missing the playoffs. On the heels of such a disappointing season, rather than building goodwill with fans, the Crew chose to RAISE its prices for renewing season ticket members (e.g. by 11%+ for Premier East seats and 10%+ for Upper Midfield). This was an odd course of action given the past histories of other clubs considered to be MLS “standard bearers” in similar situations. For example, after a bad year in 2013, Toronto FC did not raise prices for existing season ticket holders in 2014, while also delaying the date they had to commit to the tickets so they could first monitor the club’s off-season moves. And this was after another unsuccessful year in 2012- when TFC ROLLED BACK prices for existing season ticket holders to 2007 levels. The Portland Timbers chose not to increase any of its season ticket plans for the 2013 season after a frustrating 2012 campaign. This decision, as described by their owner Merritt Paulson, “to once again keep prices steady is in the best interest of our long-term relationship with our fans.” This was quite the gesture, as the Timbers had more than 7,500 fans on their Season Ticket Waiting List when this decision was made!

Business metric dog tricks

A great example of the shenanigans of the Crew front office’s 2017 promotional efforts was the “Pups at the Pitch” event. Fans could bring their dogs to the home match against Seattle in May. This match drew fewer than 13,000 fans and was the least attended of any 2017 match with a promotional event. Strangely, the Crew chose to repeat this event later in the year for the September match versus Sporting Kansas City. I have to admit- finding this in my research bothered me for quite a long time. Why would the club repeat a promotion that failed to draw a large crowd against a top road draw like Seattle? It made no sense until I looked at the specifics of the promotion. Fans in attendance (including season ticket members) couldn’t just bring their dogs. They had to purchase a more expensive ticket allowing them to bring their dog, or if they already had a ticket for the match, they were required to purchase a dog add-on ticket for an extra $10. To be admitted, each dog and human was required to have its own ticket. So essentially, the club was marketing a promotion that would generate revenue by selling tickets which wouldn’t count towards increasing the match’s attendance total…….because, after all, they’re dogs.