30,000 Fans at a Major League Soccer Game?! It Happened Saturday Night at Gillette Stadium
It had been a while since the New England Revolution saw a home crowd like it did this weekend. More than 30,000—32,766, to be exact—turned out to catch the Revs’ regular season finale against Toronto. (They won, 1-0.)
That marked the third-largest MLS regular season crowd in team history, not including games flanked to a high-profile international game as part of a doubleheader.
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Topping the 30,000 mark is uncommon for the Revs. For that matter, in recent seasons, topping 20,000 is rare. This season, the Revolution drew 16,681 fans per game on average, according to the MLS Attendance blog. That’s up 12 percent from 2013. While it’s worth noting that Saturday’s big crowd is responsible for about half the increase, it’s still the Revs’ highest average attendance figure since 2008, when the team was coming off back-to-back-to-back MLS Cup finals appearances. Fittingly, 2008 was the last time New England drew more than 30,000 fans to an MLS game.
The attendance boost in 2014 is obviously a good sign for the club. It also spells out the rarity of a crowd the size of Saturday’s. It coincides with a couple of things.
The first is the quality of the product on the field. It has been a strange, winding season for the Revolution…but in the end, the playoff-bound squad caught fire, losing just one of its final 12 games to finish in second place in the Eastern Conference. They also boast an MVP candidate who is scoring at will in Lee Nguyen, and a genuine star after the late-season addition of Jermaine Jones. This has been refreshing for fans who saw the team undergo a rough rebuilding patch from 2010 to 2012 before making a somewhat surprising return to the playoffs last year.
The last game of the season, which is dubbed Fan Appreciation Night, is usually the highest-attended each year, and Revolution President Brian Bilello told Boston.com that the team had expected all season to see a big crowd for Saturday’s game. However, Bilello said, ticket sales for the game picked up in the last month or two as the Revs’ play on the field improved. And while Revolution home crowds were up 12 percent for the season, they were up a whopping 24 percent for the finale compared to last year’s—indicating this wasn’t your average end-of-year bump. “The playoffs are coming, the fans are excited,’’ Bilello said in citing reasons for the extra-large crowd.
The Revs’ attendance increase in 2014 also comes alongside Major League Soccer’s continued growth. The league set a new record by drawing more than 19,000 fans per game. For a few years now, MLS has been ahead of the NHL and the NBA for average attendance. That’s not a great comparison, given that some MLS teams play in stadiums far larger than your typical arena for the winter sports. The Seattle Sounders, for instance, draw nearly 45,000 fans per home game and top 60,000 for big matches. The enthusiasm can be further tempered by checking out TV ratings, where MLS still lags not just behind other American sports leagues, but also English soccer aired in the U.S. (That didn’t prevent the league from tripling TV revenues in a new contract set to take hold next season, though.)
So it’s still extremely premature—it’s outright wrong—to say MLS is reaching the same level as America’s ‘Big Four’ sports leagues. What the growth in attendance figures does indicate, though, is a growing appetite for MLS’s live experience, a selling point the league has consistently tried to make.
Locally, the Revs are still well behind both MLS’s new attendance record and their own best average attendance (at 21,423, that figure was recorded way back in 1997). In their case, the 2014 bump and the impressive turnout on Saturday night are more likely indicative of a fanbase that has a team to really get excited about. That theory will be further put to the test when New England hosts a home playoff game against the Columbus Crew on Nov. 9. Bilello said he expects 20,000 at that one.
One final note: So much discussion of the business around the Revolution is centered on the team’s need for a soccer-specific stadium in the Boston area. If you were to ask any sort of stakeholder—fan, player, Revolution staff, MLS official—you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who would suggest staying in Foxborough is in the Revolution’s best interest. They’d all be right, to be clear, but it comes with some irony that if and when the team finally finds itself in a 20,000-to-25,000-seat soccer-specific stadium, it will never again see a crowd like Saturday night’s.
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