Comments on: Fan Loyalty, 2000-2010

By: Kevin Pelton

Kevin Pelton — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:03:55 +0000

Marc, my vague recollection is you must be referring to the Sonics' decision to reserve something on the order of 500-1,000 tickets for each game in 1995-96 only to be sold on gameday starting two hours before tipoff. The team sold out every game that postseason, so to suggest that tickets were easily available due to a lack of interest is erroneous.

The Sonics also sold out every home game during the 1996-97, 1997-98 and 1998-99 seasons. By my math, that streak included 114 regular-season games and 23 playoff games.

By: Johnny Twisto

Johnny Twisto — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:54:56 +0000

There's no perfect way to account for this, but just for anyone who doesn't know, it's hard to equate the Knicks and Nets, despite being in the same MSA. The Knicks play right in the middle of the most densely populated county in the country, and right on top of 6 subway lines, 2 regional rail lines, and the national rail line. The Nets play in the middle of a parking lot in the middle of a swamp. And as others have alluded to, it's possible the Nets fans are very loyal, but there just aren't many of them. Still, our definitions of "loyalty" could be semantics, and this is still an interesting study.

By: Jason J

Jason J — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:44:42 +0000

thanks, chisel

By: Neil Paine

Neil Paine — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:12:14 +0000

Well Marc, isn't boycotting the team (because of the Jail Blazers or whatever) still being disloyal? Isn't the whole point of fan loyalty to support a team unconditionally, theoretically even if the roster was stocked with felons and lost every game?

By: Stay Chisel

Stay Chisel — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:31:18 +0000

I've been a Bulls season ticket holder for a while and have not seen any long-term ticket plan options. As far as I know, tickets are only purchased one season at a time.

By: marc

marc — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:57:32 +0000

I think this tends to discount Portland's loyalty. Smack in the middle of the period in question there was a fan revolt due to the Jail Blazers backlash. Fans were still fans, but they were pissed off fans that were literally boycotting the team. This sort of analysis glosses over those sorts of things that are unique to certain franchises. In terms of Seattle's loyalty, as someone who lived up there I think loyalist views of the overall fanbase's loyalty are generally exaggerated or greatly exaggerated. The fans that were there were quite loyal, but huge swaths of the Seattle metro area simply didn't care. Seattle would also be more affected than most towns on this list from competition--no NHL, but the Seahawks, Mariners and Huskies were all significant factors in diluting Sonics interest which led to a very wishy-washy level of interest depending upon on-court success. Even when success was found, though, support still wasn't as widespread as for the other sports--when you can literally buy walk-up tickets for a Western Conference Finals game in 1996, the height of their popularity, and not have to go to scalpers as I did, it says that the fan base, while passionate, didn't cover large chunks of the population there.

By: Walter

Walter — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 07:42:17 +0000

Neil, this is a little bit of a tangent but I know that their are many regression (or MLE) models that incorporate home court advantage as an independent variable. However, whenever I have seen the results the home court advantage is assumed to be constant across all teams. Would it be possible for you to update your BBR Rankings system to include an separate homecourt advantage variable for each team (the model would have 60 variables instead of 31). I think it would be interesting to see which teams have the best and worst homecourt advantage.

I would assume teams like Utah would have the best.

By: Walter

Walter — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 07:36:30 +0000

I think the study has a lot of good information but I think the output of which teams were the most "loyal" is somewhat skewed. For instance, the Lakers expected attendance percentage was 97.5% meaning that even if fans were literally fighting to the death every night outside the arena to get in and had a perfect 100% attendance record they would have finished no higher than 5th on the list as they couldn't possibly exceed the expected attendance by more than 2.5% (and to their credit they did exceed their expected by 2.2%). When a team has no mathematical chance at being higher than 5th then the results aren't necessarily accurate. I think it would be interesting to include ticket price into the study as well (or possibly a ratio of ticket price to per capita income). Any team would probably be close to 100% attendance if the tickets prices were $1.00 and they all would suffer drastically if the average ticket price was $1,000 regardless of the product on the floor.

By: Gawad kalinga Philippines

Gawad kalinga Philippines — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 04:33:30 +0000

Loyalty, being the difference of actual attendance and expected attendance, is quite flawed for me. Let's take LAL for example. The lakers, for the last decade has been winning. And so, as expected, their actual and expected attendance are high, thus making the loyalty % low. You said that the most loyal fans go to arenas even though their team is losing. You can't say that lakers fans aren't that loyal if they have a little opportunity to prove it because the lakers were and are still winning. Can you see my point? This case may be applied to the spurs as well.

Maybe, your formula is more applicable to the teams that have low winning percentage for the last decade.

And I pity the nets.

By: Neil Paine

Neil Paine — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 22:44:09 +0000

Key word: "some" recovery -- you still don't expect a team that goes 41-41 to sell 99% of its seats. I agree, though, that a lot of their performance here was driven by sales at the beginning of the decade when they were beyond awful, so you may be on to something when it comes to being locked into longer season-ticket deals. I'm going to take another look at this next week, so I'll see what I can dig up.