The Major Arena Soccer League’s top two teams, San Diego and Chihuahua, meet for the championship after a regular season with positive progress and two playoff rounds that were an artistic success and (likely) a commercial failure.
Overall, the league’s average announced attendance was up just over five percent from last season and the highest since COVID-19, but more than half the teams in the league saw drops year-over-year.
How is that possible? The gains by San Diego (which almost doubled its average announced crowd after moving into a new arena), Empire, Tacoma and Milwaukee were largely offset by losses in Mesquite, Baltimore, St. Louis, Dallas and even Chihuahua.
This chart ranks the 12 MASL teams not by average (Kansas City led the league for the second straight year), but by percentage gain year-over-year1If you want to see the leaders ranked in the traditional way, they’re here.. This illustrates the challenge the league faces as it tries to grow.
| Team | G | Total | Average | Median | High | Low | Diff |
| San Diego Sockers | 12 | 40,458 | 3,372 | 3,520 | 4,928 | 1,789 | +94.7% |
| Empire Strykers | 12 | 38,604 | 3,217 | 2,939 | 7,387 | 1,723 | +28.6% |
| Tacoma Stars | 12 | 18,019 | 1,502 | 1,370 | 2,497 | 1,013 | +25.2% |
| Milwaukee Wave | 12 | 42,459 | 3,538 | 3,275 | 4,588 | 2,253 | +10.0% |
| Harrisburg Heat | 12 | 17,146 | 1,429 | 1,425 | 2,156 | 690 | +3.2% |
| Utica City FC | 12 | 38,104 | 3,175 | 3,065 | 3,791 | 2,891 | -2.1% |
| Kansas City Comets | 12 | 50,327 | 4,194 | 4,072 | 5,194 | 3,557 | -13.2% |
| St. Louis Ambush | 12 | 25,212 | 2,101 | 2,116 | 2,954 | 1,043 | -16.3% |
| Baltimore Blast | 12 | 19,408 | 1,617 | 1,566 | 2,872 | 1,063 | -16.7% |
| Chihuahua Savage | *11 | 14,953 | 1,359 | 1,252 | 2,400 | 759 | -24.4% |
| Dallas Sidekicks | 12 | 15,211 | 1,268 | 1,405 | 2,308 | 330 | -24.6% |
| Texas Outlaws | *11 | 5,147 | 468 | 417 | 924 | 113 | -59.3% |
| MASL TOTAL | 142 | 325,048 | 2,289 | 2,070 | 7,387 | 113 | 5.2% |
| *One game not reported | |||||||
Some notes:
- Kansas City has now led the league in attendance for three straight years, the first team ever to do that in this league, and the first in any league since Baltimore led for eight straight years from 2004-05 to 2012-13 across the second and third MISLs.
- It’s truly alarming that fully half of the MASL can’t average 2,000 announced fans per game.
- December, which is normally a very difficult month to sell this sport, happened to have the highest average of any month2November had just one game, a crowd of 2,802. with 2,583. March (which had the most games at 45) was second with 2,317. Kansas City and Milwaukee helped the cause in the twelfth month with a couple of decent crowds.
- Average attendance usually picks up after January 1, in part because December is bad enough to make that effect look bigger. This season, the post-ball-drop average was 2,212, off from 2,591 in November and December.
- The Comets had the league’s biggest crowd of the season almost until the end. Their Jan. 25 gathering of 5,194 stood until the Strykers pipped them at the end with a home finale crowd of 7,387 (which was their largest crowd ever).
- Weekday games (Monday through Thursday) averaged 1,719 (luckily, there were only 21 of them), while weekend dates (Friday-Sunday) drew nearly 39 percent more on average (2,388). Sundays were the best days, average-wise , at 2,7083Four Tuesday games averaged 3,430, but that’s too small a sample..
- If you took Texas (which is basically a ward of the state at this point) and Chihuahua (which is a great team in a small building) out of the mix, the league averaged 2,541. That wouldn’t be a record for the league, but it would be better.
Now, about the playoffs…
In some respects, having the quarterfinals and semifinals in one location (Oceanside, Calif.) made sense. San Diego opened a beautiful new building, and you want to showcase that. The MASL playoffs are routinely beset by bad dates and poor crowds for short-notice games. Seven teams would have to make one pre-finals trip instead of at least two in a traditional format, and the Sockers were apparently picking up the tab for hotel rooms. Instead of taking the usual 20 days to get to the finals matchup, you’d get there in three4Then they went and put a week between finals games, pushing the decider until Easter Sunday..
The problem was…no one showed up. Ticket prices were way out of touch with the market. The compelling Sunday matchups drew announced crowds of 2,100 and 2,684, but crowds for Saturday’s third and fourth quarterfinals were awful.
The games themselves were great, even though the results were largely chalk. Milwaukee pulled the only mild upset in the four-five game. St. Louis played Chihuahua tough until the fourth quarter, as Empire did in losing to San Diego for the 40th time in 47 meetings. Only San Diego’s 11-3 win over Baltimore on Sunday was a dud.
And, yeah, let’s talk about that matchup for a second. Whichever Gen Z person goes the MASL’s social media apparently believes the Ron Newman Cup is a lot older than it is. While San Diego and Baltimore have a combined 26 indoor championships (you can watch a Soccer Rewind video about one of them here!), the Ron Newman Cup was first awarded in 2012, making this the 13th time it’s been played for5There were no playoffs in 2020, for obvious reasons..
They initially had 24 as the combined number, but when it was pointed out to them that Baltimore had 10 titles and not eight, they changed it. When it was pointed out to them that, no, the Ron Newman Cup has not been awarded that many times, they….deleted the comments.
This is where we are as a sport, boys and girls. Bad crowds, the likely folding of one or two more franchises, and people with no sense of history or ability to look for places where such information is kept.
Every year I think the league is about to fold, and somehow it survives. I don’t know how. Name another pro league in the last 3 decades, with a 2k average, that survived? Minor league hockey and baseball does because it’s supported by Major league clubs. I get the playoff format. They need to save time and money. It’s really done for TV. They never expected good crowds. But did get ticket prices wrong. It’s a very middle class town and you have to cater to families. There are no US markets asking to expand. So the future of the league is in Mexico. Tozer said it Sunday. They need more teams in Mexico. Travel expenses for Chihuahua are insane.
I don’t disagree with anything you said.
I don’t get how these folks soldier on, when the richest owner is Phil Salvagio.
Lots of fans think they have “the solution,” but there is no solution.
Expansion teams can help with reducing SOME travel expenses, but when they’re terrible and fold (as most of them have), they don’t help the overall enterprise.
The idea that they need fewer regular-season games and more playoff games is silly, too. You can schedule regular-season games months in advance, and you have a chance to generate some revenue. Playoff games are scheduled at the last minute, usually on bad dates, and provide little time to sell or get anything but super expensive travel.
Expand the season, contract the season, expand to more cities, collapse into fewer cities, pay the players more, pay the players less, put more teams in Mexico, put a(nother) team in Chicago, put teams in big markets, put teams in small markets, and the one I love the most “Get a real TV deal,” as if that’s how TV works.
I’m stunned it’s still here, too. But it is.
I’m at at loss what to suggest to fans. Many seem delusional, like the good old days of the 80’s are magically coming back. When I share truths with them about pro soccer, and the business of the sport, they don’t want to hear it. It feels like a house of cards. If one major owner pulls out, then maybe the dominos fall. I think just for survival, regional travel is a must. It feels like Chihuahua is gone, as good as they are, if we don’t get them a Mexican rival to cut their costs. I think the Utica model is where they need to be. Medium city, no competition, fans want indoors in winter, perfect size arena. Honestly outdoor has spread so wide, and practically year round now, it’s squeezed out this sport. If MLS & USL go to Euro calendar, MASL should switch to summer. CISL did pretty well with that
In relative terms to today, yes, the CISL did pretty well in the summer, but ( a ) that was before the WNBA and ( b ) literally the only guy making money in the CISL was Commissioner Ron Weinstein.
Unless all of US Soccer decides to play August to May, there will still be soccer competition, and still competition for arena dates. The WNBA gets crowds indoor soccer could not even dream of (and, yes, they do not play in any of the same arenas at the moment, but the MASL has enough trouble selling tickets in the traditional indoor soccer time period regardless).
I agree that Utica (and I would add Kansas City) is the model to follow (assuming not everyone can build their own arena like San Diego). Utica has a revenue ceiling, though. But at least the shared operations with the hockey team help.
In the end, it doesn’t matter if you get a nearby rival (which can only help so much) if you simply cannot gain relevance in your market. And most MASL teams cannot.
There are no doubt a lot of old MISL fans (like me) who aren’t even aware that the sport still *exists*. (Changing the name from “indoor soccer” to “arena soccer” probably didn’t help.)