NWSL Attendance Trends and What They Say About The League

With almost half the 2016 NWSL season gone, the weekly battle for a spot at the top of the table continues to be fiercely competitive. This battle is about to become even more interesting as the USWNT players leave at the beginning of July to start preparing for the Olympics, with international players following shortly after. At this time last year the Women’s World Cup was finishing its group stages, and national team players had already been gone for weeks. The tournament was highly successful, with the U.S.A.-Japan final setting a record for a soccer match in the U.S. with 25.4 million viewers on Fox. This success was then reflected in the USWNT’s victory tour, and in the NWSL when the league experienced an attendance bump in the second part of the season. If the 2016 season follows the same pattern as last year, the NWSL should experience another attendance bump after the Olympics are over at the end of August. Regardless, even without this projected bump, the 2016 season is already drawing more in total average attendance than the previous three seasons.

In order to get a full picture of where the league is at with the attendance, this article will examine two sets of data. The first set of data is the total average attendance for all matches played in each of the four NWSL seasons through week eight. The second set of data will look at the same matches, but exclude those that are outliers.

For the purposes of this article an outlier is defined as those matches with over 10,000 attendees. In weeks one through eight, these are the matches which would be considered outliers:
• The 2016 Orlando Pride home-opener which drew 23,403 people.
• A Chicago Red Stars double-header with the Chicago Fire on 4/19/2014 with 15,473 attendees.
• A Chicago Red Stars double-header with the Chicago Fire on 5/9/2015 with 16,017 attendees.
• All Portland Thorns matches during this time period.

In examining at the total average attendance both with and without outliers it is easy to see that the attendance growth in 2016 over the previous year is surpassing all of the other seasons.

Looking at the total average attendance by week, you can see how much those matches considered outliers affect the data week by week. However, even with those matches causing spikes in the graph, the 2016 season is still trending over the previous three seasons overall.

This becomes even more apparent once you take those outliers out, with 2016 clearly trending above the other three seasons.

Some of this growth can be attributed to the inclusion of the Orlando Pride as a 2016 expansion team, however as you can see below the average by team is also trending up. The only team not exhibiting growth over 2015 is the Chicago Red Stars. This is due to the double-headers they played in 2014 and 2015, which has not happened as of week eight in 2016.

If you take those double-headers out of the Chicago Red Stars average you can see that they are also experiencing the same growth trend over last year.

Tracking match attendance is important. It is often the most visible way of judging the success of a team and of a league. For women’s soccer it is especially important as many detractors say that people are not interested in women’s sports and thus women’s sports are not a viable investment. However, if you compare the NWSL teams’ average attendance to that of the more established men’s leagues it becomes apparent that the NWSL is on par with the NASL and USL 2016 attendance averages.

So far in 2016, the NASL attendance ranges from the Fort Lauderdale Strikers’ average of 1,372 to Minnesota United FC’s average of 8,801 attendees, as of the beginning of June. In the USL, most teams are averaging between 1,000 and 6,000 attendees with FC Cincinnati and Sacramento Republic FC topping the list at over 16,000 and 11,000 respectively. The Portland Thorns alone average more than all of the NASL and USL teams, as well as five MLS teams. However, even without the Thorns’ average attendance, the NWSL is averaging between 1,963 and 13,152 in attendance. This puts the league well within the same range as the NASL and USL.

If the NWSL growth trend continues to hold steady, then 2016 will surpass all of the other NWSL seasons’ average attendance, solidifying season four as a success and the NWSL as a good investment.