17 Responses to “Fan Loyalty, 2000-2010”

1. Nate D. Says:
   January 19th, 2010 at 1:10 pm

   I think another factor that wasn't mentioned was how many (or few) other pro/major college sports teams were within any given market. Granted teams like the Spurs, Kings, and Jazz who had winning teams through much if not all of the 2000's would be expected to draw well in any market, however I think that NBA teams in Portland, Orlando and Milwaukee (each in the top half of the league in "fan loyalty") might have benefitted attendance-wise by being "the only show in town". Anybody agree or disagree? Just my two cents. Interesting topic and I enjoyed the article.

2. Jason J Says:
   January 19th, 2010 at 2:32 pm

   I have no idea if this is done by organizations (at all), and it may just be that Chicago has a lot of serious basketball fans, but did people get roped into long term season ticket deals while the BULLS were playing and then get forced to keep them while the bulls were playing?

3. Neil Paine Says:
   January 19th, 2010 at 3:11 pm

   Good point, Nate. I considered throwing in variables for attendance of NFL/NHL teams in the same metro area, but it would have involved acquiring some data I didn't have on hand at the time. Colleges would also be interesting to include -- perhaps I could just add a dummy variable for each sport (1 if they have a team, 0 if not).

   Jason, interesting idea, although Chicago also led in attendance % in 2007 and was 2nd in 2008, only dropping out of the top 10 twice all decade (15th in 2002, 12th in 2003). I don't know if people bought season tickets 3-4 years in advance in 1998, but even after that they've continued to sell at a rate that isn't commensurate with their W-L record. Granted, it's a huge market, but still.

4. Gabe Says:
   January 19th, 2010 at 3:45 pm

   Two things:

   1) I believe some arena sizes have changed over time (adding new seats, restructuring, etc). The Wikipedia page seems to only list the current attendance.

   2) For teams that share a city (eg, NY, LA), does it make sense to divide the total city population by two, in order to take that into account? Maybe not necessarily divide in half, but make some sort of adjustment? Perhaps add a binary variable for it?

5. Quenton Says:
   January 19th, 2010 at 5:19 pm

   Brilliant article.

   I'd love if you'd run the numbers for Seattle (pipe dream) up until The Thing That Shall Not Be Named, as my gut tells me the city's loyalty was much higher than certain entities would have people believe.

6. mackie chang Says:
   January 19th, 2010 at 6:24 pm

   how about loyalty be defined by more intangible things. Sure statistics make the argument black and white, but can it really tell the whole story? I'm pretty sure you have to be very die-hard and loyal if you are a clippers fan, in LA or abroad, especially with them constantly being hated on (the onion news story on all the clippers dieing in a staples center collapse comes to mind), as well as the horrible luck that's come upon them time and time again (everyone knows about the bad picks, and brand leaving).

   Just putting that out there.

7. Jason J Says:
   January 19th, 2010 at 6:26 pm

   Neil - by 2007 & 2008 there had been some recovery in Chicago. 1999-2001 was a basketball abortion (no offense to Jud, Toni, and Randy Brown) where the three most popular players and the coaching staff from the team's glory days all hit the pavement. I just wondered if perhaps the apparent popularity of the team (and a lot of Chicagoans were pretty pissed at management for the dynasty failing to defend the title) had something to do with ticket holders being locked into old deals at that stage - again if that's even something that happens, which I don't know.

8. Neil Paine Says:
   January 19th, 2010 at 6:44 pm

   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.

9. Gawad kalinga Philippines Says:
   January 20th, 2010 at 12:33 am

   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.

10. Walter Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 3:36 am

    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.

11. Walter Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 3:42 am

    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.

12. marc Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 8:57 am

    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.

13. Stay Chisel Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 12:31 pm

    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.

14. Neil Paine Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 2:12 pm

    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?

15. Jason J Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 2:44 pm

    thanks, chisel

16. Johnny Twisto Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 4:54 pm

    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.

17. Kevin Pelton Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 6:03 pm

    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.