Attendance Through First Two Games in Guelph

Not that great, 12,612 and 13,085 for the first two games. If the Cats can get on a hot streak, then maybe they can sellout a few games.

Comparison of 2009 and 2010 Ticat Attendance

Two 9 and 9 seasons back to back make it a bit more convenient to compare attendance for this year and last year. Here's the 2010 regular season attendance game by game with the opponent:

2010

Calgary 25,248

Winnipeg 21,408

Winnipeg 23,653

Toronto 30,319

Montreal 23,452

Saskatchewan 23,108

Edmonton 20,791

Montreal 23,118

BC 23,931

Total 215,028 (23,892 Average)

Besides the Labour Day, the next biggest was the Calgary game with 25,248. Strangely the game against BC last weekend was third with 23,931 attending. It didn't look like a bad crowd but it didn't look like a great crowd either so I'm wondering if this number is a bit suspect. I did see more BC fans than I expected including some at the Prince Edward Tavern following the game.

The Edmonton game at 20,791 was the low point, but Edmonton was relatively weak at that point in the season. No sub 20,000 games this year. The Rider game was weaker than last year. I blame this on the fact the Riders played back to back in Toronto and Hamilton this year. Spreading out the games would probably maximize Southern Ontario Rider fan attendance. Plus Saskatchewan is the richest team in the league, so don't bother trying to save them money by doing Hamilton and Toronto on one road trip.

2009

Toronto 23,211

Winnipeg 24,292

BC 20,103

Edmonton 19,206

Toronto 30,293

Calgary 19,448

Montreal 22,083

Winnipeg 19,562

Saskatchewan 24,586

Total 202,784 (22,532 Average)

Compared to the 2010 opener, the 2009 was significantly smaller and had an ostensibly better opponent in Toronto. Hopefully the Cats can build on this and make the opener their second Labour Day. Three sub 20,000 games in 2009 were a big difference from 2009. In terms of teams, BC and Calgary were up significantly from 2009.

Overall the attendance was up by a healthy 6% in 2010. It will probably be difficult in getting as large a percentage bump in 2011 since the 2009 team was significantly improved over the 2008 version which likely showed up in higher ticket sales for 2010. A 3% increase is probably a realistic goal.

CFL Attendance 2010 Analysis

New warning! The new 2011 CFL attendance analysis post is here!

Warning! This post actually analyzes the CFL attendance for 2009. For analysis of the 2010 season including the best road drawing teams, go here.


Last year Tigercatatonia made several posts analyzing the 2008 attendance for CFL teams. Time has come around again to have a look again. We'll start out with the average home regular season attendance for each team in 2009:

1. Edmonton 37,164
2. Calgary 36502
3. Saskatchewan 30606
4. BC 28610
5. Toronto 26374
6. Winnipeg 25720
7. Hamilton 22532
8. Montreal 20202
Total 227,710
Here's the numbers from the previous season:

Edmonton 37383
BC 34083
Calgary 32617
Saskatchewan 29758
Toronto 29189
Winnipeg 27151
Hamilton 20784
Montreal 20202
Total 231,167

Thus 2009 was not a particular banner year for the CFL. BC was way way down, with both Winnipeg and Toronto seeing declines. Edmonton had a slight decline, despite a monster attendance game of over 62,000 against Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan had a bump, as did Calgary with the extra capacity for the Grey Cup available late in the season.

Surprisingly Hamilton had a decent 8.4% jump. Probably the cheap tickets the team made available at the end of the 2009 season helped, as did the Labour Day sellout with over 30,000, plus a much better team. Likely the Cats could have done better with a better economy. With momentum of a better team and a slowly recovering economy hopefully the Cats can boost season tickets sales over last year and get another bump in attendance.

Montreal stayed the same, due to selling out their capacity yet again. With an added 5,000 seats this season at McGill stadium, Montreal will likely beat Hamilton in attendance this year.

Overall the CFL saw a 4.1% decline in attendance in 2009, which isn't too bad considering the economy and the performance of other professional leagues in North America. Baseball for instance had a larger 6.5% decline in 2009.

In a future post, I will look again at which teams drew the best on the road. Here's my analysis for the 2008 season. I'm going to go way out on a limb and predict Saskatchewan will again lead this category.

Hamilton Playoff Attendance

Seeing as the Cats are selling a goodly number of tickets for the playoff game tomorrow, I tried to find the attendance for the last home playoff game in 2001. Apparently my Google skills are not good enough, as I haven't found it yet. Looking on the wikipedia page for CFL attendance, I did find the highest playoff attendance in Hamilton, 33,392, on November 14th, 1971. Sadly Toronto won 23 to 8 that day, but fortunately went on to lose the Grey Cup.

Best Road Draw: Saskatchewan, BC Worst

I finally got around to doing the data entry into octave for calculating the best CFL road draws in terms of attendance. For each team's road game, the attendance was compared to the mean attendance (which I blogged about here) of the home team and then averaged over all nine road games. Here's the list (rounded to the nearest fan), with no surprise, Saskatchewan being way out in front:

1. Saskatchewan 2658
2. Calgary 374
3. Edmonton 370
4. Winnipeg 200
5. Toronto - 145
6. Hamilton -634
7. Montreal -1296
8. BC -1380

Probably the biggest surprised is that BC is the worst road draw for
2008 in the CFL, closely followed by Montreal. Now these numbers are
highly dependent on various factors, such as what conference the team
is in, and when during the year specific games take place. Montreal always
having a constant number of fans and Saskatchewan having two levels of
sellouts during 2008 adds some other weirdness. Looking over BC's road games, they were a poor draw in Hamilton (18,723), although the main culprit
seems to be the Calgary games at the beginning and end of the season (30,159 and 30,275 fans respectively). They were also relatively a weak draw for their two Edmonton games (35,008 and 34,342 fans) and their Toronto draw was no great shakes either (28,273). Montreal was hurt by weak draws in Edmonton (29,911), Calgary (30,960) and BC (30,132), plus the fact their draws versus their Eastern rivals were nothing special.

I was surprised to see that Hamilton wasn't the worse (although maybe some fans showed up thinking sure fire win!). Hamilton was hurt by a relatively weak Calgary game (31,116) and two weak Winnipeg games (25,484 and 24,595 fans). Hamilton was probably helped by two games in Montreal, where the attendance doesn't change.

Saskatchewan benefited from a monster game versus Edmonton (48,808), plus excellent draws for Calgary (35,650 and 35,650), BC (38,608) and Winnipeg (29,770). Almost makes you wonder why they don't schedule two road games for Saskatchewan in Edmonton. Saskatchewan was a poor draw in Toronto (28,654), but that was right at the end of the season, where the Argos were heartily sucking.

It will be interesting to see if Saskatchewan can continue their road draw strength for 2009. Last year they probably benefited somewhat from their hot start, which in my opinion is unlikely to be repeated this year. For Hamilton, an improved team should keep them from rock bottom in terms of road draw, although I don't expect much to change.

Cat Season Ticket Sales Apparently Up

Drew Edwards is reporting in the Spec that Ticat season ticket sales are up possibly 4% from last year, with a 87% renewal rate from the year before. The Cats do say that the more expensive tickets are not selling as well. This is actually pretty good news for a team that has had back to back 3 and 15 seasons and during a pretty poor economy. It also shows that the CFL will probably be relatively unscathed by the recession compared to other North American sports leagues (NHL, NFL, MLB, NBA, MLS, and Nascar).

Could Hamilton even show an attendance increase this year? With a 9 and 9 team with a reasonable start, with the wins coming more at home, this is definitely possible. With Calgary apparently going to have a good attendance year due to the Grey Cup and Saskatchewan having expanded seats all season, the CFL could see an increase in attendance compared to last year.

Saskatchewan Roughrider Attendance Correction

My apologies for the figures in the last post. The Saskatchewan Roughrider totals were not correct as I forgot the capacity got boosted for the August 31 game against Winnipeg from 28,800. Strangely, for the Winnipeg game the attendance is listed as 30,985, whereas for the last three games it is 30,945. Here's the amended list:

Edmonton 37383
BC 34083
Calgary 32617
Saskatchewan 29758
Toronto 29189
Winnipeg 27151
Hamilton 20784
Montreal 20202

This you will note, boost Saskatchewan over Toronto. I'm still working on the best road draw calculations, but I should be able to post them for Friday.

Best Road Draw, Part 1

Remembering the Ticat game at home against Saskatchewan and all the Riders fans there, I got to wondering which CFL is the best road draw. I also thought about how the Jesse Lumsden fumble before halftime probably cost us the game, but then I should probably just let that go. Damn he had the first down yardage too.

Anyways, calculating who is the best road draw is a bit tedious, but I have calculated the average attendances for each team last year which is the first step:

Edmonton 37383
BC 34083
Calgary 32617
Toronto 29189
Saskatchewan 28800
Winnipeg 27151
Hamilton 20784
Montreal 20202

All right Hamilton, not last in something! Actually with the feeble record and
feeble attendance the Ticats had last year, the Cats may be able to improve on both this year.

Anyways, from what I've seen so far, the Riders look like they will end up being the best road draw. Hopefully I can have part two posted by the weekend. Somehow I don't think Hamilton will end up doing that great and the Argos might surprise.